Yet more tyranny of the negative slope

Go over to See Arr Oh's place today, and check out his tabulation of the number of Division of Organic Chemistry fellowships, and how they rose and fell over the years. It's a pretty sobering graph he has there.

One thing that I thought I would point out (in repetition of See Arr Oh) is how M&A activity has affected academic organic chemistry in a mundane but still quite profound manner. (See right). I've stricken the names of companies that have been bought out or otherwise closed -- it's quite the remarkable list, on the 1997 side.

While we can argue about the benefits of M&A activity for society at large (future CJ and his Roth IRA may be benefiting), it is abundantly clear to me that the track record of M&A for the bench-level chemist is no good at all.

[Does anyone have the back story to what happened to the DOC fellowships? (Apart from the obvious, that is the funding companies went away.) What's the benefit of funding one of these? Just goodwill in the community and prestige?]

C&EN's 2012 employment issue: the numbers

I don't want to have the new numbers released from the ACS Department of Member Research and Insights from the March 2012 ACS Salary Survey to be lost in the shuffle, so here they are, pulled out of Sophie L. Rovner's article, which is worth reading in full:

• Overall member unemployment: 4.2% 
• Ph.D. member unemployment: 3.4%
• B.S. member unemployment: 5.9%
• Industrial member unemployment: 5.4%
• Academic member unemployment: 2.2%
• % of members unemployed at anytime during 2011: 8.2%
• % of members unemployed at anytime during 2010: 8.4%
• % of newly graduates unemployed in October 2011: 13.3% 
• % of newly graduates unemployed in 2010: 10.6% 
• % of Ph.D. graduates unemployed in October 2011: 8.8%
• % of B.S. graduates unemployed in October 2011: 13.6%

Also, check out this chart from the article (right), which indicates the brutal reality facing new graduates in chemistry.

Credit: C&EN*

Anyone who buys into facile claims that America needs more scientists and more chemists needs to be able to explain this graph. 

Also, the larger picture for the chemical manufacturing sector:

Zeroing in on the U.S. chemical manufacturing sector, employment totaled 799,600 on a seasonally adjusted basis in September 2012, up 0.2% from the prior month and up 0.7% from September 2011, according to preliminary figures from BLS. That’s good news, but it’s little comfort to the hundreds of thousands of people who lost their jobs in prior months. At the start of the Great Recession in December 2007, employment in the sector was 857,600. Five years earlier, it was 921,500. And 10 years before that—in December 1992—chemical manufacturing employees numbered 1.03 million.

Yikes.

*[NOTE: Corrected number for 2004 for ACS members. Numbers include unemployed and seeking employment. Data for 2012 on new graduates are not yet available. SOURCES: ACS Starting Salary Survey, ACS Comprehensive Salary and Employment Status Survey.]

Corporate recruiting visits at Harvard Chemistry: The New Normal (?)

This is the 4th annual analysis of corporate recruiting at Harvard's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. As the graph at right shows, the recruiting season (so far) indicates a slight drop from 2011, but the situation more or less staying the same. (NB: the 2012 recruiting season is not over.)

It's surprising to me that corporate recruiting has not recovered back to 2008 levels. After 4 years, it appears that 10-15 companies is the new normal for Harvard. One presumes that full-bore large-company hiring of entry-level research chemists will be back for good when Harvard sees a big increase. It does not look good now.

(Those who want to see other universities' corporate recruiting schedules, click here for a look at Stanford in 2010 and here for MIT's corporate recruiting from 2002-2011.