"Engineers and physicists are often portrayed as clueless geeks on television, and despite the high pay and the importance of such jobs to the country’s future"

"Engineers and physicists are often portrayed as clueless geeks on television, and despite the high pay and the importance of such jobs to the country’s future" I must have missed this part when I was a post graduate. The only thing I saw physicists getting paid was peanuts you had to move three states over to get. In 2006, when I left things looked largely like this[1]: age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s Sadly from what I hear of people from my class who stayed on things are worse now. So why doesn't the article talk about the elephant in the room? That when you add student debt to the picture you need to work until you're 40 to beat someone who has worked at McDonald's that whole time. And just at that point you enter the most uncertain part of your career which will make or break the rest of your life. Students aren't leaving the STEM fields in droves because they are stupid and unmotivated, they are leaving because the prospects for a career are terrible. [1] http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science