May 3, 2015 | Postdoc population size, STEM shortage myth
See Too Many Postdocs, Too Little Funding, an article discussing the postdoc situation from “Boston University Today”....
Apr 15, 2015 | Ideas for change, Postdoc population size, STEM shortage myth
Jessica Polka, Kristin Krukenberg and Gary McDowell have an article in today’s edition of Molecular Biology of the Cell, “A call for transparency in tracking student and postdoc career outcomes“. The article calls on the scientific community to collect and disseminate data on graduate student and postdoc career tracks.Without this data, it is not possible to tell whether there is, in fact, a national “STEM shortage”, and whether there are sufficient jobs available for graduate students and postdocs to justify the large numbers currently passing through the academic system....
Dec 10, 2014 | Ideas for change, Postdoc benefits, Postdoc population size, STEM shortage myth
STEM postdoc researchers are highly trained, but for what? By Gary McDowell, Tufts University The STEM fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics supposedly suffer from a shortage of graduates. Conventional wisdom says there’s no one for employers to hire for science and engineering jobs. This STEM shortage myth has even figured in the immigration debate in the US. But look again. There are actually plenty of STEM graduates; the US is just training them the wrong way. It’s true there are many professional STEM vacancies but there are also many STEM grads who could fill them. The problem is the current training pipeline doesn’t direct graduates to these non-academic jobs. STEM students aren’t prepped for the professional world. Instead, they are guided toward an academic workforce that has expanded through a dramatic rise in the number of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Graduate researchers and postdocs – that is, researchers with PhDs carrying out advanced research – are part of the academic career track originally designed to lead to tenured academic research positions. As renowned engineer Vannevar Bush advised President Truman in 1945, while advocating for the creation of a National Science Foundation: The plan should be designed to attract into science only that proportion of the youthful talent appropriate to the needs of science in relation to the other needs of the nation’s high priority. However, the number of permanent – that is, tenured – jobs has not increased since that time, leading to hyper-competition and a massive pool of postdocs. Junior researchers are shamed by a culture that perceives leaving academia as a betrayal. Colloquially non-academic...
