Causes of the Current Job-Market Situation

The present levels of Ph.D. unemployment have multiple, interrelated causes.

• During the late 1980's, the number of Ph.D.'s produced grew from a low of 726 in 1984-85 to a peak of 1202 in 1992-93. An influx of foreign students accounted for 72% of this increase [AMS Survey]. The more cynical attribute much of this increase to ``The Myth,'' a badly flawed 1987 NSF study forecasting a future shortfall of 675,000 natural scientists and engineers, but it is clear that this is not the full story.
• Colleges and universities, under intense financial pressures due to cutbacks in federal spending on higher education as well as the recent recession, have been reducing faculty sizes. The American Council on Education's 1993 Campus Trends report indicates that 40% of doctoral-granting institutions have procedures underway to cut back on the number of full-time faculty, mainly through attrition [ACE, 1993]. The AMS reports that there were 31% fewer positions offered in math departments in 1992-93 than in 1989-90 [AMS Survey]. Universities are making up lost teaching capacity with temporary and part-time workers, with 52% of ACE surveyed institutions reporting extensive use of part-time faculty (i.e. more than one-fourth of courses in these institutions were taught by part-time faculty) [ACE, 1993].
• Corporations, faced with an increasingly competitive global economy, have been paring back research and development budgets. In addition, global companies which once hired research mathematicians no longer have to look to U.S. labs to provide the best researchers. Sun Microsystems, for example, has begun to fund Russian scientists for some of its research in parallel operating systems; Lotus has an extensive software development facility in Bangalore, India.
• The budgets of military research labs and defense contractors have been slashed as a result of the end of the Cold War.
• The total number of scientists has been growing exponentially at a rate faster than the growth of the population. David Goodstein, provost of Cal Tech, points out that the current oversupply of scientists is the inevitable result of this disparity in growth rates [Goodstein, 1993].