2010 ChemCensus is out: not much good news.

Credit: Chemical and Engineering News

The results of the ACS ChemCensus that was held in 2010 is out in this week's issue of Chemical and Engineering News in the writeup by David Hanson.

It's going to take a while to wade through all the data, but here are the important details (to me, anyway):

• Reported salaries were all down, with the exception of median B.S. chemist salaries. 
• As we've known for a while, the unemployment rate of all respondents in March 2010 was 3.8%, which is 0.1% lower than 2009. That 2009 was a 20-year high for the ACS Salary Survey. 
• The "U6-like" number for the ACS Salary Survey data (including part-time, post-doc and unemployed) is the highest in ten years, at 11.9%. Hanson notes the other side of this statistic, the lowest full-time employment of chemists since at least 2010. I'll note that I predicted a U6-like number at 12% way back in 2009. Good to know I'm only a year late. 
• Unemployment is negatively correlated with education, with B.S. chemists at 5.1% unemployment and Ph.D. chemists at 3.2%. M.S. chemists (the legendary 'most employable') come in at 4.8%. 
• The "ten year" rule still holds; among age cohorts, the 30-39 age group has the lowest unemployment at 2.5% and the 40-49 age group jumps to 3.6%. The bad news isn't over yet -- the 50-59 age group has the highest unemployment at 4.7%. This is lower than 2009's 5.0%, but not by much. 
• I note that the "small company discount" is alive and well. Median Ph.D. salary for a company of 10 or fewer employees? $49,200. Median Ph.D. salary for a company of 11-20 employees? $86,200. That's close to a 50% discount. Wow. 

More soon. Readers, here's the article. What do you see? 

The Eka-Silicon caveat: The ACS Salary Survey and the ChemCensus have both had relatively low response rates from members, which limits the extrapolatability of the data. This year's response rate for the ChemCensus was 47%, which is much lower than the 80% that professional survey types like to see. A discussion of this can be found here. At the same time, ACS unemployment numbers for their members more-or-less track the BLS survey data for chemists (see linked graph). 

One more thing: All of the 40,480 responses were hand-entered by the ACS' Deparment of Research and Member Insights. Research associate Gareth Edwards (I believe) was responsible for much of that. This is a huge undertaking, and he should be commended for it.