by godelski | 2025-12-16 00:30:41+00:00
> where the number of students needed to carry out existing professors' research is much larger than the number of junior faculty positions generally available.

This is definitely true, there are more physics PhDs graduating from the top 2 schools than there are total faculty positions listed each year.

BUT you are missing that there is still demand for positions out in industry as well as government labs. But there's also a decline in that right now as we're going through a time of encouraging more engineering and less research.

In reality there's a pipeline of research. If you haven't been introduced to it, I like to point to NASA's TRL (Technology Readiness Level) chart[0]. The pipeline is from very basic research to proven systems. Traditionally academia and government labs do the majority of work in the low TRL while industry research handles mid level (stuff that isn't quite ready for production). The reason for this is due to the higher rate of failure of low level research and so shifts risks away from industry. Not to mention that industry has different incentives and is going to be more narrowly focused. Academia and gov labs can research more long term projects that will have large revenue growths but may take decades to get those returns. I mean how much do we get from the invention of calculus? Or the creation of WWW? We'd also get far less growth and profits were these not more distributed.

So while yes, getting a professorship is a challenge and highly competitive, it is far from the only path for these graduates. We can also do a lot to increase (or decrease) their options by increasing (or decreasing) funding for science. There's a lot of science that happens outside academic labs and they still depend on PhD graduates to be able to do most of that work. If you want these people to have jobs, fund more low level research[1]

> I've heard scientists complain that universities owe it to students to provide more help finding a job in industry after they graduate.

A big reason for this is that networking is still a big issue. I can tell you as someone who does not have a good relationship with my former advisor that this has made job hunting a much harder experience compared to other peers. While my credentials are better than some of those people they come in through a side door (often skipping things like LeetCode challenges) and instead I have to go through the standard applicant pool. I don't think they don't deserve those jobs (most of them do), but just pointing out that networking is still a critical part of hiring. I mean even one simple part is that when applying you might not even know what a group is doing and if that's what you want to do. Solicitations are often vague. Even if there were no advantage to the hiring process networking still provides a huge advantage to the filtering process.

I mean even putting the personal experience to the side, don't we want to make the most use of the resources we have? Don't we want to get graduates connected to labs/work places where they will be most effective? This is still a surprisingly complex problem to resolve and even limiting the hiring problem to PhDs (where there's far less noise than general hiring) it is still a complicated problem.

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/somd/space-communications-...

[1] But I'd also say that we might be encouraging too many people to do PhDs. Doing a PhD "for a job" is a bit odd. A masters is better intended for that. But a PhD is more directed towards doing research work. That said, in the worst case a PhD says "this person can work on ill-defined tasks and has the diligence to see them through." Regardless of the industry, that is a pretty useful skill.