I run a small industrial applied research lab (<100 researchers). The truth is that, except in fairly specific cases, we don't need PhD level staff either. Just like in a university lab, the bulk of the hard work is done by people with Graduate (or in some cases Undergraduate) degrees. Practical experience in the field is also about 50% of what we need (since we're ultimately figuring out things that can go into engineering and deployed operationally, knowing what the end-state environment looks and runs like is critical). The role of PI is more often filled in our case by the corporate leadership.<p>I honestly think that the lack of large industrial research labs and the drying up of good academic research positions is very much an issue of what would be R&D funding going to other things that provide better near term ROI: VC, stock market, etc.<p>R&D is very much an investment like anything else and for whatever reason (patents, existing IP portfolios, etc.), it's just not a place that gets much attention at the moment as the money handlers have found that they have more ROI opportunity elsewhere.<p>I think the modern substitute for old fashioned R&D is the modern tech startup. The siren call of these ridiculously inflated "valuations" is simply too much for investment managers and it locks up more and more money that could go towards other investments. There's more parallels there as well, R&D and Startup investment is a high-failure game. But the outcome of successful startups is likely to be much larger than the outcome of a successful R&D venture (which still has very long tails of IP capture, product development, marketing, etc.)<p>I think it's a shame in the sense that, while we end up with dozens of photo sharing sites and social network startups, there's very few actual world changing ones out there. Most of what we get are not "hard" technical areas and their value derives from their faddish popularity - they're kind of the Karashians of technology.<p>But I guess that's the way of the world.
> Now, as a new crop of graduate students receives Ph.D.s in science, researchers worry over the future of some of these dedicated people; they’re trained to be academics and are often led to believe that anything else is an admission of failure.<p>As someone finishing up grad school, this doesn't seem quite accurate. To me, it seems like a lot of the interesting research is being done in industry. I remember scrolling through jobs online toward the end of my undergraduate and seeing "PhD required" for all of the positions I was interested in. Most of my friends working on their PhD are aiming either for industry or a research scientist position at a government lab (like ORNL). So I'm not sure who exactly constitutes this group that believes "not professor" = failure.
Three big problems:<p>1) Emphasis on funding translational research using government grants, which industry would otherwise be doing on its own. Hence, industry jobs have evaporated while basic science has languished.<p>2) Institutional salary caps on Grad students/Post docs, so training funds stretch too far resulting in an oversupply of entry level jobs. Better to pay the best people at competitive wages.<p>3) Growing divide between industry and academia, making job hopping even harder. Everybody is left worse off.
What the article curiously doesn't talk about it the fact that the non-academic job market at PhD level collapsed in 2007. In the news yesterday: even more cutbacks at Merck. The degree of offshoring and outsourcing that happened since 2003 in chemistry and the life sciences is incredible to anyone not in the field.
It's a real shame how the recession has hit STEM funding. There are a lot of really exciting new technologies that are simply not funded.<p>The private sector cannot innovate until monetization is in sight and the public sector is increasingly squeezed to publish papers with limited resources.<p>The overall effect is less innovation and bad science.
This story again. The oversupply of aspiring scholars is really <i>really</i> not news.<p>What would be news is any sign that things are changing, with applications to grad school dropping, or maybe the expansion of graduate school degrees that are explicitly not aimed at professorships.
I disagree with the bulk of this article. It certainly varies a lot of by field but in biophotonics I've seen a lot of extremely poor candidates, people who say things like "I don't do math", "I don't want to teach", "MATLAB is for other people", "I'm not a biologist so I can't explain my work".<p>When I first started I thought these people sucked, and I was going to be great. What I learned is that the graduate development opportunities are rare, and many of the reason people suck are beyond their control. For example, working on tedious projects or bullshit projects, do to your PI's conflict of interest. Or simply put that your research rests on a foundation of lies.<p>So, on one hand we have many people on the other hand we don't have many qualified people.
I don't see any particular reason to tie research generally, and scientific research specifically, to institutions primarily organized around undergraduate education.
It all feels like a market signaling problem. When people are choosing majors and how far to go in school, they don't seem to have the right information. Lack of understanding of the marketability of different degrees surely harms the students/future workers, but would seem to be in the interest of certain employers who benefit from the glut of overqualified workers. Of course, oversupply in one sector is likely accompanied by undersupply in others.
<i>Every year the market grows tighter, and federal money for research grants, which support most of this research, remains flat.</i><p>This makes me think we (as a country, a people), having trained all these scientists, have a market opportunity for inexpensive research, and we aren't taking advantage of it. Sure, the best and the brightest might fight their way to the top, but we can get perfectly good science out of the middle of the bell curve too.
The thing is we could double the science budget in most industrialised nations without really noticing. Compared to all the other very low ROI work being done by government spending and the almost free cost of borrowing it's probably something we <i>should</i> do.<p>Throw enough tenure against the wall and eventually something will stick
<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/tileshop_pmc_inline.html?title=Click%20on%20image%20to%20zoom&p=PMC3&id=4309283_nihms562644f1.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/ti...</a><p>Right,<p>What is the difference between Civil/Environmental and Environmental ?<p>It seems the best bet is to study something like mining since the R_0 is so low there.
Please choose 2 among the 2000 problems that you need to be solved as soon as possible. Wait patiently whereas 1998 urgent problems unexplicably rot and spawn 50 new problems each. Learn how to live with the new situation. Talk about the old good times when life was much easier and you had plenty of money to spend. Repeat.
This is a good problem. The solution is to raise the bar: in order to be a professor you have to make a tangible advancement in your field, something that advances the state of the art by an order of magnitude.
The world is about people selling crap they don't need to each other. If you can be honest with yourself enough to accept that, you realize there is no place for learning in this worldview.<p>Getting money today (GMT) is all that matters, so until the govt finds a way to take everyone's not hard-earned money and redirect it toward more noble pursuits, I'm confident the trend will worsen.