A couple of weeks ago I posted an entry on NIH funding rates, and how the increase in funding over the 90s led to an increase in the number of postdocs.
I went digging around for the numbers, and found this power point from the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine.
So here are some stats for all those interested:
The number of postdocs in the biomedical sciences has almost doubled between 1990 and 2000, following the increase in NIH funding.
And interestingly, most of these extra postdocs are foreigners (like me).
So it seems like the increase in postdocs could only be maintained by IMPORTING labor, that's why although the demand for postdocs went up. There was no market pressure for postdoc wages to increase. (Just import them!) The reason that not many more Americans enter science has nothing to do with a lack of science education, but low pay. And us foreigners (here because conditions are often worse in our own countries) and American postdocs are finding it hard to make ends meet. This coupled to the fact that rent and the cost of living in many academic centers (Boston, San Francisco, New York - [yes NY has more academic-biomedical researchers than in any other city]) skyrocketed in the 90s, made it much worse. I don't have the numbers yet for the increase in academic positions in the biomedical sciences (the ppt has numbers for the total increase in tenure & non-tenure track positions), so I can't tell you exactly how many of these postdocs found academic jobs. But I'll keep digging.