Chris Mooney posted a couple of things last week– one article at ScienceProgress and one blog post— talking about the supposed shortage of scientists in the “pipeline.” Following an Urban Insitute study, he says that there’s really no shortage of scientists being trained, but rather a shortage of jobs for those scientists. Coming as he does from the policy/ journalism side of things, he brings the article to a ringing conclusion:
The numbers presented by the Urban Institute lead to an uncontestable conclusion: Some young scientists aren’t going to be working in purely scientific positions. There simply aren’t enough jobs for them. Instead, some will be going into fields like journalism, or advertising, or politics–and if so, they ought to be learning more than simply scientific skills.
Learning about science is wonderful–but in today’s complex world, it’s rarely enough. Sure, it helps in any number of occupations, ranging from law to business, to know something about science. But it helps even more if you also know something else (like, say, how to speak in public or write, or design a website). Knowing how to think scientifically is pretty good on its own; but in combination with other skills, it’s truly sublime.
In fact, we can go further. If the core concern is ensuring U.S. competitiveness, doesn’t interdisciplinarity–the ability to combine scientific skills with another type of expertise–both enhance creativity and also give someone an edge? Doesn’t a scientist who also speaks Spanish or understands patent law have a leg up in the global marketplace?
If so, it follows that not only do we need more scientists, we need more scientists with additional skills to boot. Why can’t the scientific community release major reports stating that?
Like most rhetorical questions, it has an easy answer. You don’t get major policy reports calling for more training to help science grads succeed in non-science jobs because it’s not a policy problem. It’s a cultural problem. What we need to address this problem is for scientists to stop acting like indie rockers.
You know the steroetype I’m referring to– the bands and music fans who are poor and unrecognized, and make that a point of pride. Any band who manages a hit song or a major record deal has “sold out,” and sacrificed whatever was good about their earlier work. Anybody who hangs it up and gets a regular job is even lower on the food chain, having completely abandoned the whole idea of art.
Science isn’t quite as bad as that– you can actually make a decent living as an academic scientist– but there’s something of the same attitude. In the current scientific culture, students are expected to be aimed directly at a tenure-track job at a major research university from day one of graduate school. Everyone is assumed to be working toward that goal, and any deviation from that track is either because they couldn’t hack it, or they’re selling out.
In much of the physics community, if you talk to people about former students or post-docs who have stepped off the presumed path toward a research university job, you’ll hear them spoken of with the same edge of pity that indie rockers use to speak of people who quit bands and got office jobs. “Yeah, he was a good physicist, but for some reason he’s teaching at a liberal arts college…” People who leave to go to industrial positions or Wall Street are like bands with major-label deals– they gave up their calling in favor of pursuing money.
Just take a look at some of the academic job market discussions that crop up here and at Cosmic Variance, and you’ll see what I mean. Some of the Cosmic Variance threads are particularly toxic in their pervasive if-it’s-not-a-tenure-track-job-at-an-Ivy-it’s-crap attitude (this is not, I hasten to add, from any of the CV principals, but rather their commenters).
We don’t really need to provide much extra training for most of the skills Chris cites, for the simple reason that good scientists are already trained in most of them. Scientists need to be able to communicate effectively, both in writing and in public speaking. Very few people get through a scientific degree program these days without enough knowledge of computers to be able to design a web site, or to learn how very quickly. Lots of people in science already speak Spanish, or any of a host of other languages.
The real problem Chris is speaking of is not a matter of getting the scientific community to provide students with more skills, but rather giving them approval and even encouragement to use those skills in careers that are not on the default major-research-university track. We need to stop thinking of taking those jobs as something just one step up from total failure, and two steps up from an English major.
In short, as a community, we need to stop acting like indie rockers with math skills.
But that’s not something that can be accomplished by writing white papers and lobbying Congress for more money. It’s a cultural change, that has to come about from within the community.