In a new paper, a group of MIT researchers argue that science is producing PhDs in far greater numbers than there are available tenured jobs for them to fill. The authors, engineers Richard C. Larson, Navid Ghaffarzadegan, and Yi Xue, start out by noting that
The academic job market has become more and more competitive... nowadays, less than 17% of new PhDs in science, engineering and health-related fields find tenure-track positions within 3 years after graduation.
But why? Are we simply producing too many PhDs nowadays? Larson et al. approach this question by borrowing a concept from epidemiology: R0 (R nought), known as the basic reproduction number. In the context of an infectious disease, the R0 is the average number of people who are newly infected by the disease by each existing patient. Influenza, for example, has an R0 of about 1.2 - 1.6. If R0 is greater than 1, ...
