The Stagnating Job Market for Young Scientists

By Jordan Weissmann

Young scientists spend most of their work lives gathering and crunching data. So it seems especially unfair that when it comes to the job hunt, they’re forced to fly mostly blind. Ph.D. programs don’t usually track their graduates’ employment outcomes. They certainly don’t advertise placement figures the way that, say, business schools do. While the government collects troves of information from America’s doctorate holders every year, much of it is weirdly organized and tricky to access.

With a little cleaning up, however, the federal data do tell a pretty clear story: The market for new Ph.D.s in the much obsessed-about STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—is stagnant. Over the last 20 years, employment rates are either flat or down in each major discipline, from computer science to chemistry. It’s not what you’d expect given the way companies like Microsoft talk about talent shortages.

But the graphs don’t lie. Building on a short post I wrote last year for the Atlantic, I asked the National Science Foundation to pull up two decades’ worth of results from its annual Survey of Earned Doctorates, which polls graduating Ph.D.s about their job plans. The numbers, which I’ve broken down in charts, cover the classes of 1992 through 2012 for chemistry, computer science, engineering, life sciences, math, and physics.


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http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/07/employment_rates_for_stem_ph_d_s_it_s_a_stagnant_job_market_for_young_scientists.html