Are There too Many PhDs?

Interviewer: Are there too many PhDs? We'll talk about that next on the Scope.

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Interviewer: I'm talking with Dr. Richard Dorsky, Director of the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Graduate Program at the University of Utah and Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy.

So are there too many PhDs? That's the question that's being passed around these days. What's led that question to come up in the first place?

Dr. Dorsky: Well, the traditional path for PhDs is to become a professor at a research university, and it's always been clear that there probably aren't enough academic positions for all the PhDs that are trained in science. I guess it's became particularly of interest lately because of reductions in funding to the national institutes of health for grant money for scientific research, and so that led people to question even more whether there are jobs out there in academia for PhD-trained scientists.

Interviewer: You're the director of a graduate program so you talk to graduate students a lot. What's the feeling amongst the incoming students now about their prospects for the future?

Dr. Dorsky: Students have always been concerned about whether there will be academic faculty jobs for them, but that was really based more in the past on the number of positions that are available and with changes now they also see that grants are getting harder to get. So even if they get a faculty position there is a concern about how they are going to fund their labs. I think the combination of those things has really led to more anxiety among graduate students about whether they're making the right choice by going to graduate school if they want only an academic research faculty position.

Interviewer: And do we know if the current funding crunch has affected how many PhD graduates will go on to get jobs?

Dr. Dorsky: Well, the statistics are not fully known at this point, I would say, but anecdotally, at least, I think job searches are . . . I know in our department, job searches that we've done over the last few years, we've had more and more applicants for one job, and so it seems like there are more PhDs on the market for jobs than ever and fewer jobs out there for them to get.

Interviewer: How are people talking about addressing this problem?

Dr. Dorsky: Well, from the top down. NIH has instituted requirements for career training that involves alternative careers besides academic research for students funded by training grants. The graduate programs at the U and at other places have instituted much more serious emphasis on alternative career training, and really with an idea of getting students to think about what they really want to do with their careers and whether it requires a PhD.

We in the Neuroscience Program and other programs require students to put together an individual career development plan, which is a way to get them to focus on what their career goals are and to see if their current training is meeting those goals.

Interviewer: Do you see anything wrong with having students go into a PhD program basically knowing that they're not going to end up in academia on the first place?

Dr. Dorsky: Well, the stated goals of the NIH-funded training grants and of our program, I would say, are to place students in research science. It doesn't have to be in academia, it doesn't have to be primarily in a research institution, but we want them to stay in science whether it's in writing, editing, or biotech. So any of those outcomes we feel are acceptable results of PhD level training, especially if the jobs that they're obtaining require a PhD.

What we would be more concerned with is students who go on to careers that don't require PhD, such as maybe primary or secondary school education which while a worthwhile career, seems that it doesn't require the level of training or scientific research training that we offer in a PhD program.

Interviewer: Of course, I've also heard the argument that having a PhD is going to help you no matter where you go, that having that knowledge and kind of in-depth perspective can enrich any sort of career.

Dr. Dorsky: I think that's true about education in general. I guess the question we would ask students is whether they want to devote five or six years of their life to that outcome, when they could get on with their life and get a job much sooner and get the training on the job.

Interviewer: What could happen if there are fewer PhDs?

Dr. Dorsky: So that's an interesting side effect of this whole process, which is that many research labs on our campus and other campuses, and especially labs of more junior investigators, operate primarily through the labor of PhD graduate students who complete thesis projects, write papers, produce preliminary data for grants. And with the current system, there's no clear replacement for those people. Postdocs and technicians serve different roles in laboratories, and without graduate research the system would have to be organized in a very different way.

It's not necessarily an ideal system, but this is how research science has worked for many years, and if there is going to a big global shift in how we do graduate training then there also has to be a corresponding shift in how research laboratories are staffed.

Interviewer: Do you have any other thoughts that you want to bring up?

Dr. Dorsky: Well, I think this is a critical time in planning ahead for future graduate training programs. With the recession in 2007/2008, we saw a big influx of graduate student applications partly due to the economy, I think, and now at least in anecdotally we've noticed those applications starting to drop off because the economy has improved, but the job prospects in academic science have not necessarily improved. So the next couple of years, I think, will be critical in finding out what the pool of graduate students is going to look like, and whether we're even going to be able to maintain the same of graduate class sizes as we have in the past.

Interviewer: So in other words, you don't want to act too soon. You want to see how it all shakes out?

Dr. Dorsky: Right. I don't think we want to overreact. I think we want . . . there are natural fluxes in the number of graduate students coming in and graduating every year, and we want to be able to adapt to those numbers, but we don't want to change anything drastic until we know that there's actually a change in the demographics of graduate students applications.

Announcer: Interesting, informative, and all in the name of better health. This is the Scope Health Sciences Radio.