Too Many Graduate Students; Not Enough Jobs

Today, I offer two articles. The first article is from Scientific American about the current state of the US science and engineering job market, while the second deals with an alternative model to PhD education being explored in China.

Does the U.S. produce too many scientists?
This story by a really eye opening article on how the US overproduces scientific PhD's for the job market and how this bizarre system is maintained through the recruitment of foreign students to fill the ranks.

What I got out of the article is that:
1) US K-12 still produces some of the best graduates in the world. There are some big gaping holes in the public education system that merit fixing, but we should acknowledge that it still produces some really good students.
2) Those students who want to make money don't go into science.
3) Those that do go on to graduate school in science join a grant funding system which supports lots of cheap labor in the form of graduate students and "temporary" postdocs. Then when they graduate with PhD's and want to start their own labs, they discover that there are way too many PhD's for the number of career jobs available.
4) One solution is to switch funding from temporary postdoc's to longterm staff scientist positions. Another is to cap the number of foreign graduate students who are admitted to study in the US and make the cap respective of the market.

I don't feel like I know enough to comment on policy, but I am already weighing options for PhD work and I haven't even started grad school.


Do scientists really need a PhD?
BGI, a Chinese genomics institute doesn't think. The suggested model would be to jump into a research project right out of college without the typical PhD educational experience. While I may be a bit biased, my three years of lab tech work seem to be very similar to what PhD student would go through, minus the required classes and grades. While I look forward to being the first PhD in my family, I truly doubt that the letters, by themselves, will make me a better scientist. I believe that it is the hard work, scientific problem solving and long discussions with colleagues are what make the scientist.