Possible titles for this post are manifold; how about "Professional Prognosticators Predict Poor Prospects for People Who Predict Downpours"? I'll stop there.
In the current issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, John Knox, of the Department of Engineering at the University of Georgia in Athens, analyzes the supply/demand proposition for scientists who study weather. It has been, he notes, more than a decade since the last such assessment and many things have changed since then that affect the attractiveness of weather-related work, including the rise of the Internet and Internet and The Weather Channel, the profile of climate change, and the movie Twister. Knox concludes (pdf) that:
. . . if the projections are accurate: the number of undergraduate meteorology degree recipients will increasingly exceed the number of meteorology employment opportunities into the next decade. Thus, given recent trends and future projections, the growth of the U.S. undergraduate meteorology population is potentially unsustainable in terms of bachelor’s degree–level employment within meteorology.
This kind of frankness--and cynicism--is rare among scientific-workforce prognosticators--and refreshing Much more common are claims that we need more and more scientists regardless of what market forces imply--after all, even if they can't be employed in the field they're being trained in (these conflicted prognosticators typically argue), they're still learning valuable skills.
Knox echoes arguments we have often made (more broadly) at Science Careers (here, for example, and here), pointing out that prognosticators often choose to ignore the demand side of the supply/demand balance, and "because the mechanisms that generate interest in our field (e.g., unprecedented media emphasis on weather) are mostly uncoupled to the mechanisms of demand."
There's much more discussion on the Prometheus blog from the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
