Editorial
Fewer Ph.D.s?
M
uch has been said recently about the employment situation for chemists in the United States, including that for newly minted Ph.D.s. It is true that even young analytical lhemists must now look harder for positions that please them. Jobs in the traditional, large chemical company R&D sector are harder tofind.As a result, some senior chemists have seized the view that the capacity for Ph.D. .raining ii too large and that graduate schools should trim the size of their entering class. Some institutions have actually instigated such trimming, from which (I suspect) a trickledown perceptional effect will ensue on undergraduates that encourages them to stop at the B.S. or AB. degree level or make an alternative choice of postgraduate area such as medicine or engineering I believe that it is far more important to be concerned about the quality of Ph.D. graduates than about their numbers. The annual number of Ph.D. graduates is a small fraction of the national supply of Ph.D. chemists in all the industrialized countries, and graduating a few less will not significantly ease the employment picture for new graduates. An objective of training fewer Ph.D.s, which by inference aims at an eventual downsizing of the U.S. national workforce of chemists, is a simplisttc approach that ignores much broader issues. First, the larger purpose of graduate education in chemistry, or any other technical area, is to ensure a continually renewing supply of intellectually skilled and creative individuals. If the economic future of a country is founded on gaining technological advantages (and history tells us this is plausible), is the need for a high quality technical workforce going to diminish in the future? National and local governments and the public have a vested interest in maintaining existing technological advantages and in gaining new ones, and that in part is accomplished by subsidizing graduate education. That is a strong system for graduate technical education is a giant strategic asset for society as a whole That system has great importance for the improvement of individuals but in the national and public sense does not exist solely for that purpose
As mentors we (including myself) feel a personal responsibility for these young people's success and happiness (and that's a good thing), and we (including myself) harbor feelings of guilt if there is a struggle for jobs (which is noble, but not necessarily the sole wisdom). But again taking the national view, an increasingly competitive employment environment means that available positions in the chemical sciences, including analytical chemistry, will be increasingly captured by the best prepared and most creative group of graduates. This translates to me that striving toward improving the quality of the graduate education that a Professor gives a student is far more important to the student than the Professor artificially trying to control the number of individuals competing for jobs. There needs to be more discussion of this educational quality issue, which is a very complex topic that includes, as part of the mentoring process, exposure to problem solving and a realistic approach to an individual's prospects. My last observation is that downsizing graduate education, and implicitly the national workforce, adopts the view that chemistry as a physical science is shrinking, not growing. I vehemently disagree with that forecast. Some areas of chemistry are more mature than others, but most, including analytical chemistry, are full of life, growth, and opportunity. There is no general malaise! Chemistry at the interfaces with biology, the environment, materials science, computational science, and even physics throbs with needs and opportunities for new insights new measurements new paths to economically significant substances and processes Chemists in the future will be engaged in deciphering ever complex molecular systems that will be challenging to understand control and exploit I hope that bright young scholars now interested in chemistry continue in educato challenges anrl ttif> m m
petitive world of tomorrow and to feel no reluctance to demand high nnality from their gradnate educators in prepari th f that environm t
Second, the typical academic chemist's mindset is that every young chemist who graduates deserves a quality job relating to research or to R&D in chemistry.
Analytical Chemistry News & Features, March 1, 1996 161 A
