Washington Post front page: “Too many laboratory scientists for too few jobs”

JUL 09, 2012

Physicists are doing all right, but reality for biologists and chemists contradicts calls for boosting science training.

DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0168

Steven T. Corneliussen

A headline and subhead below the fold on the 8 July Washington Post front page summarize a long article : “Scientists heeded call but few can find jobs: After getting expensive PhDs, many forced to find work in other fields.” The online headline says, “U.S. pushes for more scientists, but the jobs aren’t there.”

The reality concerning those jobs, Brian Vastag’s article declares, “runs counter to messages sent by President Obama and the National Science Foundation and other influential groups, who in recent years have called for U.S. universities to churn out more scientists.” Vastag continues:

Obama has made science education a priority, launching a White House science fair to get young people interested in the field.

But it’s questionable whether those youths will be able to find work when they get a PhD. Although jobs in some high-tech areas, especially computer and petroleum engineering, seem to be booming, the market is much tighter for lab-bound scientists—those seeking new discoveries in biology, chemistry and medicine.

Citing a 2009 NSF survey, Vastag reports that “only 14 percent of those with a PhD in biology and the life sciences now land a coveted academic position within five years.” He also cites Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University, who says that this figure has been steadily declining since the 1970s. Vastag also delivers bad news about chemistry:

Largely because of drug industry cuts, the unemployment rate among chemists now stands at its highest mark in 40 years, at 4.6 percent, according to the American Chemical Society, which has 164,000 members. For young chemists, the picture is much worse. Just 38 percent of new PhD chemists were employed in 2011, according to a recent ACS survey.

But physicists seem to be doing much better, Vastag notes, with unemployment around 1–2%, according to surveys. Physicists work in many technical fields, he adds, with some even going to Wall Street.

Vastag ends by quoting Kim Haas, a chemist who spent 20 years designing pharmaceuticals, but lost her job. Haas spoke of her own high school daughter: “She’s very good at everything, very smart. She loves chemistry, loves math. I tell her, ‘Don’t go into science.’ I’ve made that very clear to her.”

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.