Few people spend 11 years in college. Most stay for four or five before the urge to leave campus and earn a salary kicks in. Barring a thesis defense meltdown, I’ll be one of about 50,000 graduate students across the United States and Canada to get a Ph.D. in science this school year. After seven years in graduate school, I’m left wondering if the time and effort was worth it. What do scientists do these days, anyways?
According to several recent reports, not much. The problem, stated last month in the Washington Post, is that academic jobs have all but disappeared. A 2011 report in Nature concurs: “People who have trained at great length and expense to be researchers confront a dwindling number of academic jobs, and an industrial sector unable to take up the slack.”
A 2010 article in the Economist subtitled “Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time” is even more damning of doctorates. To be fair, that article targeted all Ph.D.s, but the reporter made science doctorates seem particularly worthless, writing that she “slogged through a largely pointless PhD in theoretical ecology.” After crunching the numbers and talking to about a dozen people with science doctorates, though, I’ve concluded that for everything these accounts get right, they get just as much wrong. In short, science Ph.D.s are just about the last group of people the media should be worrying about. Let me explain.