Shove it up your pipeline

I know that I should treat this report on preparing students for non-academic careers as a good thing, because it involves academic physicists and professional societies finally recognizing that we need to get serious about the fact that most physics majors will go into industry, not the PhD pipeline/pyramid.  I should be glad that people are recognizing this, and that the Important And Serious Types get it.

The problem is that I hate the important and serious types because they are always so disconnected from reality, half of them still say all the Acceptable And Serious stuff about PhD production, and it seems like they only figured out 4 minutes ago what the physics community should have figured out 4 decades ago:  That most people don't get PhDs and don't wind up in academia.  How can I take these jokers seriously when they started revising their Party Line yesterday while I've been taking students to industry meetings and teaching computational physics and applied optics since I was a junior professor?  These jokers will no doubt get the world to pat them on the back for "Steering the Conversation to Recognize the Need for Change" while some of us have been in the trenches doing this stuff for a long time, and we figured it out without the Serious And Important People issuing reports and trying to "Change The Conversation" or whatever.

And they dress it up in all of their administrative language instead of plain English, speaking the language of administrivia and bureaucracy.  And I know, I just KNOW, that when the next grant opportunity comes along, if it's for some PhD pipeline bullshit they'll be talking up the importance of that when five minutes earlier they were talking about preparing students for industry.  Because they're a bunch of parasites.

Alternative is back in style, so I said "What about Breakfast at Tiffany's?"

The editors of Nature deign to notice reality:

Alternative career paths should be celebrated, not seen as a compromise.

Do go on.

...but young scientists have more reason than most to be disillusioned when things do not go to plan. Almost all have completed a PhD. And almost all would have been told that the qualification — and the effort and dedication involved — was the first step on the ladder to a permanent academic position. 

Nature and others have long pointed out that this is a lie. There are simply too many PhD students and too few senior posts. Hence the purgatory of the postdocs: trapped in transition and trying to accrue the necessary credit to move on.

Well, I'm not sure how "long" they've pointed it out.  Their link is to 2011.  If they'd pointed this out in the 1970's I'd be more impressed.

Up next:  The editors of Nature suspect that these newfangled desktop computers might have an effect on how people do science.

Stephan: An alternative to the "alternative"

One periodically hears the Right-Thinking Classes talk about "alternative careers for PhDs."  This sort of talk is a joke on a number of levels.

For starters, some of them include "teaching at a 4-year college without a graduate program" as an "alternative career."  That just shows how narrow their conception of academia really is.

Of course they include working in industry as an "alternative."  It is rather strange that the most common job (when one finally lucks out after years of postdoc positions) is the "alternative."  They seem to be aware of this, and if they talk too much about industry in a roomful of postdocs somebody will eventually say "Oh, yeah?  Where are all of the companies clambering to hire us?"

But the true darlings of the Right-Thinking Classes are the trio of k-12 science teaching, science journalism, and science policy.  Now, yes, of course, we want to have scientifically literate k-12 teachers, especially (but not exclusively) in high schools.  And of course it would be nice if more journalists knew more about the science stories that they (sometimes) cover.  And who wouldn't like to know that the people making decisions about nuclear power regulation or approval of pharmaceuticals are knowledgeable about science?  Alas, there are only so many jobs in science journalism and science policy, and k-12 teaching requires a lot of other traits besides a science degree.  It isn't for everyone.

None of this stops the Right-Thinking Classes from periodically yammering about these paths.  I like Paula Stephan's response on page 181:

Yes, there is an apparent shortage of math and science teachers in the United States.*  But surely there is a more efficient way to increase the supply than by transforming people who have invested seven years of training in graduate school and another three to four as a postdoc into teachers.

Ooh, she is just ASKING to be disinvited from any further panels at funding agencies and professional societies.  Well, if she gets tired of those events, instead of getting herself disinvited she can just transfer the invite to me.  I'll be happy to consume fancy hors d'oeuvres while telling people things that they don't want to hear.

*To my knowledge, this is one of the few areas where the "shortage" rhetoric might have a factual basis, though the shortage has a lot more to do with the number of people who will accept those working conditions at the salary on offer than the number of people getting science degrees.