sci.research.careers

/2007/8/22/employment-trends-in-biomedical-sciences

Ginny C ( /2007/08/news-flash-too-many-
) just pointed me to a recent FASEB presentation
( /pages/PolicyIssues/ ) that
summarizes recent trends in the life sciences labor market. It's
great that they have done this, since I suspect a lot of people don't
know the big picture, and FASEB has a very broad reach. Give it a
read.

There is a great deal of overlap with Paula Stephan's findings (http://
/2007/3/3/troubling-doubling) and a few other things that
Peter and I have discussed in the blog.

A few things that struck me in the slides:

* I knew that numbers of women have been increasing rapidly in the
life sciences, but the graphs in the presentation are still pretty
striking. Ditto for the number of postdocs on temporary visas.

* Success rates for NIH fellowship applications have been falling
almost as fast as for R01s. They're down from ~45% in 2001 to ~27% in
2006.

* NIH spending on students as a percent of the total budget is down
from ~ % in 1985 to ~ % in 2006

* Foreign PhD recipients are increasingly staying in the US

* The fraction of all US biomedical PhDs who are tenured or in tenure-
track positions is steadily decreasing. ~46% in 1981 to ~28% in 2006

* Almost all the new positions created during the NIH doubling period
were MDs in clinical departments

* Hiring of PhDs by med schools has pretty much ground to a halt in
the last couple of years.

* Average GRE Quantitative scores are surprisingly low for life
sciences folks: 529 for health sciences and 606 for biological
sciences applicants (out of 990 total). I have always wondered if
part of the reason the labor market for life scientists is so much
worse than for physical scientists and engineers is that quantitative
skills give the latter folks more options.

/2007/8/22/employment-trends-in-biomedical-sciences