{"id":11899,"date":"2012-06-17T11:04:25","date_gmt":"2012-06-17T16:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=11899"},"modified":"2012-06-17T11:04:25","modified_gmt":"2012-06-17T16:04:25","slug":"same-old-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/11899","title":{"rendered":"Same Old Story"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/galacticinteractions\/2012\/06\/16\/same-old-story-too-many-graduate-students\">Same Old Story : Too Many Graduate Students<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I saw this report from the NIH advisory committee. The summary of the problem: there are too many graduate studnets (sic) produced in biomedical fields for the number of academic positions that will be available for them in the future.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Same old story:  ignoring the fact academia is not the only career for someone with a science PhD.  The <a href=\"http:\/\/acd.od.nih.gov\/bwf.htm\">NIH report<\/a> doesn&#8217;t make this mistake.  From the summary (emphasis added):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The model should include an assessment of present and future needs in the academic research arena, <strong>but also current and future needs in industry, science policy, education, communication, and other pathways<\/strong>. The model will also require an assessment of current and future availability of trainees from the domestic and international communities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In the actual report they note that the number going into academia has dropped, ~34 percent in 1993 to ~26 percent today.  So it hasn&#8217;t been the case that most biomedical PhDs go into academia for at least 10 years.  Why are people pretending that this is the case?<\/p>\n<p>One thing I don&#8217;t get is the claim that graduate school does not prepare you for a non-academic career.  (In contrast to my time in school, when I heard the complaint that it doesn&#8217;t prepare you for an academic career, because there was little to no preparation for becoming a teacher.)  Maybe my own experience in physics is atypical, but I didn&#8217;t have to learn a whole lot about how to conduct research when I got my current job outside of academia (working in a government lab).  The implication of the study is that in biology this isn&#8217;t the case, so sure, you should go ahead and fix that.<\/p>\n<p>There may well be a good argument that we have too many graduate students.  But comparing that number directly to the number of academic positions isn&#8217;t one of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Same Old Story : Too Many Graduate Students I saw this report from the NIH advisory committee. The summary of the problem: there are too many graduate studnets (sic) produced in biomedical fields for the number of academic positions that &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/11899\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11899\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}