Yu Xie is the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University. Alexandra A. Killewald is Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University.
In the heated debate over the state of U.S. science, alarmists say there are too few young high-flyers; others, too many. Enter sociologists Yu Xie and Alexandra Killewald, whose nuanced view is backed up by able number-crunching. The United States, they found, is still a scientific superpower: the workforce has grown, and numbers of new graduates at all levels of higher education are rising. But the future is less certain: the number of US doctorate holders taking up academic posts is in decline and earnings are stagnant, for instance. Nature 20120712 Xie and Killewald take a forensic look at who does science in the U.S. today, where they work and why. Their approach is thorough and systematic, and draws together a variety of available data, as well as offering some fresh analysis. This is a short book...It is also a useful one, providing a welcome corrective to the wailing and gnashing of teeth that too often accompanies this debate. -- James Wilsdon Times Higher Education 20120906