Looking for more info concerning the "warnings" against majoring in Biology

In numerous threads I’ve been reading I see the warning “don’t major in biology”. My D18 will be heading to college in September, with the hopes of either medical school or a scientific/medical research career. She loves biology, but the warnings make we want to at least get more information for her.

I understand the general notion that there are a lot of un/under-employed biology graduates, but is that talking about those with just a bachelors, or even those with PhD’s?

There are other subjects she loves too (she got much higher on her SAT in English, loves writing and has been working on a book), but her favorite classes are sciences such as biology, and anatomy & physiology. She does fine in math (calc bc), fine in other sciences like Physics and Chemistry, but none of those excite her as much as the biological sciences.

I think no matter what, she’s going to end up doing a minor (or double major if the schools allows it) with the minor/2nd major being something in the humanities.

Given the above, and that her goal is continuing education for either MD or PhD, should she still consider something other than biology, or is the warning ignore-able since she doesn’t plan to get a BS in Bio and then go looking for a job with just that?

Thanks!

The warning is mostly that there is an oversupply of biology majors at the BA/BS level, so the common presumption that “STEM majors have good job prospects” is not true for biology majors, so biology majors who do not get into medical school (meaning most of them, since pre-med is a weeding process that eliminates most from applying to medical school, and only about half of those who apply get admitted) should be prepared to seek jobs in other areas (e.g. those which want people with a BA/BS but not any specific major).

https://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472276a.html is an article about the situation for PhD graduates. Note that, in any field, the number of PhD graduates is far greater than the number of faculty jobs available, so job prospects depend on whether there is non-academic demand for PhD graduates in research jobs.

I have always assumed that a biology major for undergrad implies the need for a graduate degree (M.Sc, PhD, MD, DVM, …). Are there jobs for people with appropriate Master’s degrees? Also, is this an area where being bi- or tri-lingual might help a bit?

The academic job market for PhD in biology/biomedical fields is terrible. Only 15% of bio/biomed PhD find permanent academic positions with 6 years of graduation.

See: [Addressing Biomedical Science’s PhD Problem](Addressing Biomedical Science’s PhD Problem | The Scientist Magazine®)

While some PhDs will find jobs in applied industrial research labs (think Monsanto/chem industry, the pharm industry, tobacco industry, big Ag, etc) there is still a huge oversupply of bio/biomed PhDs. Annual surveys of recent bio/biomed PhDs have reported that 30% of all those who have earned doctorates within the last 5 years are either unemployed or underemployed.

The job market for a MS in biology is equally or even more poor than for those with a PhD. (In part because of the generally poor quality of some/many MS programs–which many colleges use as revenue generators.) For the most part, a MS won’t get anyone a position that one couldn’t get with just a bachelors.

When my daughters were choosing college majors, my husband (an academic with a STEM PhD ) and I both strongly discouraged our children from choosing biology as their undergrad major, or, if they did, to supplement that degree with a second major or strong minor that would improve their employability in the job market post college graduation. In both cases, our daughters selected math/applied math as a second major and added coursework in statistics, probability/risk management and computer programming. The addition of the math made them both more employable immediately post graduation and allowed them entry into a variety graduate programs (biomedical engineering, public health/epidemiology, biostatistics, computational bio, medical physics, etc) that are in high demand and offer good career options & salaries.


N=3

D2 took a breather between undergrad and med school. She used math degree as an employment hook and spent 2 years as a research program manager at a top med school. Her college BF was a Bio PhD student at the same university. The (now ex-) BF is still toiling the field of graduate research 6 years later, in part because the job market for new PhDs is so bad. He is unable secure a  permanent post-PhD position despite doing 2 internships in industrial research. D2 has 2 friends who were also in the same top 5 bio PhD program--one quit ABD because she was so discouraged by her job prospects. She enrolled in an unfunded MS in biostatistics because she knew that at least she could get a job when she finished. (She did, and now works for the NIH.) The other finished her PhD and is now teaching high school science in the same school district where she grew up.

FWIW, both my Ds' high schools --including one low-ranked & underperforming public district HS--had teachers with PhDs in chemistry and biology, some from top academic programs (Berkeley and MIT among others.)

Does the same hold true for biochemistry majors?

Yes my DD HS chemistry teacher has his PhD from Northwestern

Beyond career aspects, there are other reasons to avoid biology (and really most science majors unless there is true unrelenting passion)…

  1. Science majors require a lot of courses superfluous to pre-med students. Whether it’s ecology or botany in biology or Analytical Chemistry for the chem major or any upper level physics class, the relevance to medical school coursework is essentially non-existant. Biochem is a little bit different but YMMV depending on a number of different university related factors surrounding the decision making about biochem requirements, which as a newer field, sometimes is not its own department and is housed in chemistry or biology departments. The home department can have a significant impact on how the major is constructed.

  2. many of those classes required of majors are freaking hard. Physical Chemistry is often referred to as the 7th circle of hell. Heck, many schools because of it’s use as a weed out course, Bio 101 is an absolute massacre (at my school, it wasn’t so much the Bio 101 lecture portion as it was the Bio 101 Lab course that was so brutal). And upper level physics? Oftentimes not so much.

  3. While it’s not a guarantee, I feel safe in generalizing that most people who get PhD’s in the bench sciences (and doing good enough research to reach tenure) are less than compelling teachers compared to those in Social Sciences and the like. Personality types matter a lot. Having to take a bunch of required courses with terrible teachers is not a recipe for consistent success.

When you take all of this together, the Pre-med who majors in something else doesn’t have to take irrelevant courses, and is by no means blocked from taking upper level science courses that interest them or that have teachers with well earned reputations of good teaching. These are things that create success for undergrads.

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Biochem major could be more marketable in pharmaceutical/biotech industry BUT biochem is a *** much harder *** major than general bio, which means you could “tank” your GPA for med school application/grad school well before you see any post-undergrad employment benefit.