Degrees Oversold.

When I entered graduate school, I was not sure what career path I would ultimately pursue, but I was fairly certain that I would at least have a career. Unfortunately, my certainty was misplaced. According to a recent story on NPR (link to NPR article), the unemployment rate for someone with a Ph.D. is approximately 30%, and there is a less than 50% chance that they will have full-time employment. With the nation’s overall unemployment rate now standing at 7.7%, someone with a doctorate is 4 times more likely to be unemployed than the average worker. Further worsening the situation, more Ph.D.’s are finding that the only full-time work they can find is as a post-doc. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a post-doc position is essentially an extension of graduate school that pays slightly better but is usually a dead-end job. I will use myself as an example. I graduated with a Ph.D. in cell biology in December of 2012. The professor that I worked for as a student then immediately hired me a post-doc. I now do the same exact work that I was doing as a student and make an insultingly small salary. Admittedly, my situation is not the norm. Most Ph.D. graduates go on to a different lab, and usually a different institution to work as a post-doc. But I considered myself lucky to have any job at all, so I gratefully  accepted the offer to stay in the same lab. In any case, a post-doc is a dead-end because there are very few faculty positions available at the University level. A person can do two, three, sometimes four post-docs, all in different labs, and all in the hopes of eventually becoming an actual tenure-track professor. And now we’ve come to the problem: tenure.

Tenured faculty are essentially faculty for life. Once the position is locked in, it is essentially removed from the job market until the professor retires or more likely dies. Universities have a backlog of applicants for an ever shrinking number of faculty positions, yet they continue to churn out Ph.D. graduates as if there was some unmet demand for them. They perpetuate a lie, i.e. the country needs more scientists with advanced degrees. I will plainly state the contrary. The country needs less people with Ph.D.s and more people who will do the grunt work of science for menial pay. Universities subsist on the work of graduate students, lab assistants, and post-docs. The work they do does not require much more skill than can be acquired with a two-year associates degree or in some cases simply a high school degree. Lab work is monotonous and does not require that a person actually know the theory behind what they are doing or why they are even doing an experiment. Of course, in order to earn a Ph.D. a person must demonstrate that they have a deep understanding of the scientific theory behind their work, but the work itself can be done by anyone who can follow simple instructions. I understand that being able to follow instructions is becoming a lost art, but the science fields should not try to play-up the difficulty of what they do. Again, I know that it requires a high level intelligence to design the experiments and make sense of the data that is acquired. These jobs are usually left to the faculty, so we are back to the original problem. There are just not that many jobs that require a Ph.D.

During my time as a graduate student, I found that I both enjoyed and was good at teaching. I decided that I would ultimately like to teach at the college level, so I knew that I would need to obtain a Ph.D. But universities usually do not hire “teachers;” they hire “professors.” Professors are expected to conduct research and teach a few classes here and there. It’s great if they happen to be good teachers, but it doesn’t matter all that much to the Universities if the professors are ineffective and dull in the classroom. What counts is their research, the grant money they bring in, and the number of publications they can crank out, thereby circling back again to the people who do the actual work, i.e. the graduate students and post-docs. Everything comes back to the minions, but compensation is disproportionate given to the professors. While your average post-doc earns maybe $40,000 a year (a figure that I don’t even come close to), a full professor can get anywhere between $90,000 and $250,000. Both have a Ph.D., yet one earns at least 2 times and sometimes more than 6 times the salary.

I didn’t get into this field for the money, but I did enter it under the hopes that I would eventually get a job doing something I enjoy. I wouldn’t mind if I was making $20,000 a year if I was happy, but I am stuck doing research that I hate. It is beyond the mere loathing I feel towards research; it is also the fact that what I am doing now in no way advances my career or will help get the job I want in the future. Yes, I could quit tomorrow, but there are several problems with this scenario. First, I am now “over-qualified” for many jobs. Employers are reluctant to hire someone that they feel obligated to pay more than someone with less education. Why should they hire someone with a Ph.D. and pay them $50k if they can hire someone with a bachelor’s degree for $30k? Second, the jobs that I am suitably qualified for are few and far between. Community colleges have found tremendous savings by only hiring adjunct faculty, which are part-time jobs that pay a genuine pittance (think $12,000 a year). Third, and perhaps the most daunting, is that if I quit I will infuriate some people in high places that have the very real ability to destroy my chances of ever getting a teaching position anywhere. Universities are incestuous monsters, and a negative evaluation from one professor can blacklist a potential job candidate for life. So if I jump ship, I will be doing so with an anchor shackled to my leg.

In the end, this has all been just a futile rant against a system that is broken and stacked against the very people it depends on most. I hope that this is also a warning to anyone thinking of pursuing a Ph.D. As a friend once said, “You know what Ph.D. stands for? Permanent Head Damage.”

Damn right.