Commentary

A Ph.D. Deficit?

Earlier this month the Wall Street Journal published an editorial that brought to mind an earlier controversy. In “Our Ph.D. Deficit,”¹ Norman R. Augustine and Burton Richter, who are respectively the retired chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp. and the Nobel-Prize winning former director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, argued that the U.S. federal government should increase spending on research to forestall a shortfall of American engineers and physicists with Ph.D.s. Will there really be a shortfall?

A dozen years ago, the particle physicist Leon Lederman wrote in an article in Physics Today, a trade magazine, that even physics students of average abilities should have no problem finding a job because their skills are in such high demand. This article brought an immediate flood of letters from physicist with recent degrees, each stating that the author could not find a job in physics despite having stellar grades.

Upon seeing the Augustine and Richter article, I wondered if perhaps they were making the same groundless claim that Lederman had made. I personally have never seen evidence of a shortage of physics Ph.D.s in this country . In academia, I have only seen a glut of physicists competing for a handful of jobs, and in business, I have never seen much of a call for applicants with physics Ph.D.s.

The Augustine and Richter start by arguing that the strength of the U.S. economy depends on innovation and the development of new industries. In tying the importance of research to economic development, they point out that the faculty, staff, and students of MIT have created 5000 companies in the past 50 years. For the United State to prosper, it must be able to rapidly create companies that make use of the newest technologies. So far, so good. I'm certainly all for a good education, especially in math and science.

But then the authors start making statements that do not support the premise of their article; they tie technological development to federal spending on research. They state that federal spending on research in the physical sciences and in engineering has been constant in dollars adjusted for inflation, which they state is a decline of 50% in the fraction of gross domestic product spent on government research. At the same time, fewer Americans are pursuing degrees in the physical sciences and engineering, stating that enrollments in advanced degrees are down by more than 20% since 1993.

According to the American Institute of Physics,² the number of Bachelor's degrees in Physics peaked in 1968 with about 6,000 degrees conferred in that year. This number dipped to around 4500 around 1980, and rose to about 5000 in 1990. The number of degrees conferred in 2001, the last year with available data, is 4,000. Engineering Bachelor's degrees have been falling steadily from almost 100,000 degrees conferred in 1985, falling to a little over 70,000 by 2000. But these declines are accompanied by increases in Bachelor's degrees in the biological sciences, which rose from 40,000 in 1985 to over 60,000 in 2000, and by a recovery in computer science Bachelor's degrees, which had fallen from 40,000 in 1985 to about 25,000 in the early 1990s, but have since risen to over 35,000 in 2000.

The numbers for Ph.D.s follow a similar pattern. The number of Americans receiving Ph.D.s in physics rose from around 600 in 1985 to about 800 in 1994; it has since fallen back to 600 in 2000. The number of engineering Ph.D.s conferred on Americans rose from around 1300 in 1985 to a peak of around 2700 in 1997; in 2000, the number of Ph.D.s conferred on Americans had fallen to around 2200. At the same time, the number of Americans receiving Ph.D.s in the biological and health sciences rose from abut 3400 in 1985 to about 4300 in 2000, and the number in computer science has risen from about 200 to 400 over that period.

Does all of this suggest that we will have too few Ph.D.s in physics and engineering? The declining numbers only matter if the number of Ph.D.s is currently just sufficient to meet the country's needs. But is this actually the case?

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Cold War came to an end after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The physics community anticipated great changes because of the so-called peace dividend. As many of my colleagues patiently explained to me (I was skeptical), the government would cut spending on the military, which would mean more spending for the sciences. What happened was quite different. When spending on the military fell, spending on military research fell, which meant the physicists working for government defense labs were suddenly out of funding. These researchers flooded into academia and into non-military labs. At the same time, Eastern European scientists also flooded into the U.S. scientific market, either physically taking residence in the United State or winning U.S. research contracts to perform research in their own countries. For the cost of one American postdoctoral fellow, a U.S. research lab could outsource work to two highly-trained and experienced Russian researchers. The end result was that spending on scientific research fell, while the competition for those funds escalated.

By the way, those of you who believe that cuts in NASA's manned space flight program will lead to more money spent on unmanned scientific experiments should consider this history; if manned space flight ceased to exists, the unmanned program would probably also suffer spending cuts.

This history of physics after the Cold War is clearly not lost on American students examining their career opportunities. Stories of hundreds of applicants applying to a single university professorship are well known within the physics community. My own belief is that this partly accounts for the decline in American students seeking advanced degrees in physics; we are not entering a Ph.D. deficit in physics, but are instead in the process of recovering from a glut.

This is being accompanied by a shift to today's most dynamic branch of science, the biological sciences. The recent advances in biochemistry far outstrip any recent advance in physics. The demand for scientists to study the human body and to develop medicines and medical devices is tremendous. Under these circumstances, one would expect a large fraction of the best students to forsake physics and engineering for biology.

There remains one point to comment on about the Augustine and Richter article. They clearly have a big-government view of economic development, despite their bow early in their article to the entrepreneurial spirit in the United States. I question the idea that the American economy needs government research to produce new products. The striking feature of the U.S. economy is the continuous creation of small private companies that develop new products and technologies. These companies are the source of innovation, they are the source of new jobs, and they thrive without government funding. These companies are able to rapidly deploy resources into the most important segments of the economy. The danger is that if government attempts to direct more research into the physical sciences, they will divert young researchers from the more dynamic areas of biology and health care, which would harm this country's economic growth.

Issue 2.19, May 18, 2005.

© 2005 The Astrophysics Spectator.