Jobs - Part I update

The first article in my series on jobs, mainly faculty jobs, in physics put its focus on the supply side of the job situation. My main objective was to show the origin of a weakly-damped cyclic pattern that started when the pre-Boomer generation earned PhD degrees in massive numbers and filled up the faculty positions needed to teach all of us Baby Boomers going to college. [Boomers are under-represented on most university physics faculties as a result.]

By an odd coincidence, a retirement party for two professors who were hired in the mid 60s led to the discovery of the advertisement shown below. This captures quite well the anger of pre-Boomers who got to the hiring party a year or two too late. Details and comments are below the fold.



This ad came from Physics Today. Based on what else was with it, I would guess it might have been published circa 1978 but I have not gone to a library to track it down. (It could be that it was published as early as 1976 and I just happened to look it up in 1978 or 1979.) If you go looking, it would be at the very end of the classified ads. In addition, a search through the annual index for letters to Physics Today by Robert Yaes, or through the Bulletin of the APS for abstracts he submitted, would turn up a lot more of the same.

Yeah, this guy was bitter. I have to wonder if he messed up and took a post-doc in 1967, planning to look for a job in 1969 only to find that they were all gone. Little did he know that the market was going away in 1967 and would only get worse. And he was not alone in his anger. It is a common theme when I have run into pre-Boomer grads of the same program at my Enormous State Graduate University, ones who finished grad school circa 1970. One, in particular, had a long and lucrative career with IBM (basically straight out of grad school) but is still bitter that his outstanding research work meant nothing once slots had been filled by people who never amounted to much but had one advantage: they graduated 3 or 4 years earlier.

And there is another side effect. When contacting people to have a lab reunion built around this retirement party, I could not help but notice who they found (and collected on their alumni list) and who they did not find - or maybe even try to find. The only PhD grads from my Boomer generation who are listed are ones who happened to be somewhere in academia. They just ignored all of the ones who are off in the real world (even ones at national labs), including ones who have done extremely well (key patents, that sort of thing). If a student does not end up in academia, they don't know what that person ended up doing.

This has important consequences for students even today. As I noted at several points in both part 2 and part 3 of this series, it is quite common for faculty today to know nothing about the two thirds of physics jobs that are outside academia: they don't know where those jobs are, what skills they require, nothing. It was also common when I was a grad student, although some (like my adviser) had kept in touch with all of their students and knew what kinds of jobs they had and how they were (or were not) using their physics skills in that profession.

PS - Yes, they were hired in the mid 60s. The guys who are retiring were on the faculty for over 40 years. I gave another example early in part 2 of the series. Those "retirement replacements" people expected in the 1990s are slowly appearing now, but it is far from clear if all of those lines will remain in physics departments. Budgets are being cut, research priorities are shifting, and the Boomer Echo will be ending in another 5 or 10 years ... and t-t faculty have to be paid for forty years, whether students are there in large numbers or not.