So Many Research Scientists, So Few Openings as Professors - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/14/upshot/so-many-research-scientists-so-few-openings-as-professors.html
Biomedical sciences have been among the hardest hit. The field had an 83 percent increase in Ph.D.s between 1993 and 2013, to about 192,000 from 105,000. But although most got jobs somewhere, only about half got jobs in academia and only a quarter got tenure-track positions, which, for many, is what all that training was preparing them for.
“It used to be that the majority who got a Ph.D. in the biological sciences would go into an academic career,” said Dr. Michael Lauer, deputy director for extramural research at the National Institutes of Health. “Now,” he says, “that is very much the minority.”
Many spend years in a holding pattern as postdocs, which are temporary positions, working for a professor and being paid from the professor’s research grant. The average pay in 2016 for a beginning postdoc in the biomedical sciences is around $44,000, a figure that, adjusted for inflation, has not changed since 1998.