In “Women in Science,” I wrote
One of my students, we’ll call him Bill, in an introductory computer science class said that he wanted to be a biologist when he grew up. What biologists had Bill met? They were all professors at MIT and about half of them had won the Nobel Prize.
The gist of the article is “sure, science is great if you’re working at the Nobel Prize level, but that’s not where the average scientist ends up.”
It looks as though I was, as usual, wrong.
Apparently, science can be a terrible career even for Nobel winners. See this article on Jeffrey Hall, who won the 2017 Nobel in medicine but quit science 10 years previously.
Ironically, winning the Nobel now qualifies him for a number of cushy teaching posts at any number of prestige-hungry universities eager to boost their US News ranking.
Bulls, bears, & pigs make money. Inventors get slaughtered.
A degree in science or engineering can be useful, there are many jobs in finance and banking that can offer financially rewarding carriers.
Other good examples are Cambridge Analytica and Robert Mercer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mercer_(businessman)
Who applied his computer science skills to the problem of applying big data mining to winning elections. This was very useful in the last US election.
Moving forward, lots of science and engineering will be done in China and India, so good skills could be how to spot technologies developed that could be commercialized and marketed to North America and Europe. It is usually much more financially rewarding taking an invention to market than doing the inventing which usually is boring work and takes too long to be financially interesting. Why would anybody want to work in a lab, when they could be exploiting and making money?
If the graduates of science and engineering want to compete, they have to stop thinking about making the world a better place and instead they should concentrate on how to survive and exploit those around them, they will do much better financially. Most politicians, dictators, bankers and lawyers have learned this along time ago.
The father of a friend picked up a science Nobel this year. I’m sure he enjoyed the phone call, but he’s also been upset for nearly two decades about being repeatedly passed over. Whether it balances out is difficult to say. He probably doesn’t have another two decades to enjoy it..