Physics manpower: present and future

JAN 01, 1980

This summary of the APS Physics Manpower Panel’s report explores the employment paths of recent PhD’s, looks at attitudes and expectations, and makes projections for future supply and demand.

DOI: 10.1063/1.2913908

Ralph A. Alpher

Milan D. Fiske

Beverly Fearn Porter

The decade of the 1970’s has been a time of turmoil and transition for the support of physics and physicists, especially of young physicists just completing their graduate years. Science, the Endless Frontier, had come to have financial horizons quite close in during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. A whole generation of physicists had become accustomed to automatic careers, in which demand so far exceeded supply that the greatest problem was to choose among desirable alternatives. The great expansion of higher education had created limitless opportunities in the mode most familiar to the graduate student, and academic research—perforce with some teaching—became the normal career goal.

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More about the authors

Ralph A. Alpher, General Electric Corporate R&D Center, Schenectady, N.Y..

Milan D. Fiske, Retired, General Electric Corporate R&D Center, Schenectady, N.Y..

Beverly Fearn Porter, Manpower Statistics Division of AIP.