This is a commentary to this original article recently published on nature
It takes years and hard work to graduate, especially if you want to obtain a Bachelor and a Master degree. Upon completion you feel a bit under pressure from an economic point of view and also because after years of uncertainty you want to start having a direction and be able to picture your future self. In my experience, most students are tempted to undertake the academic life because they think that's what they want to do and to start a PhD is probably the easiest and quickest way to find a paying job. I was there myself, and it was tedious to find a job in industry, especially if you are in the classic catch-22 situation: you need experience to get a job and you need a job to get experience. I had to send my CV around hundreds of times to apply for industry jobs without getting many replies while I was offered a PhD on the spot, it looked too easy and no brainer, that's how I started my PhD.
What I didn't know at the time was that I was putting myself in a difficult situation. Supply and demand is so influential in our society, it determines price of stuff and of course how much a job pays.
Do you know why it's so easy to start a PhD?Because you are cheap labor. Generally the stipend of PhD student is somewhere near the minimum wage if you were to presume that you were working 40 hours per week. However, that's a wrong assumption because it's rare you can get a PhD only working 40 hours a week. If you are pursuing a PhD in biological sciences you most likely have to work weekends and even on Christmas and Thanksgiving, obviously for no extra pay.
Anyway I don't want to make just monetary considerations, let's look at the job market, what will you do after completing a PhD? It's shocking how so many smart people endure such though period without really thinking about why they are doing it and without asking: "What's next?"
Well it doesn't look very good for PhDs, here I quote:
For our Careers section this week, Nature surveyed more than 5,700 early-career scientists worldwide who are working on PhDs. Three-quarters of them, they told us, think it’s likely that they will pursue an academic career when they graduate, just like Platts — now a senior lecturer in sport development and sport business management at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. How many will succeed? Statistics say these young researchers will have a better chance of pursuing their chosen job than the young footballers. But not by much. Global figures are hard to come by, but only three or four in every hundred PhD students in the United Kingdom will land a permanent staff position at a university. It’s only a little better in the United States.
What this means is that an astonishing 96% of PhDs students will end up having to move on and look for a job that is unrelated to their PhD, only 3 or 4% will actually be able to find long term opportunities in academia. Not only this could cause PhDs to waste years of their lives pursuing a dead-end road, but also it tilts the balance in supply and demand. Because there is so much supply of PhDs, even the 3 or 4% that make it through, has to accept precarious and low paying jobs especially in the early stages of their career. Universities and Institutions can easily offer low paying academic jobs and still get plenty of applications for these jobs.
I don't want to discourage anyone from apply for a PhD, I just want to point out what are the numbers, surely supervisors or Universities don't have interests in doing that. If you made it this far you are probably a capable person and smart above average, take some time and crunch some numbers, it will pay off to think twice before starting a PhD.
Since I feel this post has been a bit negative I want to cheer you up with a funny depiction about how your life ambitions will change if you decide to undertake an academic career:
