Physics Today ads track employment boom and bust

This month marks the 70th anniversary of Physics Today’s first issue in May 1948. As historian David Kaiser writes in his May 2018 feature article about Physics Today’s early years, the magazine was founded “soon after the end of World War II, during one of the most disruptive periods in the history of physics.” Riding high on the success of the Manhattan Project, physicists in the late 1940s and early 1950s enjoyed rising cultural prestige and expanding funding opportunities. Those good fortunes didn’t last. By the 1970s, physics was in the throes of a serious jobs crisis that saw many qualified researchers forced to leave the field.

That professional arc for the physics community is played out in the advertisements of Physics Today. In the 1950s and 1960s, Physics Today was filled with ads from companies eager to recruit physicists. By the 1970s, those ads had vanished. Many of the changes brought on by that physics jobs crisis are still with us today, including a reliance on postdoctoral positions.

Physicists in demand

The postwar period saw massive increases in physics PhD enrollment in the US. The expansion of educational funding in the GI Bill and the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958 sent more and more students into graduate school in physics. In 1955, 500 physics PhDs were awarded in the US; in 1965, there were 1000; and by 1970, the number had risen to more than 1500. At the University of California, Berkeley, the physics department became too large to hold a departmental picnic anywhere on the university’s grounds.

Students chose physics in large part because of the career options that awaited those with degrees. A physics PhD usually led to employment opportunities not only in academia but also at the dozens of private companies and defense contractors who needed physical scientists to work on their projects. Even with rapid postwar expansion in physics programs, demand for physicists outstripped supply. In 1962 the Placement Service at the American Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics Today, listed 514 jobs for physicists but registered only 449 PhDs looking for work.

That demand was reflected on the pages of Physics Today. Many companies and large academic laboratories looking for PhD physicists were not content to place simple black-and-white classified ads in the “Positions Offered” column. Potential employers including Los Alamos National Laboratory, General Dynamics Corporation, and Lockheed Aircraft Corporation purchased large, eye-catching ads to attract applicants. In the January 1958 issue, 44% of the ads outside the classifieds were for jobs. Though some ads requested applications for a specific position, most were far more general; they encouraged readers to write to the personnel office to learn more about all the open positions.

Job ads aimed at PhD physicists, as historian Alex Wellerstein has written , employed a range of rhetorical tactics to capture readers’ attention. Some, like a 1956 ad for Los Alamos, touted the exciting science “qualified scientists and engineers” would do if they joined the laboratory. Others offered a desirable lifestyle. “Look ten years ahead!” urged an ad for the Douglas Aircraft Company. “Will your income and location allow you to live in a home like this?” The ad pictured a house, a pretty single-story California ranch, owned by a Douglas engineer. Still others appealed to the ego. “Are you the ONE MAN IN THREE who will qualify as a Raytheon physicist?” declared an ad for the Raytheon Manufacturing Company.

Many of the ads drew on Cold War anxieties about communism and the Soviet Union. An ad for the Sandia Corporation depicted two gunslingers facing off, with the headline “No Second Best.” Sandia told potential employees, “Our business is design and development of nuclear weapons—weapons that stop potential aggressors and defend our freedom. And in this kind of work, either you’re best, or you’re nothing.” The ad went on to assure physicists that Sandia’s home city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, provided “pressure-free, relaxed, pleasant living” and “varied recreational activities.”

Boom and bust

Even as physics PhD enrollments kept expanding, signs of trouble started to appear. As the Cold War entered a period of détente in the late 1960s, some of the funding that had fueled the growth in physics jobs began to vanish. The combination of funding cuts and an economic downturn proved devastating for the job aspirations of PhD physicists. In 1968 the AIP Placement Service recorded just 253 jobs for 989 applicants. In 1969 Physics Today reported that 30% of job seekers with new physics PhDs and 40% of job seekers with new master’s degrees had received zero job offers . And then the numbers went from bad to catastrophic. In 1971 the AIP Placement Service advertised just 53 jobs for 1053 applicants.

That trouble was reflected in the advertisements in Physics Today. By 1965 job ads represented just 25% of the total, a noticeable drop from seven years earlier. By the 1970s, pricey full-page color ads for jobs were gone. Companies went from trying to woo physicists with flashy images to assuming they would have their pick of applicants if they placed a classified ad in “Positions Offered.” The January 1975 issue of Physics Today contained 116 nonclassified ads; only one of them advertised a potential job.

Physics Today’s coverage of the jobs crisis was initially rather unsympathetic to disappointed job seekers. In a June 1969 editorial , Physics Today editor-in-chief R. Hobart Ellis Jr suggested that there was little the physics community could—or ought—to do for physicists who could not find work in their field. “We feel that freedom and responsibility are the way of life most suitable for the physicist,” he wrote. Although he said he would like to see the physics community offer data on job opportunities and high-quality placement services, “the responsibility for finding a job we would like to leave to the physicist himself.”

Readers—particularly graduate students―quickly responded with a flurry of aggravated letters. “I am aghast that R. Hobart Ellis Jr could take such an irresponsible position,” wrote William Greenberg, a graduate student at San Diego State College. “After encouraging students to major in and study physics, I feel that it would be inherently dishonest for AIP to turn around and disown them after they graduate and cannot find a job.” Robert Levine of the University of Pennsylvania wrote that Physics Today had a responsibility “to offer something more constructive to those of us about to enter the profession than the chilling thought that unemployment is the price of freedom.”

Legacy of the crisis

Despite the field’s professional struggles, the 1970s was a decade of exciting physics , including major developments in the standard model and the birth of quantum chromodynamics. In his book How the Hippies Saved Physics , David Kaiser argues that the crash of the physics job market led physicists to refocus on curiosity-driven theoretical research, which ultimately yielded advances in quantum information science. But the conceptual richness of 1970s physics was likely small comfort to those who found themselves driven out of the field by a lack of opportunities. Unemployment and underemployment for physicists continued to be a problem throughout the 1970s.

One consequence of the crash was the expansion of temporary postdoctoral positions, stopgaps for both cash-strapped departments and physicists eager to find employment. A 1986 AIP survey found that the number of new physics PhDs accepting temporary postdoctoral appointments was rising sharply. That trend held in the sciences overall. Between 1981 and 1998, the number of university postdoctoral positions doubled in the US . By 2004, 67% of new physics PhDs reported that they would take a temporary postdoctoral position after graduation.

The story of the 1970s jobs crisis will likely sound familiar to physicists who lived through the 2008 financial crash and its aftermath. In 2016, 22% of recent physics PhDs reported feeling underemployed , and a further 5% were unemployed. There is cause for hope: Recent data suggest that the percentage of physicists who accept potentially permanent jobs after their PhD is on the rise . But the days of laboratories pleading for the chance to send Physics Today readers lists of their open jobs have not returned. The archives of Physics Today reminds us that physics is not immune to economic downturns—and that the physics community should be prepared to advise and support young physicists when the job market takes a turn for the worse.