Philosophy, outside of the formal academic environment, can be considered a
discipline, not a profession. Although philosophy represents a body of knowledge,
it does not beget an occupation built on that specialized body of knowledge.
Philosophy degree holders move on to a myriad of job opportunities — from
law to business to writing to political office — but there are no job openings
on Monster.com for “Philosopher.” This status does not devalue the
discipline of philosophy, but rather permeates society with people grounded
in the discipline’s fundamentals. On the other hand, engineering, no matter
the specialty, is firmly set in the ways of a profession, from the highly structured
undergraduate training to the lifetime of professional requirements.
The geosciences are potentially at a crossroads — the field can either
continue to be a profession or slowly evolve into a discipline. Pressure are
mounting, with the recent spate of department closures, apparent backlogging
of recent Ph.D.s in post-doctoral positions, lagging undergraduate enrollments
and continued modest hiring in traditional geoindustries.
The geosciences have a rich history of being more like engineering than philosophy,
with interactions between industry and academic programs across the broader
community. These links, however, began to weaken in the 1980s, as many faculty
with strong connections moved into petroleum industry positions. Following the
job losses from the oil bust of the mid-1980s, enrollments plummeted and the
connection between the historical resource industries and the geoscience departments
weakened even further.
For now, the geosciences are largely following the same enrollment and employment
trends as the other physical sciences. But an analysis of data from several
recent studies shows clear disconnects surfacing between reality and perception
within the geosciences and the initial part of the human resource supply chain.
The geosciences are an exception in the sciences, with the master’s remaining
the preferred degree for professional employment and geoscience master’s
recipients often commanding higher starting salaries than their peers in other
sciences. This positive property, however, is offset by a troubling disparity:
Among master’s graduates in 2002, 72 percent took full-time non-academic
employment upon graduation, while 82 percent of master’s-granting geoscience
departments reported that the purpose of their program was Ph.D. preparation.
This stark contradiction is further supported by the results of the American
Geological Institute’s (AGI) Sloan Foundation-funded study of professional
master’s programs, which found that only one department in the United States
has a formal professional science master’s program in the geosciences,
compared to numerous such programs in engineering and the other sciences.
Also, the training pipeline in the geosciences continues to narrow very rapidly.
The nearly 800 bachelor-granting geoscience departments in the United States
yield to around 400 master-granting departments, of which 25 produce one-quarter
of all master degrees. Likewise, of about 200 Ph.D.-granting departments, 25
produce one-half of all doctorates.
According to a joint study between AGI and the American Geophysical Union, in
2002, 54 percent of geoscience Ph.D.s took post-doc positions following graduation,
which represents a slight increase over the near-term trend. While post-doc
work is often considered the final training for a career in academic research,
another view, particularly for subsequent post-doc appointments, is that the
newly minted Ph.D.s are simply on hold until they can find permanent employment
in academia.
Another major problem that continues to persist is a belief that environmental
geoscience is the future of the profession. With geoscience departments increasingly
integrating “environmental” in their name and their curriculum, academe
appears out of step with the profession as a whole. Yet the academic world is
facing its own external forces: The accepted view is that students are demanding
more environment-oriented classes and programs. From a geoscience perspective,
however, that demand does not necessarily translate into careers in the profession
and, likely in the long-term, no real gains in majors.
According to an analysis of historical data from the GeoRef database, from the
1950s to the 1990s, the number of dissertations in environmental geoscience
jumped 2800 percent, compared to an average 400 percent increase in the total
number of dissertations published. Employment of geoscience graduates, however,
has not followed this trend. Following a quick increase from 8 percent to 14
percent of total graduate hires from 1985 to 1990, the environmental sector
today continues to hire less than 20 percent of geoscience graduates. In contrast,
the petroleum industry today hires fully a third of all master’s and Ph.D.
graduates, closely followed by non-geoscience high-tech companies. Thus, it
is clear that although environmental science has a place in the profession of
geoscience, it is not the only future of the profession.
These trends possibly represent larger changes afoot in the geosciences. According
to the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Recent College Graduates,
the profession has a distinct but unrecognized dynamic — with 50 percent
of people holding their terminal degree in a geoscience, yet working in another
field, and 50 percent of people working as geoscientists holding terminal degrees
from another discipline.
As described at the 2000 AGI Academic-Corporate Associates Conference, perhaps
the geosciences need to, in part, consider themselves a “liberal”
science, in which the core educational values of a program prepare students
for a broad range of career and life options. In the long term, the geosciences
will benefit not only from a strong geoscientist workforce, but also from well-versed,
geoscience issue-aware decision-makers. Who knows, perhaps the geosciences could
even compete with philosophical engineering.
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