US PhD production is flooding the market for professorships

New York Times : Tenure-track professorships are one of the most desirable jobs for PhD holders in the sciences. However, in many disciplines people earning PhDs significantly outnumber the available positions. In popular fields like biomedicine, less than one position is available for every six PhD recipients, and across all science and engineering degrees fewer than 50% on average enter academic positions related to their degrees. Many entering academia in non-tenure-track positions end up in low-paying narrowly focused jobs and then leave the field after four to six years. Richard Larson of MIT and his colleagues have calculated replacement rates—how many PhDs professors each trained during their career—for tenure-track positions across several science fields. The highest rate they found was 19.0 PhDs trained per tenure-track professor for environmental engineering; biological and medical sciences were at 6.3. Larson’s work suggests that this measurement could be used to help PhD students decide whether to enter academia, industry, or another career field.