Why there is a job shortage

FOR SOME YEARS the training of PhD scientists has been advertised as a major goal of public science policy. We all believed that the demand for these scientists was inexhaustible, and increases in federal support for scientific research have often been advocated on the grounds that the research activity was needed to train graduate students, whether or not the anticipated scientific results were urgently needed for any other reason. The largest component of federal obligations for university science, in fact, goes to pay the salaries of research scientists and of their students, so that allocation of manpower may be the most important question in federal science policy. (We, of course, can only provide incentives; people allocate themselves as they wish.)

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