"Don't Become a Scientist!"

[CharonY]

But there are also fields, such as my own (Chemical Engineering) that have a worldwide shortage of employees, and great career opportunities.

Due to the length of a doctorate it is extremely difficult to predict how the job market will be when you graduate. E.g. there was an overabundance of engineers in early 2000. Taking the data in the link from Swansont's post for example, the unemployment rate 2003 for engineers was 4.4 % (similar to 4.6 in social sciences) but dropped to 2.3 in 2006 (wheras social sciences dropped to 3.9 only). And of course it does not mean that they actually get to work as engineers (though it is highly likely for this discipline).

 

2. The organization one works in: [...']

The important point is imo not that academia makes less money. This is generally well known. No one goes into academia to make money. The really unattractive bit is that in contrast to industrial positions you position is up to tenure always limited (you can, of course be laid off in industry, too, but the contract is often not time limited per se) and, which is even worse, instead of increasing the chances of promotion by staying in academia, there is a peak time, after which your chances actually gradually decrease. So if you belong to the unlucky ones stuck too long in academia (e.g. by making choosing bad postdoc positions, or getting underfunded faculty positions) the career chances go down the drain.

The industry as well as academia is meanwhile very interested to have as many PhDs as possible, regardless of actual job opportunities. The reasons are simple, it helps keeping the salaries down, as well as as increasing the ability to choose among candidates.

But in any case, the availability of jobs in industry far outweighs those found in academia.

In addition, Katz is explicitly referring to physical sciences

some university (there are hardly any industrial jobs in the physical sciences)

. This is a bit of an overstatement, however, I recall that a significant number of physical science (especially theoretical physicists) in non-academic fields actually work on a completely different, often physics-unrelated areas (e.g. as statisticians).

 

Now getting back to the money issue. In the study a scientist was defined as anyone with a bachelor and above. Also while bachelors are more unemployed than doctorates (3.4 vs 2.3 in 2003, 2.9 vs 1.6 2006) there are roughly 10 times more bachelors around than PhDs in total and around 5 times more Bachelors in science and engineering fields. That being said, the mean salary in industry (S&E field) for bachelors is 70,000 compared to a PhD with 78,000.

However, a bachelor gets a head start of around five years to earn money. By the time a PhD candidate can look for a job, the bachelor got five years of industrial experience under his/her belt. Of course the cap salary for PhDs is higher, but the question is how the promotion possibilities of a bachelor are compared to a PhD. On the median the difference is rather low and almost non-existent between masters and PhDs. Overall if you go into industry in order to do science or engineering for money, it appears not to pay off too well, either.

 

Edit: apologies beforehand if I wrote up too much garbled nonsense again, had a number of deadlines and hence did not manage to grab enough sleep. See? You got deadlines in academia, too.