So, Chemjobber (whose blog focuses on “[q]uantifying the chemistry job market” and “helping chemists find jobs somehow”) wrote an interesting post on the supply/demand mismatch when it comes to chemistry Ph.D.s and how this might affect a person’s rational deliberations about whether it’s worth the gamble to pursue a chemistry Ph.D.
That post got me thinking (as good posts do), and I posted some of my thoughts about what we (in a sort of societal-level “we” that at least includes chemists and chemical educators, broadly construed, but that might also encompass higher education types and even society as a whole) might want to do about this supply/demand mismatch, and about how what we think we should do is probably connected to how we think about the point of education in the first place.
I went and read the comments. (I know, who does that?)
There, I learned:
1. Putting up a blog post that includes some typos (or maybe they were artifacts from the voice recognition software) means that your Ph.D. should probably be revoked. Immediately!
2. The existence of one commenter with a Ph.D. in chemistry who has an intellectually stimulating job that pays well means that there is no job crisis for Ph.D. chemists! (False alarm, kids! Come on back to the lab!)
3. The existence of one commenter who works placing interns for his university’s STEM college and reports a 100% placement rate for students looking for internships means that there is no job crisis for Ph.D. chemists! (Even though maybe these are undergraduate students being placed? And maybe some of these internships pay less than what you’d view as a living wage, or perhaps nothing at all? Still, companies will welcome cheap transient labor from science majors, so the economy is totally fine!!)
4. Ph.D. programs in chemistry are probably way easier now than they were 100 years ago. (Whither intellectual rigor?) Maybe these lower standards are to blame for the glut of chemistry Ph.D.s.
5. On balance, it is a good thing when a sub-par chemist finds a job teaching philosophy!
Thankfully, we sub-par chemists can look to Fark comment threads for helpful examples when we teach logic and critical thinking.
And, because I count it as due diligence, I immediately emailed Chemjobber to alert him to the news that he’s been mistaken about the chemistry job market. I expect by the end of the week he’ll shift his blog over to providing photos of labware with hilarious captions.
Finally, given that the blurb that went with the link to my posts reads:
The market value of a Ph.D. in chemistry is now limited to asking ‘Would you like fries with that?” On the positive side, chemistry students are bumping the hell out of English majors in the paper-hat careers
I could get all shirty about pointing out that my Ph.D. in a “useless” non-STEM field helped me secure a tenure-track job (and, ultimately, tenure) in a field where it’s maybe even harder to get an academic job than in chemistry. (Look at me being a dumbass with my sunk costs and such!) And, there are no fry-o-lators or paper hats involved.
But that would just be mean of me.
Wait, philosophers don’t get to wear paper hats?? What the hell are you in it for, then, anyhow?
The wine, DJMH? And the stale coffee.
Often it’s about berets and unfiltered cigarettes, but I trained in a philosophy department that didn’t cotton to Continental philosophy.
So, I’ll second Chebag’s wine and stale coffee and raise with lowered expectations that I know how to dress with any sense of style.
(The lasting lesson I learned from my graduate seminar in the philosophy of language: I am a shabby pedagog.)
There was an article in Bioscience, maybe around 1980, which looked at science, particularly biology, as having followed a logistic growth curve, with several doubling of resources, but now at carrying capacity, with no prospect of another doubling. Carrying capacity means O growth. The article predicted a large overshoot in number of PhDs, and suggested that PhD programs should be cut back to no more than one per state, and that would still be too many. No idea how to find the article.
Can I just say, I’d love to see photos of labware with hilarious captions.
This just cracked me up. Now that I know that the relationship between internships and job prospects is 1:1, I no longer worry for any of my students, since they all work for free for me in my lab as “interns” already (they do get course credit). The jobz! They haz them!