There's an angle to this that I see on the ground as a graduate student in neuroscience that I've never seen anyone talk about, including Greenspun. It's that there are way more training positions for graduate students than there are jobs waiting for them.
Some back-of-the-envelope calculations reveal the problem.
In 2001, there were 57,639 grad students in the biological sciences [1].
If they want to labs of their own, how stiff is the competition?
9100/98,700 scientists in the "Educational Services" sector are life scientists (9.2%) [2]; 46,300/98,700 scientists in this sector are in the "Colleges, universities, and professional" category (46.9%) [3]; so, 0.092 * .469 = 4.3% of 98,700 = 4258 scientists are life scientists in the "College, university, or professional" category.
Let's say that the average graduate student takes 5.5 years to graduate; that means that there are 10,480 newly minted Ph.D.s in biology each year. Let's say that the average PI has a lab over a 30 year period; that means that there are ~142 jobs a year in biology that open up for those 10,000 graduates.
This means that 1/73 of the newly minted Ph.D.s should reasonably go on to start a lab of their own. The actual number will be higher, but they will be winnowed out once they fail to get grants at some point early in their careers.
I don't know how real these numbers are, but they are in agreement with the sense of struggle I see day-to-day.
The government should fund fewer training slots at graduate schools, and more R01s (the grants that keep independent labs running), to get this ratio in better balance. Right now, it is a pyramid scheme.
It also should come as no surprise that domestic students would stay away from grad school. It's an economically irrational pursuit when other options are open. On the other hand, this is the best country in the world in which to train; students can go home and be big fish in their local ponds. For them, it is economically much more rational to spend some time here.
Great post. I wrote a long comment in this thread, where I went off on a bit of a tangent on how the US should institute a moratorium on funding for graduate student training, but I deleted it, because it felt overly negative and conspiratorial. You did a much better job of saying what I was trying to say, and backing it with numbers. Bravo.
Suffice to say that I agree that we're training far too many scientists in this country, and that somehow, we need to find a way to wean Universities (and industry) off the government dole. The problem is, after decades of subsidy for advanced research, the US is addicted to cheap intellectual labor in the form of under-employed graduate students and post-doctoral researchers. If the government were to drastically cut funding for these "training" positions, the university system would collapse.
My opinion is that the only way out of this conundrum, is to force industry to re-invest in R&D over the long term. That means no more licensing patents from university research programs that were developed using federal funding; no more "tech transfer" that allows corporate research to be done on campus for slave wages; and a slow dial-down in agency funding for applied research at universities (as opposed to basic science). Research and development has to be driven by market demand, if science is to be a stable career choice for intelligent students.
Some back-of-the-envelope calculations reveal the problem.
In 2001, there were 57,639 grad students in the biological sciences [1].
If they want to labs of their own, how stiff is the competition?
9100/98,700 scientists in the "Educational Services" sector are life scientists (9.2%) [2]; 46,300/98,700 scientists in this sector are in the "Colleges, universities, and professional" category (46.9%) [3]; so, 0.092 * .469 = 4.3% of 98,700 = 4258 scientists are life scientists in the "College, university, or professional" category.
Let's say that the average graduate student takes 5.5 years to graduate; that means that there are 10,480 newly minted Ph.D.s in biology each year. Let's say that the average PI has a lab over a 30 year period; that means that there are ~142 jobs a year in biology that open up for those 10,000 graduates.
This means that 1/73 of the newly minted Ph.D.s should reasonably go on to start a lab of their own. The actual number will be higher, but they will be winnowed out once they fail to get grants at some point early in their careers.
I don't know how real these numbers are, but they are in agreement with the sense of struggle I see day-to-day.
The government should fund fewer training slots at graduate schools, and more R01s (the grants that keep independent labs running), to get this ratio in better balance. Right now, it is a pyramid scheme.
It also should come as no surprise that domestic students would stay away from grad school. It's an economically irrational pursuit when other options are open. On the other hand, this is the best country in the world in which to train; students can go home and be big fish in their local ponds. For them, it is economically much more rational to spend some time here.
[1]http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf05310/pdf/tab2.pdf [2]http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf05313/pdf/tab2.pdf [3]http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf05313/pdf/tab1.pdf