Jeremy Liew spent six years pursuing a Ph.D. in chemistry in Cambridge, Massachusetts, placing a wager on a city that had, for more than ten years, made that wager profitable for nearly everyone who attempted it. Last year, he received his degree from UMass Boston. He has since applied to about 500 jobs, but hardly any of them have responded. He began reading LinkedIn messages from Chinese recruiters more carefully than he had anticipated at some point during that search.
Even though it seems insignificant, that change reveals more about the current state of affairs in Greater Boston. For many years, the area’s university-to-lab pipeline—Harvard, MIT, teaching hospitals, and a biotech job waiting on the other side—was viewed as a sort of closed loop. It was so effective that it hardly required defense. According to CBRE, nearly 28% of the area’s lab space is currently unoccupied, and the pipeline that once ensured employment is increasingly producing credentialed individuals with nowhere to go.
Instead, a workforce underground is emerging, which is looser, more difficult to map, and somewhat more intriguing. Informal networks, Discord channels, alumni Slack groups, and word-of-mouth gig arrangements—rather than actual basements—are where laid-off scientists exchange leads, contract work, and survival advice that they were never taught by career offices. It’s the kind of thing that usually appears when a formal system stops working; people create a parallel one, usually covertly, usually out of necessity rather than ideology.
Some of these scientists believe that the previous campus-to-lab monopoly was never as stable as it appeared. In 2024 alone, Massachusetts lost over 4,940 jobs in the life sciences, a significant increase from the previous year. Research institutions have been severely impacted by federal funding cuts; in the most recent fiscal year, Massachusetts institutions reportedly lost between $47 million and $100 million. When you factor in the uncertainty surrounding international researchers’ visas, you have a labor market where the credential still opens doors—just fewer and more slowly than people anticipated.
It’s important to note that while this isn’t specifically unique to Boston, the city feels it more because it had more to fall. San Francisco, San Diego, and Raleigh-Durham are gaining ground in comparison to Boston, but this isn’t necessarily due to their booming economies. The contrast is more pronounced abroad. Approximately thirty percent of the world’s life-science licensing transactions now take place in Shenzhen. Over the past ten years, Cambridge, England, has discreetly tripled its venture capital inflows and is actively pursuing the same talent that Boston is finding difficult to hold onto.
In an attempt to address that very competition, Governor Maura Healey has pushed a $400 million “competitiveness agenda” through the state legislature. Since the bill is still being reviewed by lawmakers months after it was introduced, it is genuinely unclear if it will be sufficient. These matters rarely proceed as quickly as the layoffs.
The cultural change that scientists are already experiencing is more difficult to legislate. In actuality, the underground networks that are emerging around Kendall Square are not organized resistance. People shielding one another from an unreliable system is more akin to informal insurance. The way that any closed professional ecosystem eventually produces workarounds after enough people are burned by waiting for it to fix itself is almost familiar to me as I watch it develop.
Liew is still here. He continues to apply locally in the hopes that a position will become available before he is forced to seriously consider Shenzhen or another location. However, the fact that he is even considering it indicates that Boston’s former certainty—Ph.D. in, biotech job out—is no longer assured. The city might adjust and regain its advantage. It’s also possible that, at least temporarily, living underground becomes the new normal.
