Young Men Discouraged From Science

[jobendorfer]

24. some practical observations

Disclosure: I'm a 50 year old software engineer, lucky enough to still be working. Which means I have a bit of loose change to dabble in one of my personal interests, physics. So as I'm sitting in classrooms full of 20-somethings majoring in physics ( and trying to keep up, it's been 30 years since I took a differential equations course ), this is what I see -- with respect to physics majors.

To get a B.S. in physics, you're going to work very, very hard in very very difficult courses. It will take you approximately 5 years to get through fulltime, and longer, possibly 3 years longer, if circumstances force you to work part-time. You will come out, at our local public university, about 15k to 20k in debt. After all this, you have very few if any immediate job options. The shortest-term one is to get a teaching credential and start teaching at a high school. Another handful will get health physicist jobs ( basically, riding herd on the various diagnostic imaging machines used in your local clinics and hospitals. )

If you double-down and go to grad school: you are looking at another 7-10 years to complete a Ph.D. You will pile on more debt, perhaps as much as 50k to 100k ( again, at the low-end public university ). At this point, you are now somewhere in your early to mid thirties. Is there any chance of immediate, permanent employment? No. You will have sell yourself into a series of 1 to 2 year post-doc appointments and start publishing. If you are lucky, you might get picked up by a funded research program ( you won't have enough chops or credibility to get grants of your own yet ). And so you wait into your 40s, basically for some tenured professor to retire or keel over dead, then fight it out with hundreds of other Ph.D level physicists to grab a tenure track assistant professor slot, and finally get a job where you can think about something besides your next post-doc appointment.

Those are the economics facing physics majors. Any wonder the kids aren't signing up in droves?
For what it's worth, the male :: female ratio in the courses I've attended has been on the order of 15::1.

I'd imagine there are a few more options in chemistry. Don't know enough to speak about the biological or environmental sciences, but perhaps someone who does know the situation on the ground will speak up and tell us about it.

I think it's just a shame that one of the brightest men I know, with a Ph.D in physics from Yale, a member of the team that solved the solar neutrino mystery, is today running a software quality assurance program in a Seattle medical technology firm. Because that job comes with a steady paycheck and benefits, and he can feed his kids.

J.