Perhaps one solution to the problem of excess chemistry PhD production by our institutions is to take a step away from the path of pure scholarship into the applied sciences. That is, a chemistry program wherein chemical science is integrated with economics and business. The goal is to support the industrial part of our civilization with scientifically educated people who desire to apply their knowledge to the industrial arts, i.e., manufacturing, sales, management, and distribution.
I’m suggesting that chemical education could be split into two streams- scholarship and applied science- because that is where the grads go anyway. Presently, the scholarly route supplies the entire supply of chemistry graduates. I think there are several reasons for this. Faculty produce graduates along the manner in which they were schooled. Another reason for this singular path is the effect of the ACS standardized curriculum. Most chemistry departments struggle to maintain their ACS certification as a validation stamp for their program . It also serves as a foil for deans who want to gut the chemistry budget because it is typically very costly. The ACS program has basic requirements and that is that.
An applied science program would require a modification to the usual faculty profile. Instead of having a faculty of stellar Harvard , MIT, and Stanford graduates, the faculty would have a few from Dow, DuPont, Air Products, etc.
An applied chemical science program could include coursework on the manufacturing processes of petroleum feedstocks from crude oil to BTX, polyolefins, and maybe into some fine chemicals or extractive metallurgy. It would cover the regulatory environment and give students familiarity with EPA and OSHA regulations as well as those regs governing transportation of hazardous goods.
At some point there should be coursework in basic accounting, marketing, law, and finance. A business minor would be very useful. A student should know how to calculate the manufacturing cost of a product based labor & overhead as well as the cost of raw materials. There are many possibilities here to use real life examples. Y ou never know what will happen to a student once they understand how to get a product to market. The just might want to go do it themselves.
It is not inconceivable that a program along these outlines and with the right faculty could produce graduates who are inclined to do a startup. Once you know something about what is required to get a product out the door, it is natural to begin to dream about doing it yourself.
American chemistry lacks a culture of strong entrepreneurship among chemists. This is not quite as true for chemical engineers, though. Chemists are afraid to start a company because they have not been exposed to much of the business environment because they are partitioned in the lab. They do not know what the issues are or how to attract resources to get the thing started.
I was on the phone with a professor the other day who has $$ in his eyes. He has a customer who wants x kg of his compound and he thinks that he is going to staff a small production campaign with students in a rental space. He admitted he had no idea of what is required once you have employees doing hazardous activities. He had no idea of what workmans compensation insurance was.
His business model was simply a larger version of his research lab. The university would pay his students a stipend and he would have them laboring off campus making some stuff that is too nasty for use on campus. It is much like gold fever. Otherwise rational people become greedy and foolish when they think there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
The over arching goal of an applied science degree program is to produce graduates who have a better understanding of our industrial culture and are prepared to strengthen it by a lifetime of effort in making better things for better living. The future holds the inevitable confrontation with scarcity. We need a layer of educated industrialists who can help fashion a good life in the US with smarter manufacturing that can accomodate reduced energy and materials consumption.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
CSU Bakersfield is promoting a “chemistry/marketing” major that’s a little like this:
“It provides a solid foundation in chemistry while also educating the future graduate in important aspects of management,” according to the proposal. “This concentration does not duplicate any portion of the current curriculum. In fact, it provides a unique option of an interdisciplinary program that will make a graduate highly competitive in the job market.”
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.bakersfield.com/test/x435841656/CSUB-Senate-approves-chemistry-marketing-focus
Thanks for the link.
I think the idea of trying to broaden the education is a good thing, but the problem with the this is that adding business courses necessarily means you have to remove a bunch of chemistry courses to make room for them.
A couple of years ago, while attending a medicinal chemistry conference, there was a panel discussion about why medicinal chemistry courses weren’t all that successful. A major reason is that there’s enough chemistry to learn as it is and the major employers (who are still the big pharma companies despite all the recent layoffs), still prefer to recruit someone with a natural product synthesis background than someone with a med chem degree. So I wonder if instead of allowing someone to do stuff beyond chemistry, you’re just guaranteeing that they’ll have to get a job that is outside of ‘chemistry’ because the dual course is perceived (correctly or incorrectly) as master of neither.
I think this is a real problem that you’ve identified.
For a BS program, I would envision an ACS certified degree with a business minor. The minor could be administered by the business department. Where the chemistry department comes in is the offering of a few elective classes on industrially oriented topics. An industrial chemical processing class could be built around the study of processes for various classes of commodity materials. Or, it could be a series of case studies on the production of a single product, from request for quotation to putting it on a truck.
But, you have to have faculty who can do this.
Students could wrestle with finding the best process on paper, doing a cost analysis based on inputs like plant operating time, reactor size, overhead, R&D costs, raw mat costs, etc. Or it could involve a study of chemical process economics. Once you have the students thinking about space yields and cost per kg, then you can introduce process intensification and find the effects of various changes to the process. This activity is at the very heart of chemical manufacturing and it offers deep insight for the student into how industry works.
A graduate program could involve the student thinking about how to solve problems in process development and scale-up. In the past many have assumed that engineers are supposed to do this. But in fact, this is where many chemists spend their working lives.
The partitioning of engineer and chemist is only because of college curricula. Chemists have traditionally taken a scholarly path in school and then jump into a laboratory job at a company. Engineers typically start their careers in the plant. Finding a chemist who has a good head for manufacturing is usually a matter of accident. I’m simply saying that it can be more deliberate.
We are a company on the other end of the spectrum. We have always tried to outsource or find our products through established suppliers. Now we have a chance to develop a product of our own. Rather than outsource we have developed a synthetic pathway but are looking for a cost model. Do you know of any sources that can assist us in better determining the cost associated with our product.
Hi JB.
Cost models are not so hard to gin up on a spreadsheet once you identify all of the cost contributions. The total cost is the sum of the individual costs. You need to determine the following-
Raw material costs (fully burdened is best); hourly labor costs (you should isolate the activity to the actual people working on it); Analytical costs; waste costs; hourly overhead costs; and packaging costs. It can be very difficult to get highly accurate numbers in a facility where other things are happening simutaneously.
Sit down with a spreadsheet and tally all of the contributions to cost. I have no doubt you can do it. After a few revisions, a model will jump out at you.
Pricing is more of a philosophical problem. There is the price you need to make the project worthwhile and there is the price the customer will accept. The question is what kind of a difference can you live with? Depending on the competition, you can devise a multiplier that is applied to the total cost, or some component therein. For instance, you can apply different profit criteria to labor vs raw mat costs. Or you can just multiply the total cost by 2 (or some other multiplier) for a 50 % gross margin. Taxes, interest, unanticipated costs, etc., will eat into this to leave you with a reasonable profit. This is not uncommon.
Eventually your in-house cost accountants will begin to accumulate data to help you home in on the actual costs.