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<p>Still, that is in the range of most humanities and social studies majors (other than economics and business), which “everyone” knows have poor job and career prospects.</p>
<p>While a frugal person can certainly live on that level of pay, it would not be a good idea to take on a lot of student loan debt to study such a major (chemistry, biology, most humanities and social studies).</p>
<p>I completely agree with you ucb. I wouldn’t recommend a chemistry or biology major to anyone looking for employment after undergrad. I just don’t think its good to misrepresent the situation by pointing to a few outliers.</p>
<p>$11x40=$440 per week x 52=$23k per year assuming no health care costs and taxes are taken out. Yeah that’s borderline poverty. Anyone that claims you can live reasonably well on $23k per year is out of their mind and has no concept of reality. I suppose too that on $23k you are also supposed to be able to payoff your student loans, save fore retirement, afford $4/gallon gas, and car insurance reasonably well all while not living off a diet consisting of pasta and ramen noodles everyday which will end up killing you via diabetes if your low income life doesn’t first. Lol @ anyone claiming that at $23 k you are economically viable. Quit altogether and join the military. At least you’ll be fed and have health care.</p>
<p>Its all about money management. Trust me. If you came up from a poor background, you learn how to adapt quickly and learn how to manage your money. Fact is, these day’s nobody has sense of money management, even the government. You want to see true poverty? Go spend a year living in places such as Ethiopia, Malaysia, North Korea, and any developing/third world country. A year probably isn’t even necessary. A few months without any bank accounts or cell phones or what anything else in America that we take for granted. This would open your eyes.</p>
<p>Malaysia is not super-poor – they have cell phones, banks, ATMs, etc. there.</p>
<p>Just because they have it there doesn’t mean they can afford it. Maybe Malaysia was a bad example, but you understand what I’m trying to say right?</p>
<p>Malaysia is a great place. What’s wrong with it? The prices there are lower.</p>
<p>I bet the average Malaysian garbageman lives a better life than a bio major in L.A.</p>
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<p>Something that seems to be missing from the discussion is whether any of these chem B.S. do anything to earn more then any other high-school drop out job. </p>
<p>I knew several people that worked at Dow chemical before coming to graduate school. One of the things they pointed out was the lab monkeys didn’t have/need any type of college education-- and why would you? A lot of the work was cheap labor. Follow directions and mix/collect/isolate chemicals as told by instructions. Computers recorded all the data and it some paper pushed upstairs put it into an excel chart. It was the lab manager (who had a PhD) who made any decisions.
Of course, these lab monkeys all got their B.S. funded by the company when they realized they a. could get more money and b. if they ever lost their job, they’d have to compete with recent college grads and would be screwed!
But not one of them did their job better. And how would knowing the vibrational modes of ethane be useful? they never did any analysis. that all went upstairs.</p>
<p>And also, what kind of job do you expect in science without a PhD? The whole purpose of a PhD is that they can do original research and lead teams/etc. If all you have is a BS/MS, why would any company give you any authority? Did you think running an HPLC was going to become magically entertaining after the 5000x time?
The only place I could see this is a smaller startup where the B.S. could showcase their independence and thinking skills.</p>
<p>The claim that you need a PhD in science in order to find a meaningful and satisfying career is a complete myth. There are steadily no jobs anymore for Phd, BS, and MS chemists. The field in the US is dying. R and D has been shipped overseas and isn’t coming back. The US has shot itself in the foot with terrible domestic policies and will never recover. Also, the point isn’t that BS/MS chemists want to be high earning managers, it’s just that we would like to make a livable wage doing meaningful work. The only thing left out there these days for BS/MS chemistry grads are terrible low paying QC/analytical jobs that pay $10-15/hr as permatemps. Even if you find a decent job listing, there’s likely 100 applicants. A PhD won’t gain you much traction either when there are a ton of applicants for a single job. New PhDs can have fun jumping all over the country from year to year pursuing low paying post-doc to low paying post-doc. It never used to be this way, 20 or 30 years ago, heck even around 10 years ago, BS/MS chemists could earn economically viable wages while not being stuck doing terribly monotonous jobs without healthcare benefits as a permatemp. The temp worker loophole is something more and more firms have been recently exploiting and is a relatively new phenomena (on this large of scale). </p>
<p>-Become a BS/MS chemist if you want a terrible $10-15 hr permatemp position with no health care doing crappy method development/analytical/QC</p>
<p>-Become a PhD chemist if you want to jump around and around to post doc to post doc, temp position to temp position, or from R and D firm to R and D firm with a job that only lasts 4-8 years max. </p>
<p><a href=“miller-mccune.com”>miller-mccune.com;
<p>The Feb. monthly meeting of the San Antonio Section of the ACS features a speaker who is a past President of ACS. His topic?</p>
<p>Read it and weep…</p>
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<p>Chemistry is dead. There are no feelings of entitlement here. There are only feelings of resentment at the fact that you were misled to believe that studying science, which this country ‘desperately needs’ according to the talking heads, would get you a mediocre and hopefully stable middle class living after many of us have taken out thousands of dollars in student loan debt studying to what is amounting to be a useless subject. Employers these days expect their drones to not only pay thousands of dollars in debt to become educated, they also want to pay them borderline poverty wages and benefits. The whole system here is a joke from the government and the universities to the employers. There are only a very small percentage making a killing in income off breaking the backs of the American middle class. Soon we are going to have the most educated, un/underemployed, working poor in the history of this country all swimming in thousands of dollars of student loan debt… There is no more middle class left. Welcome to 3rd world USA, we’ve now become Tunisia.</p>
<p>Here are a couple articles that relate to this discussion.</p>
<p>The editorial is titled “Fix the PhD” with a subtitle “No longer a guaranteed ticket to an academic career, the PhD system needs a serious rethink.”</p>
<p>[Fix</a> the PhD : Nature : Nature Publishing Group](<a href=“http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v472/n7343/full/472259b.html]Fix”>Fix the PhD | Nature) </p>
<p>[Education:</a> The PhD factory: Nature News](<a href=“http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110419/full/472276a/box/3.html]Education:”>Latest science news, discoveries and analysis)</p>
<p>All those articles (the ones posted by both blindwilly and graveneworld) do is reiterate the need for growth and change within the respective fields discussed. That’s really nothing new and it’s nothing to be sad or depressed about. Technology, globalization, and the growth of information is rapidly changing and some people can’t keep up. Either you have the the ability to adapt or you don’t. The ones that don’t come on message boards proclaiming their doomsday theories and crying about being screwed over. Chalk it up as a sunk cost, learn your lesson, and move forward.</p>
<p>A main point of the article in Nature is that the research funding allows for hiring of graduate students and post docs but not permanent PIs. This creates a distortion in the preparation of scientists, so that there is a ‘PhD bubble’. It also implies that the universities are complicit by accepting the funding to generate more degreed scientist than can be gainfully employed.</p>
<p>I’ve seen this at the lab where I work. Over the past decade, PI positions have declined by 25%, technical positions have shifted from permanent to temporary, and PIs compete for sufficient funding to hire post docs.</p>
<p>While I agree with Inmotion12 that it is a ‘buyers beware’ world and students bear some responsibility in defining a successful career. I do worry as a father to a budding scientist that universities are upfront with students about career prospects. </p>
<p>I don’t necessarily agree with Inmotion12’s ‘adapt or don’t’ argument. I think that is too simplistic.</p>
<p>I also think it is a huge waste of money to spend gobs taxpayer dollars to train more scientists when they find no or crap jobs when they graduate and dump the field.</p>
<p>Do you hear that big sucking sound? It is the sound of science jobs going overseas and taxpayer dollars going down the drain.</p>
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<p>Yes the field is changing but not in a good way. The brightest Americans are being asked to compete and accept the wages of a desperate third worlder. Science jobs are becoming benefitless, unstable, and heading towards minimum wage at an alarming rate. At the same time, tuition is going up at an astounding rate. So is it worth it to spend $20k at least and 4-10 years of your life to get a job that pays less than the job a HS drop out could get to. There is nothing wrong with pointing out and warning others that pursuing a science career is a recipe for disaster and underachievement for bright young people who can do so much better for themselves elsewhere especially when idiots like the president keep calling for them to. I know I would never let my children study science nor recommend anyone else do so.</p>
<p>Just brushing it all off and saying you need to adapt is lame. That is like putting a culture of microbes in the autoclave and expecting them to adapt. There are some conditions that are so extreme it is not possible to adapt. Americans cannot live on the same wages as someone in Sri Lanka. It costs more to live here.</p>
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<p>I think one of the biggest problems is the seeming disappearance of a lot of industrial research labs where PhDs could find opportunities without having to be in academia. It seems like so many companies nowadays are only focused on getting sales up today or appeasing stock holders or what not they don’t want to have a long term vision for how the company can maintain a strong market advantage well into the future.</p>
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<p>That is exactly the problem everywhere. Complete and ridiculous short-sightedness at all levels. If something generates a cent in extra profit now even if it will cause millions in damage down the road they will do it. Businesses, the Govt noone is thinking of tomorrow.</p>
<p>That is what I like to call unchecked Capitalism. We’ve become so engulfed in our own greed as a society, that we don’t realize the consequence’s of our actions. I can see the total implosion of our way of living unless we totally change our track of living. It is not too late to steer away from the proverbial iceberg. A lot of this is a political issue as well. I see the mentioning of H1 visa’s being given out like candy. But at the same time are we not trying to impose stricter retrictions on immigration? Isn’t just hiring someone like that a threat to National Security? I doubt those companies do thorough background checks with Interpol, DHS, I.C.E., DOD, etc. For all we know, we can have loose cannons for scientists that have obtained pristine fake documents posing as somebody that they are not. I still stand by my theory of imposing prohibitive taxes on those companies that outsource, but given tax credits for every legitimate American-born citizen that is hired. If I was a CEO, i definitely would go with the tax credits, because even if I had to pay a little more out of my pocket for a worker’s salary, that salary is being spent in the domestic economy, bringing in revenue for the government allowing them to fund research money, focus on proper education, etc. But hey, I’m just a rational thinker.</p>
<p>I think one of the main reasons you see companies looking towards the now instead of later is that the people in power have little incentive to make a company that will last after they’re done. If you’re a CEO and you have an opportunity to make a billion dollars this year, but you know the company will then lose money the next five years, what do you do? You choose to make money this year, leave the company, and then state the reason why the company’s failing is because you’re not there! You can then get hired at another company to do the same exact thing.</p>
<p>People are either A.) too stupid or B.) in denial of the fact that the modern American way of life is a thing of the past. The middle class doesn’t exist anymore. From the very get go, the entire game is rigged for 95% of us, we’ll never get ahead, not when college tuitions keep rising over double the rate of inflation while American middle class incomes continue to do this:</p>
<p><a href=“http://assets.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/earnings%20growth%20mishel.png[/url]”>http://assets.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/earnings%20growth%20mishel.png</a></p>
<p>The vast majority of Americans are simply too stupid to realize that their entire system and culture is *****ed beyond belief. The greatest con ever invented in this country is tricking the majority into believing that you can get ahead with more education via the collegiate education system at the cost of THOUSANDS of dollars of debt. Congratulations bait biters, you just forked over 20 years of your life paying off thousands in debt plus interest for incomes that you could have made as a high school graduate, carpenter, or plumber. </p>
<p>If I were a science student these days I would learn Chinese or Portuguese. Brazil and China are going to absolutely dominate the US in the next 30+ years. The US will be the **** boy of the world economy for the foreseeable future due to idiotic domestic and economic policies that have shot themselves in the foot. A science graduate these days needs to think globally with regards to employment. Eventually you just may have to move to China, Brazil, or Indonesia for sustainable employment, because that is where real money is being spent on things other than weapons technology and bombs.</p>
<p>I just ran across this ad in my daily job search. I had to share it. Science is now officially a minimum wage job.</p>
<p>Position Title:
Lab Assistant:Bergthorsson</p>
<p>Appointment Type: Definitions</p>
<p>Student- W/S or SE</p>
<p>Working Title (if applicable):
Lab Assistant:Bergthorsson</p>
<p>Department</p>
<p>Biology Department</p>
<p>Salary Grade</p>
<p>02</p>
<p>Salary:
$7.50-$8.75</p>
<p>Work Location:
UNM Main Campus (Abq)</p>
<p>Position Summary:
Performing PCR and DNA sequencing, running agarose gel and analyzing DNA sequence data in order to verify duplications and deletions in the genomes of experimental populations of Caenorhabditis elegans, and analyzing sex ratios in experimental populations of C. elegans.</p>
<p>Minimum Qualifications:
Preferred Qualifications:
Prefer a work study student that has experience in the above techniques as well as experience in working with Caenorhabditis elegans.</p>
<p>Posting Date:
08/18/2011</p>
<p>For Best Consideration:
08/23/2011</p>
<p>Closing Date:
11/17/2011</p>
<p>Application type required for this position:
Student Employment Application</p>
<p>Additional requirements for this position:
Please completed the Online Customer Service Training located at: <a href=“http://www.career.unm.edu/scs[/url]”>www.career.unm.edu/scs</a></p>
<p>Required Applicant Documents:
Optional Applicant Documents:
Resume Cover Letter</p>
<p>Special Instructions to Applicants:
Position Type:
Student</p>
<p>Term Appointment End Date (For Staff Only):
Posting Type:
Competitive</p>
<p>Position Class URL:
Posting Department Website:
Institutional Commitment:
University of New Mexico is committed to promoting and supporting the diversity of our campuses. UNM is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.</p>
<p>Exempt/Non-Exempt</p>
<p>Non-Exempt</p>
<p>Quicklink for Posting:
unmjobs.unm.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=63926</p>
![http://assets.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/earnings%20growth%20mishel.png[/url]](http://assets.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/earnings%20growth%20mishel.png%5B/url%5D){kind=link}
