Discouraged Job-Seekers Cite Crisis In Science Career Advice

As available academic researchjobs decline, many are questioning the wisdom of traditional maxims like 'the cream rises to the top' Rapid and accelerating changes in the structure of United States science have left many scientists bitterly disenchanted and feeling that they have been left high and dry, trapped in dead-end careers, the victims of misleading or downright bad career advice. DOUBTER: Kevin Aylesworth says that graduate advisors have a vested interest in keeping students in research. California Institute of Technology vice provost David Goodstein, a highly successful physicist, describes the current situation this way: "The great corporations no longer believe they need central research labs, and they've been undone. The Cold War has ended. The national labs have lost their missions and haven't found new ones. The world has changed completely." Many feel that the implications of these changes are being communicated poorly, if at all, to those contemplating scientific careers. "The nasty facts of life are really not discussed very often," says Arthur E. Sowers, a membrane biologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. "People in the know and institutions in the know are not openly disclosing up front the realities of what people are getting into. I certainly have never been pulled into an office and told all the bad things that can happen." Sowers, a non-tenure-track research professor, is 51 years old and is facing the imminent loss of his major grant. He's contemplating a career change that would take him out of science entirely. He is adamant that those considering a career in science be given a hard dose of reality: "Young people have to somehow get the idea that science is a field that's in contraction. I think they have to first learn that there are better pastures someplace else. "I think the failure rate in achieving career goals is just far higher than worth the effort to find out if you're going to succeed." Critics place a good deal of the blame for misguided counseling at the feet of graduate advisers. Kevin Aylesworth, a theoretical physicist and founder of the Young Scientists Network--an Internet resource for discussion of scientific career issues--says that, because advisers depend on graduate students to put in many hours in their labs, they "don't want to discourage [graduate students] from their narrow tasks of research. Some of the worst career advice I can think of that comes directly from advisers is: 'The cream always rises to the top. Yes, times are bad, but you don't have to worry about it.' "I've heard that numerous times, and it always makes me cringe. It's really not the way the world works, necessarily, and just because your adviser is telling you that cream rises to the top, it doesn't mean you're the cream." Regarding the contention that "the cream always rises to the top," Joseph S. Merola, director of graduate education for the chemistry department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, says: "I think that's a true statement, but I think that as advice it's lousy." By the same token, he adds, "I certainly wouldn't doubt that there are probably a lot of advisers out there who may not know the score, and may be giving people bad career advice. But at least in my experience, at least in the chemistry field, I really don't feel that people are misleading students. Some people get very disgruntled late in their careers, but early in their careers they're very idealistic, and when we try to discourage them they don't see that they should be discouraged. "The long and short of it is that a lot of times advisers aren't as blunt as they need to be about a person's chances and a person's future. But when you are really fired up and young and starry-eyed, you don't want to hear those things. Perhaps there's a bit of blame on both sides." A good deal of blame for bad career advice is targeted at several studies released in 1989 and 1990--including one from the National Science Foundation entitled The State of Academic Science and Engineering (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1990)-- that seemed to show that the U.S. was in for a shortage of scientists by the end of the 1990s. CRITIC: Caltech vice president David Goodstein cautions that the good times for science opportunities "can never come back again." According to Caltech's Goodstein, the studies predicting an imminent science shortage were based on two factors. First, the assumption went, "the tremendous cohort of professors who came in from 1950 to 1970 will come of retirement age by the end of the 1990s. Secondly, we have the baby-boom echo--the babies of the baby boomers--so we'll have an increase in enrollments at the same time there's a large number of retirements." With an increase in the number of college students and a simultaneous decrease in the number of active faculty members available to teach them, says Goodstein, "if you take those things in isolation from the rest of human history, you come to the conclusion that there ought to be a shortage by the end of the century. "It was obvious [when these reports were released] that they were nonsense," concludes Goodstein. "Three hundred years of history shows us that there's no shortage, there's a surplus. It is true that those professors will retire. But it's also true that for 20 years we've been producing far more Ph.D.'s than we can absorb. Even just the rumor that there might be academic jobs at the end of the decade prompted a large increase in the enrollment of American students in graduate school. The problem solved itself instantly if it were going to be a problem, but it was never going to be a problem." A report released in April entitled "Reshaping the Graduate Education of Scientists and Engineers" from the National Research Council's Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP) attempts to address some of these issues. The COSEPUP report notes that a declining proportion of Ph.D. recipients in science and engineering are entering academic careers. Between 1977 and 1991, the proportion of Ph.D. scientists and engineers employed in academia declined from 51 percent to 43 percent. Only 31 percent of individuals awarded Ph.D.'s between 1983 and 1986 were in tenured or tenure-track positions as of 1991. During this period career opportunities in academia were declining, opportunities in the federal government remained flat, and a larger proportion of Ph.D.'s were finding positions in industry. For this reason, states the COSEPUP report, graduate training should be designed to afford students far more flexibility in their career choices. The report recommends that once graduate students have met their qualifying requirements, "department advisors should help students choose between three distinct options: to stop with a master's degree, to proceed toward a Ph.D. and a position in research, or, for a student interested in non-traditional fields, to design a dissertation that meets high standards for originality but requires less time than would preparation for a career in academic research. We believe that the first option is typically undervalued and the third option often neglected." The report suggests, for example, that graduate students substitute industrial internships for on-campus research assignments, simultaneously broadening their educations, increasing their employment prospects, and decreasing the time it takes to get their degrees. "The most immediate impetus [for the report] was the growing sense of dissatisfaction ranging to panic among young scientists in various fields," says Mary Jane Osborn, head of the department of microbiology at the University of Connecticut Health Center and a COSEPUP member. This "sense of dissatisfaction ranging to panic" was expressed by a young graduate student in chemistry in a recent posting he made to sci.research.careers, a Usenet newsgroup. He wrote, in part: "I think it is terrible to tell people to go into science when there are no jobs out there. Companies are getting swamped with applicants as are universities and colleges. You are better off to have your M.S. or B.S.--at least you can get your foot in the door. Ph.D.'s are in bad shape when it comes to jobs. I was told that America needed Americans to go into science. So I did and it has been the most frustrating experience of my life. . . . There are days when I wished I never picked up a beaker." "It's quite clear that, by and large and with some notable exceptions, graduate schools, graduate programs, and graduate faculty are not sophisticated in the sense of knowing what's going on in the outside world," notes Osborn. "There's a large element of truth in the cliche that the graduate student is trained to be exactly like his mentor. Clearly, students need to have much more currently useful information on what career options may be available to them, and what kinds of training and priorities in their graduate education might prepare them for a flexible choice among these options." To that end, the COSEPUP report suggests the creation of a national database to which students and their advisers would turn to find up-to-date information on employment options and trends. The COSEPUP report has come under criticism from those who suggest that its recommendations don't go far enough to address an era of continuing limitations in the expansion of science. One of the more gentle criticisms comes from David Goodstein, who says of the committee: "These are intelligent people who have worked very hard, listened to a lot of opinions, and have done their very best to confront the problem. I don't want to disparage what they've done, but these are the most successful scientists, come together to figure out what to do about the system. And it does have somewhat the air about it of the winners in the game saying, 'Don't change the rules.'" REALIST: Arthur Sowers says young people need to be told "that science is a field that's in contraction. Arthur Sowers's criticisms are somewhat harsher. "These are Band-Aid fixes where there should really be a large reevaluation," he contends. "The whole tone of the report is designed to preserve the status quo and the role and position of the institution. They do not want to discourage people from coming in because they need slave labor." Referring to the report's suggestion that graduate training be broadened, Sowers asks, "If people diversify so they can do other things, why the hell should they get a Ph.D. to begin with? I don't think there's any problem with overspecialization, because that's what a Ph.D. is all about. I think the important thing is to discourage people from applying to graduate school and to get postdocs to bail out. I would just recommend that people find something in life [besides science] to be happy with." FOR FURTHER READING Copies of David Goodstein's articles "The Big Crunch" and "Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates" can be found on his World Wide Web home page. For access, point Web browsers to http://www.caltech.edu/~goodstein/ Copies of the COSEPUP report "Reshaping the Graduate Education of Scientists and Engineers" are available from the National Academy Press for a fee. For information, call (800) 624-6242. Copies of the report's executive summary are available via gopher at gopher.nas.edu, and on the World Wide Web at Many scientists, Goodstein speculates, would prefer to believe: "'We've had some bad times, the research funds are a little short, but the good times will come back.'" On the contrary, he maintains, "They can never come back again." Goodstein himself can offer few solutions. "I don't want to stand on a stump and say we've got to stop producing Ph.D.'s. All of my instincts cry out and say, don't argue against education, and don't argue against scientific research. Education and scientific research are intrinsically good things. Nevertheless, it seems to me that we have a real moral dilemma." Perhaps some of the oversupply of Ph.D.'s could be absorbed if secondary-school science teaching were a more attractive career, he suggests. One thing is for sure, he says--it's dangerous to do nothing. "The marketplace will eventually work these problems out if we let it. But in the course of doing that it may hurt a lot of people, and it may even destroy science completely." Not everyone agrees that the traditional basic-research career is in a nose dive. Says Virginia Tech's Merola: "I've been accused of looking at the world through rose-colored glasses, but I do have an optimism that a lot of the fiscal cutbacks are short-term. I think that as people recognize what's happening to higher education and to the technological future of this country, we're going to see people saying, 'Wait a minute, we've made a mistake in the last few years and we really need to expand our research.' I think we will see more opportunities open up. I think we'll see more R&D. But do I have a basis for that [opinion]? No." Nevertheless, says Merola, "I think science as a career is still a good choice. But if you view the Ph.D. in the same way that you view a vocational school--that it's going to give you some skills and those skills are going to be marketable-- that's a big mistake. You have to be internally motivated. You have to go into science because almost from the day you were born you found yourself investigating, you found yourself being curious, you found yourself playing in the lab or building things, and this is exactly what you want to do with your life. So long as you have that internal motivation, science is a good career." Robert Finn is a freelance science writer based in Long Beach, Calif.

Discouraged Job-Seekers Cite Crisis In Science Career Advice

May 28, 1995

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