© iSTOCK.COM/THEADESIGNPhD degrees aren’t what they used to be. In 1973, more than half of doctoral degree graduates in biological sciences landed a tenure-track position within six years. Three decades later, that fraction had dropped to 15 percent. Demand has not kept pace with supply, says Bruce Alberts, a professor of biochemistry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and cofounder of the nonprofit organization Rescuing Biomedical Research (RBR). “The real world for [biomedical PhD students] is that maybe a fifth will ever get academic jobs,” he says. And it’s not just academia that’s overpopulated, he adds. “There aren’t even enough jobs currently in the private sector to make it possible for all of them to get research jobs.”
As a result, trainees spend more and more time in postdoctoral positions, and even then, their chances of landing a tenure-track position are in decline. Several years of survey data collected by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) show that, although the percentage of postdocs expecting to land a tenure-track faculty position stayed above 50 percent from 2010 to 2012, the percentage who actually do so fell from 37 percent to 21 percent. Unemployment following a postdoc position, meanwhile, rose from 2 percent to 10 percent over the same time period.
Yet despite these sobering statistics, PhD programs continue to grow—in the U.S., the life sciences saw an increase from around 8,000 doctoral recipients in 2004 to more than 12,500 a decade ...
