FLICKR, NEETALPAREKHIn 2014, the number of job-seeking biomedical graduate-degree holders and postdocs in the U.S. exceeded the number of relevant, available jobs by more than 8,000, according to a study published this month (April 13) in The FASEB Journal. And this labor gap shows no signs of narrowing, the authors—from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the management consulting firm ICF International—noted.

Decades of unchecked growth in academic research has led to an imbalance between the supply of biomedical graduates and demand in the job market. “But there’s very little data out there,” said study coauthor Julie Mason, associate director for cancer training at NCI. “So we really wanted to quantify the labor gap.”

Mason and her colleagues first estimated the numbers of biomedical PhD graduates from 2010 to 2014 using data from Economic Modeling Systems, which draws information from the US Census Bureau, the US Bureau of...

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