I have been looking for a job for the past two years and am stuck in a postdoc currently. I am willing to go to industry, but haven’t fully explored that option yet. However, one thing I noticed when applying for jobs last year, in particular when applying to 2nd or 3rd tier schools, is that I am at least as qualified (and probably more up-to-date on current techniques) as many of the faculty members of the schools to which I applied. Also, many of these schools had hired lecturers who were “barely qualified”, i.e PhD but no publications, etc. However, for whatever reason, my application was not considered at these places. I think that right now, there are inefficiencies in many fields wrt hiring. I also think, frankly, that the lower you go, the more nepotism there is: schools hiring their own graduates to fill temporary lecturer positions (which are still decent, desirable full-time jobs) rather than conducting a fair, open, competitive search.

Thus, it is one thing to look at your application and be honest and say, I don’t have spectacular results, I’m not going to continue in pursuit of the top academic job. But when you try to get a non-top academic job that you are qualified for, and you can’t get it due to reasons that you can not determine, then I think it is more likely for people to become frustrated.

I agree that training fewer PhDs is a bad course of action, but we need to be way more creative (and accepting in the you’re-not-an-academic-failure sense) about what PhD trained people can do as a career. This whole blog concerns the crisis in academic training from the perspective of science trainees (though it seems we aren’t the only ones with these concerns!) – I’d love to see more of 1 and 2… but I have to acknowledge that if 1 and 2 don’t work for people (i.e.: “Why should I get a PhD just to end up in journalism school”) – then training fewer PhDs will come about of its own accord.

Keep reading though and please do share more ideas/reactions like this!

It would be very interesting if PhDs became attracted into non-academic careers at substantially higher rates and the “supply” of PDF candidates dropped dramatically… would we see a reversal of the second PDF phenomenon?

This is silly. While it is a real problem that people can’t find suitable jobs, don’t you think it is strange to suggest that people should just be less educated in science? We need to be *more* educated in science. It’s great that so many people can complete the PhD. There should be ways for these people to continue to do some research (if that’s what they wish) and perhaps help society in other ways such as teach high school students science.

You appear to be saying that learning and education should be made yet more exclusive.

I hear you on this. It’s quite a bit different in my world (computer science) where it’s only been in the last decade that anyone postdoc’d between grad school and professor-hood. Even now, the cream usually get immediate tenure-track positions (with the luckiest ones delaying their start by up to two years to take a prestigious and well-paid postdoc at places like Microsoft and TTI to do nothing but research and often having that research count towards a shortened tenure clock). It’s not the top 5% to worry about though. I’ll probably comment longer on this shortly on my blog. Will post back if/when I get to that …

If there is no plan to substantially increase numbers of tenure track jobs (which even if there was, I cannot imagine it outpacing the rate of successful PhD graduates) then either or all of these courses must be taken:

1) An increase in jobs in academic, but not professorial, sectors (i.e.: permanent lectureships with job security, benefits, etc that will focus on dealing with the increasing numbers of undergraduates)

2) An increase movement of PhDs into non-academic careers with a concomitant focus on helping/training students how to find these options. The Government of Candaa, for example, has a Management Training Program that aims to recruit Masters students (or higher) into intermediate positions. The real issue is to figure out what to do about 80-90% of people who start PhDs but will not be a professor – this, I think comes back to the training process. Ideally, more PhDs (not the cookie cutter variety !) are out there making signifcant contributions to multiple sectors because of the skills they have acquired in a PhD program.

3) We do as Rachel suggested and dramatically reduce the number of people that enter and finish a PhD program.

—

Just to note, that while the Trudeau Foundation was initially endowed by the CDN government, it is a registered charity and, should, in theory, be able to spend it’s monies on what donors would like to see funded. The point is well taken on the Vanier and CGS though which do seem like an awful lot of money for a PhD student. Whether it would be better spent on a set of lectureships across the country vs. more “regular” SSHRC or NSERC awards, I don’t know – both sides have interesting arguments. The fact does remain that it needs to change.