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Mercury, March/April 1996 Table of Contents

(c) 1996 Astronomical Society of the Pacific

There were a lot of standing-room-only crowds at this January's American Astronomical Society meeting. Geoff Marcy, of course, packed them in for his announcement of two planets around Sun-like stars. But there were other full houses that didn't make it onto the front pages, and in their own ways were just as significant.

The job-hunting workshop for graduate students was one. At long last, the profession has started to clear out the academo-sclerosis and face up to the job market. By bringing in astronomers who work outside academia, the AAS publicly recognized that teachers, planetarians, journalists, and investment bankers can be as much a part of the astronomical community as researchers.

In this workshop and other discussions, some held late into the night, astronomers hashed out the issues raised in reports last summer by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation. Those reports spoke of reshaping Ph.D. programs to prepare students better for non-academic careers: encouraging off-campus internships, adding courses outside the specialty, getting students through grad school faster.

Yet the reports left critical issues dangling. As University of Arizona dean Gene Levy said, "We need a much more substantial response than fine-tuning our graduate programs."

Birth control.
The job market imposes reality on young scientists -- the only question is when. Why shouldn't it happen during graduate admissions, before students commit to lengthy Ph.D. programs? As atmospheric-science grad student John Knox remarked to me, the alternative to birth control is late-term abortion.

Right now, astronomy departments are on fertility drugs. Professors may bring forth a dozen Ph.D.s during their careers, a tradition that presumes an unlimited growth in job opportunities. Grad enrollments, like the rest of science, must adjust to stable or declining public support, and it won't be easy, since universities have come to depend on grads as cheap labor in the classroom and lab. As former IBM research director John Armstrong said, "In the past 50 years -- 50 atypical years -- the scientific community has become addicted to growth. It does not know how to operate in the absence of growth."

Degree inflation.
Many young Ph.D.s are doing jobs they could have done with bachelor's or master's degrees. Consider what the analogous surplus of college graduates has done to bachelor's and associate's degrees in the United States. Because employers are able to demand college degrees when high-school diplomas would (or should) do, high schools are under little pressure to hold their graduates to high standards. Students who don't go to college are neglected and undergraduate programs have been forced to provide remedial instruction turning the college degree into a glorified, and costly, high-school diploma.

Do we want the same to happen to the Ph.D.? In some ways, it already is happening. Teaching-oriented colleges that used to be satisfied with a master's are insisting that new faculty have doctorates. Ph.D. students already take years of coursework before embarking on dissertations, and now the reshapers of grad education want to make the Ph.D. even more like a bachelor's or master's degree, rather than redirect students into master's programs and reserve the Ph.D. for what it does best: train specialized researchers.

Immigration.
In the physical sciences, students from outside the United States account for nearly all the growth in grad enrollment over the past decade. Should universities cut back? Either answer will leave hard feelings. But by sidestepping this question, scientists have let the debate be dominated by Sen. Alan Simpson -- sponsor of a bill, S. 1394, to tighten limits on the immigration of professional workers -- and, opposing him, by business leaders who have the gall to claim there is a shortage of Ph.D. scientists.

The big picture.
The bottom-line question is, Given $x billion, the likely level of support for astronomy in, say, 2010, what is the best way to study the universe and satisfy public expectations? From this we can work out how many astronomers society would support, how they should work, and how they could make the transition from the status quo. Only then will the needed changes to grad education become clear. As Jeff Rosendhal of NASA put it: "It's very hard to develop a road map when you don't know where you're trying to go."

Young underemployed scientists are the dead canaries in the coal mine. Their plight is a dramatic signal that society has lost its capacity, or willingness, to employ increasing numbers of scientists. Astronomers and astronomy enthusiasts had better think through what that means.