COLLOQUY

THE QUESTION

RESPONSES

BACKGROUND

It is negligent, bordering on criminal that studies leading to a Ph.D. are not bound by time or project. Students are granted doctorates for poor work, denied degrees for outstanding work, and in general languish at the whim of a single individual. If graduate school is to be reformed it will not come from within but external to the scientific community. Those professors with an endless stream of cheap, disposable labor will continue to use this resource. As long as foreign graduate students continue to pour into this country, there is little or no interest in insuring students spend no more than five years in study, that projects are not open ended, that additional studies are not piled on, and that students are given a clear understanding of what will be expected of them in contractual form.

Worse still is the lack of employment opportunities for all but the very elitist university graduates. Tenured faculty and universities require teaching assistants and so the ranks of unemployed and underemployed Ph.D.'s continue to swell. Without a license to provide even a small step to separate sub-standard performance and in some cases poorly trained immigrant scientists, salaries for Ph.D.'s remain disparate to the many years of study.

Look to Puerto Rico where they have licensed chemists since 1932 in order to separate knowledgeable chemists from biologists and other scientists in environmental labs. They clearly recognize what the U.S. does not. That anyone that has used a GC is NOT a chemist. A license also provides a mechanism to remove fraudulent and poor performing scientists.

Until the U.S., the American Chemical Society, and others admit that there is less than 1 in 100 Ph.D. students that will obtain a tenure track faculty position at a research caliber university, Ph.D.s will continue to be inappropriately trained, over produced, and poorly paid.

While all of this discussion carries on, no one is actually doing anything about the problem. I hope that the ACLU takes note and enters into this problem with a class-action suit. I hope that U.S. universities will realize that graduate students are not just the "cheapest" source of labor in the country.

-- David Klein, Ph.D., (posted 10/30, 4:12 p.m., E.S.T.)

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