Math Ph.D. bubble?

union68

Uh...what exactly is a quant? Can anybody refer me to some information on this?

I like this thread. It gives me hope that if I attend graduate school there are more options than trying to get tenure after graduation.

kote

The short answer...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_analyst

Education
Quants often come from physics or mathematics backgrounds rather than finance related fields, and quants are a major source of employment for people with physics and mathematics Ph.D's. Typically, a quant will also need extensive skills in computer programming.

Locrian

I'm sorry, I couldn't find the paper/data that's based off of, and it would be helpful in interpreting the numbers.

Locrian

My bad, Vanadium had the link. You're interpreting it correctly, but it doesn't support Vanadium's conclusion. That 60% of potentially permanent positions were in industry in no way supports the notion that "Most PhD's move on to industry", since the number that are in temporary positions and then move to permanent ones (in either Uni or Industry) is not measured there. It's a subset of a subset, not of the later total.

Locrian

Sort of - they typically keep track of their member statistics, which doesn't always support peoples conclusions, since it's a select group. However, I do think I was clearly wrong when I suggested no one knew what percentage of physicists move to industry. I didn't think that through before I wrote it and apologize.

Strange as it may sound though, I still hold that the statement that "Most PhD's move on to industry" isn't actually supported by anything anyone has linked to here.

Locrian

Maybe, or maybe it's just a very hard thing to keep track of. The problem is that there is tendency for extreme selection bias in dealing with students after their graduation. Those for whom things go well tend to be much more likely to respond to surveys, etc., and are also easier to track down.

My school also kept track of their graduates. However talking with the older PhD's, it became clear to me that many names were not on the list. People who couldn't get a job often disappeared. Maybe they got one, but no one knew. Your school may not have this problem, but this type of selection bias plagues post graduation data.

Typically what I find is that physics PhD's are dealt with this way: any percentages given are the percentage of those people who got a PhD in physics and stayed in physics. This is especially true of AIP stats, and it's why I'm deeply suspicious of claims that "most" physics PhD's did almost anything, because I think it's not an easy thing to know.

The particular AIP stats people are pointing to here are graduation surveys, and so differ from their member surveys. Maybe it gets past these problems. . . but note that they only had a 53% response rate to their survey. . .

vanesch

I fully agree with you here. Although when one enters a PhD. programme, one is "still young and naive" in many cases, and as "good student" one has a kind of admiration for one's professors and would like to walk in their tracks, doing a PhD. is still a good education all by itself, independently of one's professional ambitions, but just on the grounds of personal, intellectual devellopment. It's an opportunity in your life, and in many cases (although indeed not always) it is an asset for one's professional life.



Again, I agree. I think it is a good thing that high-level knowledge "diffuses" outside of academia, into civil society. There's no point locking up knowledge in some self-replicating little world called academia, where the only reason to learn something is to become a professor so that you can teach it to someone else who will learn it to become a professor to...

I think it is very healthy that, say, amongst politicians or administrative agents, there are some PhD. in philosophy.

Of course, a totally different question is whether for the student it is a good *investment* to go for a PhD. to "help diffuse" knowledge into society. I think it is, on the condition that you see it as a personal opportunity of intellectual enrichment, and not just as a career investment solely.

twofish-quant

Yes. This is why the data that I have is useful since the professor that I knew tracked down every single graduate that had gotten a Ph.D. in the last ten years and found out what they were doing. In two cases, she couldn't get in contact with the Ph.D. holder, but was able to contact friends and find out what they were doing.

mathador79

Interesting discussion. I believe that there is indeed an oversupply of math phds. There are, simply put, many more phds being produced than there are available academic jobs. There are also many more postdoctoral opportunites than tenure track opportunities. And the bottom line is that the phd program is structured as a training program for an academic job.

I got my math phd a few years ago from a top university, got a research postdoc, published some papers, was awarded a government grant (PI), and still have not been able to get a regular position anywhere. I'm currently doing a second postdoc abroad, and needless to say am quite discouraged.

It's true that there are jobs other than academia which require people with mathematical skills, but they have little relation to phd programs, which usually provide close to zero practical training of any sort.

I've been looking into becoming a quant, but all the job ads I've seen want people with industry experience and a strong programming background. I know, I know, I should've prepared for this earlier, but I hadn't realized my "successful" academic career was about to reach a dead end. Now I'm thirty and looking at starting a new career with no practical skills or experience.

In my opinion, if graduate schools wish to continue overproducing phds, they should do a better job of preparing their students for the reality that many of them will not find suitable academic employment, and should provide alternative career counseling and job placement services.

Just my two cents.

twofish-quant

The system is pretty screwed up. One thing that I think will help a lot is if you force people to sign a piece of paper saying that they realize that if they finish the Ph.D. program, it is rather unlikely (i.e. 1 chance in 10) that they will end up getting a tenure track position.

If you go into the program realizing the real situation, then you can figure out what to do so that you have marketable skills when you get out. (Hint: Learn to program C++).

In some ways I was lucky because I figured out pretty early that the people running the system were either clueless or lying or a bit of both.

I'm not that optimistic that the system will be able to do anything formally, because they'd be basically cutting their throats if they did, and systems of power simply to not cut their own throats. One thing that is interesting in looking at the Ph.D. surveys that I've seen is that most of the people with astronomy Ph.D.'s actually do end up doing science teaching and research even without a tenure track position. This is rather dangerous since if it turns out that you can get people to do teaching and research without being a formal professor, this sort of makes professors obsolete, so there is a very strong interest on the part of people with power to make it seem like the tenure track is the only track, but it isn't.

If you really want to see what the future of the university looks like. Look at University of Phoenix.

But I think the most useful thing to do is to just let Ph.D. graduate students know that there is a problem. You have some of the smartest people in the world, and once people realize what the real odds are, and that yes, the system is lying to them, most of them will figure out something rational.

Personally, I'm not asking the powers that be to do anything, except stop lying.

vanesch

Well, when you're 25 - 30 years old, and in a PhD program, you might be considered intelligent enough to find out your job opportunities for yourself, no ? PhD students aren't mentally retarded people who need a protected work place. When you open a restaurant, nobody requires you to sign a paper that you realize that if you don't have customers, you might end up out of business. They didn't sign you a paper that you would end up with tenure either, did they ?

Of course, making some information of the real job market available can always help, but one shouldn't flee one's own responsibilities in the choices for one's career path. With kids, I agree, but not with intelligent adults.

twofish-quant

No you aren't, if the people that you are trusting to provide that information can't be trusted to give it, and are actively lying about what jobs are available.

But they are very socially isolated people living with a community in which they have very little real power, and they *do* need some protection because the people that are making crucial decisions are not unbiased. Everyone is an idiot savant. The fact that I know something about radiation hydrodynamical models doesn't mean that I have a clue about accounting, mutual funds, law or medicine. That's why I have to put some trust in people when I do certain things. In the case, of graduate schools, most students get their information about the job market from faculty, and I'd argue (with some personal experience) that this is a seriously bad thing.

If you sign a restaurant franchise agreement or bank loan, you end up signing quite a few documents saying pretty much just that. Restaurant franchise agreements are pretty heavily regulated because people that sign those agreements have an overoptimistic change of them succeeding.

I think this is non-sense. The problem is not that the physics community is merely not providing no information. The problem is that the community has in a number of situations been *ACTIVELY LYING* about the actual job market. Look at all of the white papers in the 1990's that predicted massive numbers of job openings in astronomy. When is the last time you heard someone testify before Congress saying 'we'll I think we have too many Ph.D.'s and we gotta think about what to do about that before you give us several billion dollars." Anytime, someone leave the tenure track, people whisper that that person was just "not good enough."

There are huge amounts of subtle and not so subtle brainwashing that keeps the system in place, and the fact that senior faculty benefit from that system is why. It's very easy to design or evolve a system in which people benefit from something morally repugnant without having to accept any personal responsibility for it, and I think that's what has happened.

The attitude "It's not my problem that you believed my lies" is something that I'd expect from used car salesmen and peddlers of subprime mortgages. It's not something that I'd expect senior physicists to do. I personally expect the community to have more decency, integrity, and self-respect.

PROFESSORS ARE NOT USED CAR SALESMEN. Personally, I think that one of the *DUTIES* of a professor and a physics department is to make sure that their students have the skills to prosper. PROFESSORS ARE TEACHERS, and IMHO the skills that you need to do well in the job market is as much an important part and responsibility of the Ph.D. graduate education as technical skills.

The power relationship between graduate student and professor is profoundly unequal, and it's unequal because the professor presumably has more knowledge and experience and is passing down that experience.

If we go with the attitude the professors are merely used car salesman and the student has to just look out for themselves and can't trust professors to act somewhat in their own interests, that's fine....

We then really have to ask why professors have as much power and status as they do.

Vanadium 50

This is quite different from my experience. When I was a student we certainly didn't expect a permanent job in academia. Even if the faculty didn't tell us what reasonable expectations were, which they did, we could tell:

• We could see professors who didn't get tenure.
• We could see postdocs who couldn't get faculty jobs.
• We could see students graduate with the PhD equivalent of the "gentleman's C" - granting a doctoral degree for some work that wasn't the best, with the understanding that the student would not ask anyone for letters of recommendation for postdoctoral postions.

That said, there was an attitude among the grad students that "this can't happen to me" - they would believe that half of them would move to industry (which is about what it is) but they wouldn't believe that they would be in that half. And as it happens, 50% of them were right.

twofish-quant

We may be from different generations (gee, that makes me feel old). I started my Ph.D. in 1991 and finished in 1998. You can see lots of stuff from the early 1990's about the NSF going crazy because of the supposed shortage of scientists and engineers. Also this was at a time before the web and there were simply no forums like these. (You had USENET and sci.astro, but the discussion there wasn't very careers oriented.)

Part of the problem is not so much the statistics was that you ended feeling "dirty" and "inferior" if you didn't get a permanent job in academia. It took a few years for me to overcome that. It's a shame really, since if I hadn't gone through that, I probably would have stayed more in contact with the community, and would have ended up getting some more research done. The other thing was that actively thinking about ways of making my Ph.D. useful without an academic job was also something that was quite unusual.

It's stuff like this that makes me want to hit someone

http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/v44/n18/phd.html

This is part of the "subtle brainwashing." If you didn't go for the postdoc, you were inferior, and the thought that someone with decent research might go for something other than a postdoc was something that was rather unthinkable. Also it's important for people within a power structure to mark anyone outside the structure as a "loser" (and if possible have the people on the outside think of themselves as "losers"). If you have people outside a power structure that are willing to challenge it, then you have the threat of revolution.

Part of the reason I enjoy industry better than academy is that it's possible to fail, fail very, very badly, and still find your way back into the game.

I think the industry/academia distinction is rather misleading.

The numbers I've seen (from a complete survey of astronomy graduates) is that the number of people that go into fields that are totally unrelated to academia is about 30%. However only about 15% of the people that graduate get into tenure track research positions. What happens with the remaining 55% is that they get into positions that aren't "industry" but also aren't "academia." For example, there are people that end up working as system administrators at national labs with the understanding that they will be able to do part time research. There are people that work as supercomputer center support staff at a university. It might be "academia" but it's not what people normally think of. There are also people doing science journalism, teaching community colleges, etc.

It's curious that most of the people that end up in "academia", don't end up as tenure-track professors.

It's rather good news, because it really means that what people end up doing with a Ph.D. is far, far more diverse than what people except. The really, really good news is that no one I know with a Ph.D. ended up with a dead end job. Unemployment for Ph.D.'s right now is far, far lower than the national average. On Wall Street, people with physics Ph.D.'s tended to be the last fired and the first hired, which caused some friction with people with masters degrees.

One reason that I think that it's important for faculty to tell students that they probably *won't* get a permanent faculty position, and that a professorship is not "normal" but one option out of several is that if people told the truth about the Ph.D. job market, then it makes the Ph.D. much more attractive and the life of a Ph.D. more pleasant. You end up hating yourself less.

However, the problem is that if it were accepted that the professorship was not the "gold standard" for Ph.D.'s and that "industry isn't just for losers" then we are talking about some very, very massive and threatening power shifts. If tenured professors aren't smarter or better than "industry losers" then why do they have tenure and are immune from layoffs. Why not hire some people from outside the priesthood to teach intro calculus?

The fact that people within the academic power structure are rather afraid of asking some deep questions is why there is so much misery and hopelessness, but personally I don't think the system as it exists now is economically sustainable, and since I ended up on the outside, I'm not going to shed any tears to see it collapse.

twofish-quant

The reason I think the academic system is going to collapse is because a lot of the spending in the academy has been driven by the real estate bubble. You either had massive endowments which went to private universities or booming tax receipts that went to the public ones. This created a system that for a time allowed universities to avoid difficult questions and cuts.

That's gone..... I've looked at the numbers and if you assume "standard growth" in the stock market, then universities are going to end up with big, big holes in their balance sheets. You can fix this with money from alumni and state and federal sources, but this means that professors are going to have to answer to alumni, corporate sponsors, and politicians in ways that most of them aren't used to.

And that's not even taking into account competition from for-profits like University of Phoenix. University of Phoenix scares me because unless someone comes up with some alternative, it's where higher education is moving toward, and it's not a vision that I think is appealing.

It's going to be interesting.....

symbolipoint

twofish-quant wrote:
Would employers of graduated candidates have an influence on this trend?