D.s could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. But it has. The exponential growth in research funding and the increases in the number of university students that absorbed the post-World War II scientific population explosion are history. In the life sciences today, as in other fields, scientists trained for traditional academic research posts increasingly craft careers that consist of successive periods of employment in a variety of different institutions, agencies and businesses. Most often one doesn't know exactly why it is that a colleague decides to move on unless one probes.
Students know what's happening.
It summarizes the findings of a survey done by graduate students of the Stanford Ph. D. class of 1996. With the likely end of ever-increasing federal research budgets we have reached the outer limits of the frontier. The view facing a new scientist resembles less an unlimited vista and more a busy, crowded city. Many were rather disillusioned and a few admitted that they would not have entered a Ph.D. program had they known at the start what they knew now. At the same time, the need for sophisticated scientific training continues to increase in all sectors of human endeavor.