For the first time, data showing how recent Ph.D.'s have fared in the job markets of 14 scientific disciplines are now available on one site on the Internet.
In the past, disciplinary societies would independently collect data about Ph.D.'s in their fields.
The non-profit Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology brought together 14 disciplinary societies, which collaborated to collect comparable information. How people who earned their Ph.D.'s in 1996-97 were faring, as of October 1997, has been posted on Science's Next Wave, a World-Wide Web site of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The data on the Web site cover fields in the hard sciences, such as physics and chemistry, and in the social sciences, such as political science and sociology.
The unemployment rates for 1996-97 Ph.D.'s in the 14 fields ranged from less than 1 per cent in psychology to a high of 7 per cent in political science. Most fields, however, had unemployment rates between 2 and 4 per cent.
The most revealing data, however, showed that the percentage of scientists in each field who said they held temporary positions. For example, more than half of the new Ph.D.'s in chemistry, physics, and earth and space sciences held temporary jobs, and more than half of them said they did so "involuntarily" because they couldn't find a suitable permanent position.
More than 25 per cent of the 1996-97 Ph.D.'s were already searching for other jobs in all of the fields except computer science (20 per cent) and psychology (about 23 per cent).
