The Role of CS Postdocs

The Computing Research Association (CRA), the major professional organization for Computer Science in the US, has a new white paper on the role of postdocs in CS Research. It's excellent, very thorough, and has several interesting graphs. (Including who's hired in what areas over the past few years.) The white paper is up for people to leave comments if they are so inclined, until March 15th.

I haven't had time to read the report in depth, but a few things jumped out at me as interesting:

• 42% of all CS PhD graduates are hired into industry immediately after completing their PhDs. (I affectionately refer to this as the Google Slurp). However, there is a large category of "other", which sadly includes the unemployed. So maybe that old statistic that less than 1% of PhDs in Computer Science are unemployed is no longer true, eh? 

• Here's the graph of who got hired in what. Everybody is going downhill, but it looks like Architecture and Theory people are hurting the most in hiring. Which correlates with my anecdotal information. 

(Why aren't Security, CS Education, or Ubicomp listed as fields? I would not consider any of them to be subfields of any of these really. They are their own fields).

• This table is really interesting. Compared to other fields those of us in CS/Math hardly postdoc at all:

Anyway, interesting stuff - check it out and leave comments if you have them. CRA is a well-run organization, if you comment I strongly suspect your opinions will be taken into account - not just for future white paper drafts, but also for recommendations they make to Congress and various funding agencies. (I know CRA and NSF in particular are usually fairly kissy kissy. CI Fellows anyone?)