Thursday, 10 December 2015

One of science’s longstanding mysteries has been what happens to new Ph.D.s when they finish their degrees. Lack of information about career outcomes has kept many aspiring scientists from developing a realistic picture of their professional prospects and has allowed far too many to expect to become tenure-track faculty members, despite the severe shortage of such positions relative to the number of people who want them.

To begin to provide an answer to that question, Nikolas Zolas of the U.S. Census Bureau and his co-authors used data from academic and government sources, including the Census Bureau, to trace where new doctoral graduates—in science, engineering, arts and humanities, and education—from eight flagship midwestern state universities went and what they earned in the first years of their post-graduate school careers, as reported today in an article published in Science.

“What is … striking is the low salaries,” writes scientific labor force expert Hal Salzman, of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, in New Jersey, in an email to Science Careers.

The best-paid field is engineering, with an average income of just above $65,000, followed closely by math and computer science. Physics comes next, with an average income that just tops $50,000. Then come social sciences, “other science,” and chemistry, all in the high $40,000s. Biology trails distantly at $36,000. Graduates in education and health fields on average out-earn the biologists, and the arts and humanities scholars finish last.

It’s “surprising” that fields reputed to pay well, such as computer science, did not produce higher earnings, Salzman says. “[E]ven in universities, starting salaries for those folks should be more than $65,000, so that suggests [that] a lot are in research, non-tenure track positions.” It’s likely that postdoc appointments are dampening earnings, most notably those of the biologists, the article’s authors note. If one considers only industrial salaries, they write, “the average earnings increase by one quarter (although the gap varies by field), with the highest earnings in mathematics and/or computer sciences (almost $90,000) and engineering (almost $80,000).”

The article does not pin down the kinds of jobs the Ph.D. recipients hold, but it does report the nature of the organizations that employ them. Overall, the largest fraction of the Ph.D.s, 57.1%, found work in academe, while 38.7% work in industry, with 17% working in firms that do research and development and 21.7% in firms that do not. Government employed 4.1% of the new doctorates.

http://macedoniaonline.eu/content/view/28544/53/

Categories: Societal