These are challenging times for young people pursuing scientific careers. According to the U.S. Census, the growth of advanced degrees here in the U.S. continues. Approximately 13% of adults now have graduate degrees. Four million hold Ph.D.’s, more than twice the number of twenty years ago. On a global scale, OECD notes that Ph.D. scientists in every field have increased significantly, and particularly in STEM areas. In China, for example, 49,000 Ph.D.'s graduated in 2010, a four-fold increase in just a decade.
What’s the career impact of this increase for young scientists? According to the OECD research referenced above, a “dual labor market” has formed, that consists of “well-paid established researchers who often have permanent civil servant or public employee contracts, and on the other hand a growing number of cheaper temporary staff recruited with soft money.”
For example, in a survey of 38 EU and EU-partner countries, a significant proportion of early career researchers held either fixed term contracts or no contracts at all. In fact, the OECD study reports, “Almost 90% of Ph.D. researchers were in precarious working conditions with no or less than two year contractual horizons while 90% of leading senior researchers were on permanent positions.” The consequence of this duality is severe. Young scientists, apart from a few “stars”, have little job or career security and few opportunities to win permanent or tenured positions. They have less rewarding compensation (often making it difficult to repay student loans), less access to funding for their research and for ongoing training and career development support and weaker career prospects. And, as many assert, Universities churn out more Ph.D.'s than there are tenure-track positions “precisely because graduate students allow research scientists to focus on their own projects rather than teaching and grading undergraduates.”
What’s the outcome of this asymmetry? A recent study “Changing demographics of scientific careers: The rise of the temporary workforce” found that half of university scientists leave academic life after just five years. That's a huge change; according to the study, published in the Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences, academic scientists in the 1960s stayed in the ivory tower for an average of 35 years.
