from Wired: The U.S. produced 100,000 PhDs between 2005 and 2009, while creating only 16,000 new professorships, according to data cited by The Economist. Though we’re used to hearing about PhDs in the humanities ending up as low-paid adjunct professors or baristas, we tend to expect another fate for people who major in fields like bioscience or physics. But even the natural sciences produce more PhDs than professorships.
Donnie Berkholz has a PhD in biochemistry and biophysics from Oregon State University. He’s exactly the sort of guy you’d expect to be working on a cure for cancer. Instead, he works at RedMonk, a technology industry analysis firm. He, like many other jaded PhDs, calls academia a Ponzi scheme.
Those that do land jobs are often frustrated. “Scientists spend more time chasing funding than thinking about the science,” Berkolz says. And because funding sources are so risk adverse, the type of research funded tends to be conservative. “Scientists are supposed to be all about falsifiability,” Miller says. “But your job as a professor is to never be wrong. It’s hard to be intellectually experimental when you’re a scientist.”