If you want a job doing basic scientific research the entry level qualification is a doctorate. That’s certainly true in universities and it’s equally true in biology and chemistry though that’s probably not enough. You almost certainly need a post doc or two. Physicists have enough outside options that if they want to get out the post doc is unnecessary but getting a doctorate is a terrible financial decision. That’s what happens when the government does a careful study of how to reduce the prices of highly skilled scientific labour and then follows the recommendations.
> Government and Universities Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists
> During the late 1990s I became convinced that in order to orchestrate lower wages for scientists, there would have to have been a competent economic study done to guide the curious policy choices that had resulted in the flooded market for STEM PhDs. For this theory to be correct, the private economic study would have had to have been done studying both supply and demand so that the demand piece could later be removed, resulting in the bizarre ‘supply only’ demographic studies released to the public. Through a bit of economic detective work, I began a painstaking search of the literature and discovered just such a study immediately preceded the release of the foolish demography studies that provided the public justification for the Immigration Act of 1990. This needle was located in the haystack of documents the NSF was forced to turn over when the House investigated the NSF for faking alarms about a shortfall.
> Government and Universities Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists
> During the late 1990s I became convinced that in order to orchestrate lower wages for scientists, there would have to have been a competent economic study done to guide the curious policy choices that had resulted in the flooded market for STEM PhDs. For this theory to be correct, the private economic study would have had to have been done studying both supply and demand so that the demand piece could later be removed, resulting in the bizarre ‘supply only’ demographic studies released to the public. Through a bit of economic detective work, I began a painstaking search of the literature and discovered just such a study immediately preceded the release of the foolish demography studies that provided the public justification for the Immigration Act of 1990. This needle was located in the haystack of documents the NSF was forced to turn over when the House investigated the NSF for faking alarms about a shortfall.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove...