Friend of the blog Leigh Krietsch Boerner has a great feature in Chemical and Engineering News tackling the problem of undergraduate enrollment in chemistry. The whole article is worth reading, but this analysis by Leigh is the most important:
...According to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, enrollment at 4-year colleges in the US has dropped 3.2% since 2019. Enrollment in chemistry programs, meanwhile, has tumbled 23.2% over the same period.
In contrast, undergraduate enrollment in biology fell about the same amount as all undergraduate enrollment since 2019. And at a time when college enrollment is dropping and students are opting out of higher education, the number of biology degrees has actually increased since 2019. According to C&EN’s analysis, the number of undergraduate degrees awarded in biology has gone up 7.5% since 2019. During the same period, the number of bachelor’s degrees in all disciplines dropped by 2.6%, while chemistry degrees were down 14.1%.
As of the end of the 2023–24 academic year, only a few hundred more schools offered degrees in biology than in chemistry. And in the past 5 years, the number of programs in each discipline has fallen at about the same rate. But according to C&EN’s analysis, US higher education institutions awarded 132,465 biology degrees in 2023, compared with 12,567 chemistry degrees. And schools don’t seem to be ending their biology programs.
It seems reasonable to conclude this isn't going to do great things for chemistry as a field in the United States, nor chemistry employment (for chemists) nor for the number of non-R1 chemistry faculty positions. Here's hoping that we see a turnaround. Read the whole thing.
Since college is expensive, people may be asking where the jobs are (because that's the only way to make the education pay out). Are there more jobs in biology? The transition to more biologics and fewer small-molecule drugs (because of lower permeability to generics with biologics?) might help bio (and that drug discovery needs biologic knowledge more than better methods), but both rely on lots of small startups to do their work, and the entry fee for research in bio is likely higher (longer grad school and maybe postdocs). Could it be related to lower societal opinion of chemistry (though I would have thought that would have been truer in previous years)? I don't know. - Hap
ReplyDeleteThis is a controversial take - but I think a scaling down or contraction of the chemistry major is not necessarily a bad thing. I graduated as a BS Chemist in 2004 and left a PhD program with an MS in 2008. I believe the above for several reasons -
ReplyDeleteThe PhD has been overproduced for many decades now. This creates more competition for jobs and lowers salaries. If you look at the output of the top (bio)synthetic labs - they alone can provide for the needs of biopharma. From what I saw, prior to the year 2000, a BS/MS chemist had a relatively easy time finding a job that they had some semblance of a career track on. They may not be on the managerial track (except in exceptional cases) or at a top-tier, name brand employer, but they had a job. I think it's very hard to make it as a BS/MS chemist nowadays unless one transitions out of the lab into another branch of the company outside of R&D. The irony is these jobs are usually more available and more well compensated. The consolidation of the industry that started happening in furor around 2007 really accelerated this. I will say - this is spoken from a synthetic organic chemistry point of view. I do not know how the job market is in inorganic chemistry or polymer chemistry. I do think the lone branch of chemistry that still offers somewhat of a career path is analytical chemistry as many employers still need this skillset. One just has to be able to stick it out in the early career jobs that are usually rote and repetitive, as well as shift work. I saw many analytical chemists quit or transition away in order to get away from shift work.
Chemistry was great in that it taught you how to think critically about a problem, hypothesize about solving it, and then execute the plan and seeing the results. Where I think chemistry falls short is that it teaches you little in soft skills and little about business acumen - these two things are so critical to succeed in today's workplace. In my PhD program, if you weren't running experiments or reading literature, everything else was considered a waste of time. When I got my first industry job, it took me about 3 years to realize that I was behind my peers in soft skills and business acumen and I needed to develop this in order to have a career track. Many PI's or professors (not all!) are ignorant/uncaring of this fact. Finally, less than 25% of my undergrad cohort actually went into chemistry employment. The vast majority were pre-health or pre-engineering.
Let the undergrad chemistry degree shrink to some extent! This will help recalibrate the overfilled PhD pipeline and perhaps create more demand for BS/MS employment if there is a shortage of candidates. Academia will never be able to have a lack of PhDs as that is the machine which drives academic research - but clamping down on the supply of BS chemists isn't necessarily a bad thing if the requisite employment at the end of studies isn't there. If you read the above and still want to study chemistry - by all means go for it - but have your eyes wide open that finding employment won't be as quick or easy as a business or engineering major. If that's the case - why continue to create the BS chemist in droves?
Strongly agree, especially the comment about business and soft skills. My new boss is a non-technical young hotshot with an MBA, and my own biggest development need for further advancement is my business/commercial skills rather than my science skills. Most people with the intelligence to succeed in chemistry would do just fine in an MBA program, and there are plenty of interesting technical-adjacent jobs for them with much greater advancement potential.
DeleteI remember reading that Lee Iacocca started in the auto industry as a mechanical engineer, and moved to the commercial side when he saw that this is where the important decisions get made. Same with chemistry - the commercial people are the ones making the important decisions about the future direction of the company, and the R&D people are working on what they're told.
I like chemistry and I like my job, but I can't justify pushing young people to choose it as a college major and career path. The jobs just plain don't exist anymore, at least not in line with the number of BS and PhD chemistry grads being produced.
How do chemical engineering majors' numbers look? A chemical engineer's toolbox is more directly applicable to most industry jobs. Back when I was a chemistry major, our education in modern analytic techniques was piss poor and we didn't have enough training to work in synthesis. Grad school or high school teaching were the only things my major prepared me for. I wouldn't pick the major again if I had a do over.
ReplyDeleteI never really understood the difference between a scientist and an engineer until I was in grad school. Ended up in science by default because engineering wasn't offered at my college. You're absolutely right that most companies have more of a need for engineering skills than science skills - they're often doing manufacturing with no real R&D.
DeleteAs for synthesis, the kinds of pharma jobs that used to hire hardcore synthesis PhD types are going away. A lot of the synthesis chemist jobs I see now are more like specialty monomers than drug candidates.
Same experience here. I was a chem major at a small undergrad-only branch of a large state university, and the only exposure we had to analytical techniques was using an ancient IR spectrometer (with a strip chart) in organic lab; other instruments depended on what semester you had instrumental analysis; mine consisted of H-1 and C-13 NMR (60MHz!), AA, AE, and UV-Vis. We did one analysis on each and wrote a report. This was late 90s- early 2000s for reference.
DeleteIf I had to do it again, I would do engineering or CS (though that market's weak as hell now, I hear).