PhDs Can't Find Work as Boston's Biotech Engine Sputters

25 pointsposted a month ago
by JumpCrisscross
(wsj.com)

14 Comments

ipnon

a month ago

The university pipeline seems to me totally broken as a way to gain employment. It's still effective for prestige. You should stay in school as long as you're still climbing the world university rankings, but once you start falling down this ladder leave and join industry. You will get paid more and do more interesting and valuable work.

mmooss

a month ago

As far as I know, the data says otherwise: A college degree leads to much higher lifetime income.

> do more interesting and valuable work

It depends what you find interesting. Research is very interesting to a lot of poeple.

apothegm

a month ago

Pretty sure they’re talking about graduate degrees and academia as an occupation, not getting a bachelor’s in order to join the white collar workforce.

JumpCrisscross

a month ago

> they’re talking about graduate degrees and academia as an occupation

PhDs have the lowest unemployment rate of any education bracket, and roughly match the earnings of professional-degree holders (e.g. MBAs) [1].

[1] https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2025/data-on-display/educa...

maxminminmax

a month ago

Yes, but that’s not the relevant datum, because of selection effects. The relevant question is how well employed is the person who had a choice to do a Ph.D. or not compared to the counterfactual person who made an opposite choice.

As an example, an Ivy graduate makes more than state school graduate on average, but there was a study showing that those offered Ivy admission but deciding to go to a state school made just as much (that study setup has its own selection bias issues, but hopefully those gives an idea of what I mean).

JumpCrisscross

a month ago

> because of selection effects

We're literally measuring a selection effect: that of pursuing a graduate degree.

> there was a study showing that those offered Ivy admission but deciding to go to a state school made just as much

Source?

I'm not rejecting the hypothesis that this is a measurement error. But it's been observed across multiple countries for several generations. The burden of proof is on the hot take that graduate degrees in general are a bad economic bet. (Note: I don't have a PhD. I went to a state school. So you're hypothesis is tempting to believe, hence my scepticism.)

mmooss

a month ago

> graduate degrees and academia as an occupation

Yes, that's what I meant by 'doing research': People really have deep passion for it - knowledge, being on the frontier of it and generating new knowledge.

KnuthIsGod

a month ago

Plenty of unemployable PhDs here Australia. I know one who is tutoring high school students to earn a living. His thesis was on phycology and the production of sustainable fuels. A nuclear physicist with a PhD is unemployable and is retraining as a data scientist. Another phycologist is retraining as a counsellor. A molecular biologist is running a plant shop. The first phycologist is charming but a century ago, he would have been a charming but very average greenkeeper or a gardener.

Bright people in Australia head into finance, medicine or law not into dead end PhDs. The problem is that universities sucker too many into PhD programs for the sake of the departmental government funding. This leads to indiscriminate entry into virtually all the PhD programs in Australia. When they graduate they are often underemployed or unemployed.

The ultimate harm to society is the production of research slop that worsens the SN ratio in published work.

ggm

a month ago

Personally I wouldn't have posted this. It has tones which can only be hurtful, to somebody you presumably know.

chunkmonke99

a month ago

more pointedly: the commenter presumes that the friends are unhappy with their lives. Also that some them would be better served performing back-breaking menial low-wage labor while otherwise being illiterate. Any PhD (even one in specializing in Plankton and especially nuclear physics/engineering) would equip you with a bunch transferable skills that normally would be valued in a modern society ... 1) public speaking 2) initiative 3) resourcefulness 4) analysis and communication etc etc. If I was being uncharitable I would say finance and law are actually worse for society: at least the subset of those that get paid the highest with respect to their impact on the broader society (but that is debatable).

chunkmonke99

a month ago

Would you think it would be better for "society" to allow more people to go into finance and law? Or that advanced knowledge should be gate kept by only the select cognitive elite that are most adept at playing the "glass bead game" by age 18? Would you change any of your opinions if AI renders most High IQ practical/technical tracts obsolete? Perhaps, a more sane society would be one where curious people could develop themselves in whichever way they so choose: if they want to study the mating habits of marmots in the Central Asian steppe then so be it.