Pre-print, Working paper: This paper studies why PhDs in France have more difficulty entering the job market than engineers. Using data from CEREQ's " Génération 2004 " survey, we show that job finding rates of PhDs are lower than those of engineers and situate them among post-secondary graduates as a whole. We show that this phenomenon holds even when restricting attention to R & D jobs, and that the difference is mainly due to differences in the fields of study of PhDs and engineers. We also show that the relative demand for PhDs is only moderately sensitive to cost, as only the large employment subsidies inherent in the most recent reform of the " dispositif jeunes docteurs " of France's research tax credit were able to significantly improve placement of young PhDs