After this you go on to do what is supposed to be an apprenticeship called postdoctoral work ("a postdoc"). You are paid a bit more and spend 3-6 (or more) years further honing your research skills. Then you are ready to get a job. Except there aren't as many as there used to be. Which is why postdocs have become a low paid holding pattern for many Ph.D.s while they apply for a job.
There aren’t enough research jobs out there because of how the system is set up. There is an incentive to have as many graduate students and postdocs being trained as possible since they are cheap and do most of the research. The result is that a single professor puts out many Ph.D.s over his or her career.
This didn’t matter a few decades ago when the U.S. government was increasing funding to create lots of research positions. But now we have plenty of these positions and so don’t need to create many new ones. Which means there are lots of Ph.D.s going for just a few research jobs.
Of course this wouldn’t be as big a deal if people going to graduate school were told this upfront or they received training in something besides research while they were in graduate school. But most of them don’t receive either.
Research training has stayed the same partly because of inertia and partly because it works well for the nation, universities and professors. The nation needs a ready supply of scientists and professors and universities appreciate the cheap and productive labor. But it is no longer working well for graduate students and postdocs.
So what can be done? There are a few possibilities...these are three I thought of off the top of my head.
1) Increase government funding for science. Most research positions are funded by the federal government so more money equals more research positions. I of course love this one but in an environment of belt tightening this is unlikely to fly even if the nation needs the scientists. (It should be mentioned that we aren't talking TARP money here...a few extra billion could go a long way.)
2) Restrict the number of graduate students. Since research positions aren't increasing, we could simply train fewer students. This is sort of like what happens with med school. The big downside is that most research gets done by graduate students and postdocs. Fewer of each of these means less productive American science, fewer Nobel Prizes, etc. This one would obviously be a hard sell.
3) Make graduate school about more than research training. Right now the entire focus is on becoming a great researcher. This is useful if someone is going on to a research career although even then it isn't perfect. As a professor, a scientist needs to know how to write grants, manage people, write scientific articles, manage money, etc. Graduate students and postdocs receive very little training in these skills.
And the situation gets worse for non-research careers. Students and postdocs receive almost no training for these sorts of jobs or even guidance about where to get training after they get their degree. It might be worth thinking about updating graduate school for our new reality by providing training for other possible careers. I have tried to do a bit of this at Stanford with the Stanford at The Tech program and the NSF is really pushing for a change with its GK-12 program.
Whatever happens, at the very least we need to be upfront with graduates considering a career in research science. Tell them that the odds are against them getting an elite academic research position. In fact, they'll need hard work, to choose the right supervisor and a bit of luck to land any academic research position.
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A Ph.D. does not guarantee a job.