The Iron Ring

An article I read recently in The Scientist asks the question that probably keeps some of us graduate students awake at night; are we training too many scientists? Apparently, statistics show that the number of PhDs holding tenure track positions four years after graduation has dropped from 25% to 15% in the past ten years. And as many fewer of us enter academia, the number of postdocs has doubled in the past twenty years. Anecdotal evidence certainly suggests this trend; The Scientist spoke with a host of frustrated postdocs and I can think of a few myself. But I can’t help wonder if the situation is the same across fields, or schools.

As with an undergraduate degree, the wax and wane of job flow affects different schools differently, and I would be interested to see if this is true for a PhD. Quite honestly, does my program place graduates better than others? Are more Penn Bioengineers in tenure track positions four years out? I never asked these types of questions when I started graduate school because I figured that if I wanted to be a professor, the best way would be to choose the correct Postdoctoral position. If (and that is a major ‘if’ now) I wanted to be a Professor, I would seek a Postdoc in a lab with a track record of placing postdocs in faculty positions.

Do we need to be worrying about this earlier?