Baby Boomers Are Crowding Out Millennial Scientists

Scientific innovation has positioned the United States as the global economic leader in the 21st century. However, a 2015 Bureau of Labor Statistics report suggests a problem for the future of STEM in the U.S. The report found that after years of pushing young people to study the sciences, there is a significant oversupply of PhDs in STEM fields. This makes it harder for young scientists to be successful in academia and research, eventually driving them into non-science fields and draining the pool of fresh talent. The problem is so pervasive that the National Institutes of Health has created a program to train biomedical scientists for non-research careers.

Meanwhile, the retirement age for older scientists has been trending upwards, increasing the average age and size of the scientific workforce. Most people pursue a PhD with the intent of conducting research, but academic research positions have not increased quickly enough to offset the number of older scientists still in the workforce. Consequently, it is increasingly difficult for young scientists to establish their own careers. In a recent paper, David M. Blau and Bruce A. Weinberg examine the causes of the aging scientific workforce in the United States between 1993 and 2008.

The researchers compiled data from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR), the Current Population Survey (CPS), the 1980 and 1990 US Censuses, and American Community Surveys to create a model simulating the entry and exit of workers from the workforce. The model demonstrated that from 1993 to 2010, the average age of the scientific labor pool increased by 3.5 years, a slightly larger increase than the aggregate national workforce. More troubling is the divergence in the share of scientists older than 55 years compared to the general population. From 1993 to 2010, the fraction of the scientific workforce older than 55 increased at nearly twice the rate of the total workforce (15 percentage points compared to 8). This pattern is consistent across scientific fields, including computer and information sciences.

The researchers also modeled the average retirement age over time to understand how current trends may affect the future composition of the scientific community. They found that scientists were retiring too early at the beginning of the study period, indicating that the population age as a whole was expected to increase some as the market balanced. But at present, the retirement behavior has now swung far in the opposite direction; if the current rate of retirement continues, the mean age will increase by another 2.3 years before the market reaches equilibrium. Surprisingly, the researchers found several factors which did not affect the demographic change of the workforce, including the age of PhD completion, the increasing rate of degrees awarded to foreign-born scientists and the immigration of foreign-trained PhD recipients to the U.S.

The reasons for high employment of older workers in the scientific community are manifold. The study found that 8.4 percent of the demographic change in the scientific workforce is the result of a change in retirement habits, especially after the 1994 passage of a law that eliminated mandatory retirement ages for university employees. Declining birth rates explain an additional 12 percent of the change, however, it is not specific to the scientific workforce.

Current policies aimed at keeping young scientists in academia and research, such as giving more research dollars to young scientists and preparing them to work in areas outside of their specialty, have been largely ineffective. Baby-boomer scientists continue to remain active in the workforce, reducing options for aspiring millennial researchers, therefore more comprehensive solutions must be developed. Millennials—the largest generation since the baby boom—are entering an even more competitive and technologically complex world than their predecessors. Leaving them with an anemic scientific workforce jeopardizes both the future of young Americans and American economic leadership.

Article Source: Blau, David M. and Bruce A. Weinberg, “Why the US Science and Engineering Workforce is Aging Rapidly.” National Academy of Sciences, Vol 114, No. 14 (2017): 3879-3884.

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