It's A Desert Out There

The recent report by the new University and College Union on the decline of certain subjects at university level in the UK does raise some concerns. But at the same time, it does miss a couple of crucial points. Do we really need a physics department at every university? Employment figures for physics graduates suggest that physicists had an initial unemployment rate of 8.7%, against 6.2% for graduates as a whole. Only 6.1% of those who did get work went into science.

Is is any wonder that young people don't want to do physics if there are not jobs for them? Do we expect people to train in a difficult discipline and then just to hang around in a kind of stasis until employers get themselves sorted out so that they can offer jobs? Do we expect universities to train people in disciplines they don't want to do, for jobs that aren't there, because it fits our image of what universities should be doing?

Maybe physics is going through a bad spell and will improve - it does happen. But in the meantime, it is dangerous to suggest that universities should just reverse physics department closures and everything will magically right itself. On current evidence, all that would do is create a lot more unemployed physicists.

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