But is the market actually bad for PhD scientists in America?
Dismissing the personal anecdotes of Chand John, the numbers posted show that half of PhD engineers have a job on graduation day, i.e., before most of them even start looking generally, and that was true for other sciences up until the big recession.
That looks like a pretty healthy market to me. If there's still high unemployment after 9 month, that might mean something, but I'm not seeing any hardship in the numbers provided.
Unless you eventually get a job as a researcher, a permanent one, or your family is rich enough that you don't really need to work, yes, getting a PhD in the sciences is a poor monetary investment.
Most of the jobs those fresh PhDs are getting are postdocs. They're temporary jobs that pay about as much as a high school teacher. High school teachers will get tenure eventually. Most postdocs will eventually leave academia.
It's bad everywhere. A professor with tenure will hold that job for 20-30 years. In that time, (s)he will graduate at least 5 (in some fields way more) PhD candidates. If the field of specialization of the professor is booming, (s)he may get replaced by 3 new professors. It is way more likely, though, that there will be 20+ PhDs for every single tenure job. Even in 'hot' fields, universities have little incentive to rapidly increase the number of well-paid professors, if phD students and post-docs are willing to do similar work for less money and risk (if that field becomes less hot, you can dump the post-docs, but not the professors)
They can dump the professors now too... tenure doesn't mean as much as it once did. If you are in the sciences tenured professors are now only guaranteed a minimal salary and an office. If you want to keep any sort of lab going, you need to have external (grant) funding.
Dismissing the personal anecdotes of Chand John, the numbers posted show that half of PhD engineers have a job on graduation day, i.e., before most of them even start looking generally, and that was true for other sciences up until the big recession.
That looks like a pretty healthy market to me. If there's still high unemployment after 9 month, that might mean something, but I'm not seeing any hardship in the numbers provided.