The report is pretty consistent with my personal experience. Of my class at MIT, graduating just after the .com bubble burst, a huge number of engineering and science majors all became traders, bankers, or consultants. The jobs were glamorous, high paying, and (at least the finance jobs) quite intellectually challenging. I myself went into engineering, but often felt a twinge of envy of my friends who left for New York.

Money certainly does play a big part in it, but it’s not the only factor. Like a lot of professions which are short staffed (teachers, for example), you could easily attract more people if the pay was more competitive. But the other part of it is the challenge, the sheer interestingness of the job. The financial world recently has been a casino, and the smartest, most competitive people in the world went there to play. When I visit my friends in that world, what they do is almost always more interesting that what I do.

Startups can offer a similar level of challenge, but the payoff, if there is any at all, is usually many years out. When there were interesting and assuredly high-paying jobs available in the finance world, it’s no surprise that they attracted a lot of very smart people.

Agree completely. I’ve always been a huge science buff, and did an undergrad degree in biochemistry at Harvard. My reason for not continuing was purely a measure of the social and economic rewards. It was clear that the reward for 8 years of non-paid PhD work was another 2 years of minimum wage postdoc work. Not an attractive proposition to a 20 year old – unless you also happen to be working for your U.S. citizenship as well.

The best thing that could happen to science and engineering is reducing the supply of graduates. It’s at least as hard to become a good engineer as a dentist. But dentists make 2-3 times as much and have more social standing as well. Why? Because the supply is limited by the schools.

Every time I hear this old argument that we (this nation) need more mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, I bristle. Let us be clear that these vocations are proxies for the real claim that we need inventors and entrepreneurs, not scientists and engineers. Wal-Mart, Kinsey, AIG –these are the American success stories as much as Apple, Microsoft, and Google, and none of these are particularly representative in any cross-sectional way of science disciplines or scientific reasoning. I was invited into the geosciences with the ‘gee wiz’ aesthetics of museums and PBS programming, and pursued it to the PhD level only to find that jobs are scarce, competition is fierce, pay is low, and success is meted out to a few, often hand-picked, superstars. How does a glut of post-docs, sabbatical replacements, and adjuncts help us in the long run?

The answer is revealed in recent history: the 1986 report The Nation at Risk fueled the rhetoric of math/science shortcoming even though the statistical interpretation was challenged as a Yule-Simpson effect in a report by Sandia Labs 5 years later; simultaneously, policy analysts at the NSF (under the leadership of Erich Bloch) promoted the concept of shortage in math/science/engineering PhDs in the shadow of the baby boom, and these “pipeline reports’ were also famously debunked in 1990. Now we have an overproduction of PhDs and an academic knowledge-producing ‘industry’ that relies on abundant cheap labor “in the pipeline”. The pipeline dumps most of its flow onto an infertile employment landscape.

I largely agree with the comments here that economic incentives no longer lead Americans to science and engineering unless they genuinely prefer the field. After 6 years of college and 9 in Computer Engineering, I can claim a secure and solid middle-class salary in one of the good handful of cities where I can pursue the career of working on microprocessor development. And I like what I do. Still, in terms of pay, prestige, difficulty, geographical flexibility, or sheer number of jobs available, it is easy to understand why business and finance are more popular career choices for American college students. The students of many other countries, especially in Asia, are quite happy to fill in.

It’s not that Americans don’t want to become Ph.D. scientists, but simply that there aren’t enough jobs available for the Ph.D.’s that we produce and the truth may be filtering down to naive undergraduates.

Science research in this country has become a pyramid scheme where principal investigators (university professors) need an army of low-paid graduate students and post-doctoral researchers (postdocs) to do the laboratory grunt work and to tutor the undergraduates and grade tests.

In short, contrary to what the media, pundits, and our politicians would have us believe, as a nation we are producing more Ph.D. scientists than what we need and what the job market can support. Part of the problem is that foreign Ph.D.’s are working jobs that Americans Ph.D.’s might otherwise work.

Where is the sense in spending huge amounts of resources to train people for non-existent job positions? How does it benefit our country to produce angry, disenchanted, highly-educated people who have a rightful sense of entitlement (to earn a secure middle class income)?

This isn’t merely a problem in science, it’s also a problem in other areas, such as the MBA and the Law degree. Your average Law degree today has little economic value and income-earning potential as a result of lawyer overproduction. Considering the fact that most lawyers will graduate with over $100,000 of debt today, a law degree could become a ticket to a lifetime of indentured servitude as unemployed (and unemployable in their field) wannabe lawyers have to figure out how to pay it back.

In fact, many of those Ph.D. and M.S. scientists fled the career graveyard that is the science field for law school in the hopes of becoming well-compensated patent lawyers only to discover that the employment situation in the sciences is so bad that so many other scientists had the exact same idea and that now the patent law job market is glutted. Can you imagine that–a huge oversupply of people with a combination of TWO advanced degrees–science + law? How is that supposed to be possible in the United States, the land of opportunity where education unlocks economic prosperity?

The amount of shame and depression that an unemployed, underemployed, and/or unemployable person with that kind of background must feel as looks over his student loan debt statements is almost unimaginable. The urge to commit suicide must be tremendous.

What’s the Solution?

In order to reduce economic waste and human suffering, we need to dramatically reduce the amount of advanced and professional (and even Bachelor’s) degree production in this country to better reflect the actual needs of the nation’s economy. It should be difficult to obtain entry to those types of programs and the amount of production should be similar to medical school where 95% of the graduates are guaranteed the ability to earn a secure middle class income.