Comments on: Quarterly Summary – Trying to make sense of it all

By: Veronique

Veronique — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 23:38:06 +0000

Great review Dave! I wish we could start the new year with great news.
The Conference Board of Canada has just released its new rating on Education and Skills. Canada generally tends to do well in this category but its performance drops quickly when it comes to PhD Graduates. Since 1998, we have consistently earned a “D” (yes, on a scale of A to D). In 2007, with 209 PhD graduates per 100,000 people aged 25 to 29, we are way behind European countries (on the same relative scale, Sweden has 3.5 more PhD graduates than Canada).

With the current trend, the picture does not look good to improve our ratings for the future. In the past 10 years, the relative number of PhD graduates has increased by about 10%. Japan has doubled its number of PhD graduates. You can have fun playing with the pull-down menu to compare Canada to other countries.

It may not change the rating but I think it would be time for the Conference Board of Canada to review their 25-29(!) years old range for PhD graduates. Let’s do the math here. Say you graduate from high school at 18 years old. Add 4 years of B.Sc., 3 years of Masters, 6 years for a PhD… This brings you to 31 years old if you haven’t taken any break between your degrees. Some Europeans countries like Germany have much shorter degrees.

The real issue, however, is that our country needs to value science, technology and higher education. Hopefully more positive science awareness initiatives will be seen in 2010. Keep up the good work with this blog!

By: Dave K

Dave K — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 23:53:25 +0000

Hey SubC,
You’re absolutely right about Nature missing the boat on the actual stats, I believe The CAPS folks have already sent in an official request to fix the numbers… We’ll see what comes of it. I think the point they were trying to make is that graduate students can, and are now more often, bringing in 35-45 thousand tax free per year. It’s certainly not an average as they incorrectly state, but it’s an interesting trend.

The sad part is that this probably reflects quite poorly on Canada as a PDF destination… we do need to address PDF issues at a national scale if this sort of image is to be reversed.

Thanks for reading and commenting over the last few months, it’s this type of discussion that makes writing these entries a lot more enjoyable!

By: SubC

SubC — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:21:34 +0000

Thanks for bringing up a lot of issues in your post. I must point out (surprisingly no one else did) that the Nature comments were full of misinformation and outright lies. The average postdoc salary in Canada is not C$ 28K but something around 40K. Most Canadian postdocs make somewhere between 35-45K, which while not great, is definitely comparable to a new technician’s salary. Even more ridiculous was their assertion that the average grad student salary in Canada was 45K (I wish I was paid that much in my PhD !!) and postdocs were actually taking a pay cut ! I do not know how this drivel got published in such a respectable journal, I suppose the Editors were really gullible and taken for a ride by a disgruntled postdoc.
Hope to see alot more interesting topics discussed here and have a great year ahead