Doc'd - economic disadvantages of graduate education - Statistical Data Included

Why a Ph.D. is a fast ticket to the unemployment line

EVER SINCE I CAN REMEMBER, I'VE BEEN interested in math and science. In my youth, my mother would wake me up to see astronomer Carl Sagan on "The Tonight Show" In high school, my favorite subjects were calculus, physics, and chemistry. I eventually earned a B.S. in physics and went on to get a doctorate in electrical engineering from Purdue University. I finished up my degree in 1988. Today, at age 41, I have not yet landed my first full-time job.

I know what you're thinking: I'm a big loser. How else could an American-trained scientist be so unemployable after a decade of continuous economic growth? The thing is, if I'm a loser, I've got a lot of company.

For years, we've been hearing dire reports in the media about how American universities aren't producing enough Ph.D.s in hard sciences and engineering-so few, in fact, that we've had to import them from abroad. But the truth is that universities, in their desire to exploit cheap labor (i.e., graduate students) have created a surplus of doctorates, particularly in my field of engineering, leaving anywhere from a quarter to half of all engineering doctorate recipients to follow a career path much like mine.

Bait And Hook

When I first considered working on a doctorate at Purdue University, I was hesitant. If I had taken a job in private industry, I would have earned a respectable salary; staying in school would make me a grad assistant, doing research at a wage of $550 per month. (Unlike scholarship athletes, most grad assistants must pay their own room and board.) Helping sway my decision, though, were university administrators encouraging students to earn doctorates.

The administrators' entreaties were reinforced by stories in the press promoting the idea that a doctorate was a ticket to job security. For instance, in 1983, the California State University system issued a report predicting that 83 percent of its faculty would retire by the year 2003, and that it would need to hire 11,000 new faculty members over the next 20 years. University administrators predicted an increase in job opportunities for all doctorates around the same time I would be finishing school.

So, with some reservation, in 1984, I entered one of the country's top-ranked engineering doctorate programs. I wrote a thesis on "The Physics and Modeling of Gallium Arsenide Solar Cells" The topic was interesting, but I discovered that much of the research work towards my degree consisted of debugging computer code, a very menial and noneducational task. My work was later used by Eastman Kodak in laser technology for commercial applications. My only compensation was the "training" I received from the university. Indeed, my job as a doctoral candidate seemed designated as "education" simply t9 justify its temporary status and lighter-than-air paycheck.

Entering my final year of school in 1987, I turned my attention to job hunting, using the university's placement center, pursuing job ads, and employing headhunters. Newspaper reports at the time suggested job hunting should have been a cinch. In 1986, a New York Times headline had screamed "Colleges scrambling to avert a possible faculty shortage," and the article ominously warned that by the turn of the century at least 100,000 of the nation's 450,000 full-time professors would be retiring. Columbia University announced that it was starting aggressive recruiting for faculty, and it even set aside special funds to provide young scientists with start-up research support. College administrators expressed concern that they wouldn't be able to compete with the higher salaries of the private sector.

My experience in the job market, however, proved vastly different. To my dismay, company recruiters showed little interest in hiring doctorates. Faculty openings, too, proved to be nearly nonexistent. After 10 years, I left school frustrated and jobless. I was not alone. All the hype in the mid-'80s about the dwindling number of American scientists had been effective in swelling the ranks of the doctorates with people like me--as well as vast numbers of foreign students taking advantage of American educational opportunities. By 1987, an astonishing 80 percent of engineering doctorates were foreign nationals on temporary visas.

Ironically, many of the "studies" claiming that the United States would be facing a massive shortage of trained scientists assumed that foreign students would return home when they finished their degrees. Of course, they didn't; at least half of all foreign doctoral students remain in this country after graduation. That fact, though, didn't seem to make much of an impression on the media. Despite droves of students pouring into American doctoral programs, university administrators were still making headlines warning of the coming shortage of Ph.D.s, especially in the hard sciences and engineering.

In February 1989, Richard Atkinson, the chancellor of the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), warned that the United States needed to invest at least $300 million a year in additional scholarships for doctoral candidates to avoid critical shortages of high-level scientists in the coming years. He estimated that by the turn of the century, only 10,500 new doctorates in natural science and engineering would be available to fill an estimated 18,000 jobs. The National Science Foundation was predicting an astounding shortfall of 80,000 doctorates by 2006.