Postdoctoral appointments are intended to provide new PhDs with continued education and training in research. They are usually a prerequisite for obtaining a tenure-track position at research universities and the top-tier four-year colleges.
There is considerable discussion among leaders of research groups in both industrial labs and academia about the difficulty in finding good candidates for funded postdoctoral positions. In many cases, postdocs are leaving their positions early, before their projects are completed, to take positions in high-tech startups, in small industrial and manufacturing labs, and even on physics faculties.
Postdocs in the physical sciences and mathematics make up less than one-fourth of the total US postdoc population. But for postdocs in all fields, the report documented some overarching concerns, including low pay, lack of benefits such as sick leave and vacation time, and job insecurity. Although the position of postdoc is viewed universally as an "apprenticeship" that enhances the credentials of a new PhD for a good position in research or teaching, the negative aspects loom large in a hot job market.
The employment prospects for new physics PhDs, while not perfect, are the best we have seen in more than a decade. Despite all of this positive news, however, physics enrollments at both the undergraduate and graduate levels continue to decline.
The number of US applicants for physics graduate programs has been dropping steadily since 1991. Many departments have received so few applications from qualified US students that they have admitted fewer graduate students than they have money to support. Recruitment of foreign graduate students has increased, and, for the first time in history, Americans represent the minority of entering first-year students, only 47% in 1999-2000.
The number of bachelor's degrees awarded declined throughout the 1990s and, is now down to levels last seen in the late 1950s. The decline during the 1990s in physics bachelor's degrees was steeper at departments that offer a PhD than at departments that offer a bachelor's as their highest physics degree.
Today, only 3 out of every 1000 bachelor's are in physics.
If the economy is being driven to a large extent by technology, why are these fields losing students? The answer is complex. Among the many possible causes for this apparent paradox is an explosion in opportunities in science and technology.
Today, more than ever, individuals of typical college age are presented with a remarkable array of career options. They have to choose whether to continue their education, for how long, and in what area to immerse themselves. They are presented with options that provide intellectual challenge, personal satisfaction, financial reward, or some combination of all three. Concurrently, many new fields have emerged over the last several decades, often at the interface between existing fields: medical physics, bio-informatics, and computational linguistics are just a few examples. Thus, in today's competitive environment, physics departments can no longer sit back and expect the best students to come to them; they must actively recruit new students, provide curricula that meet the students' needs, and develop mechanisms for helping students continue through their undergraduate programs.
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