I mean, isn't it clear, ever since the bulk creation / funding of so many colleges (and faculty positions) pre + post WW2, the US faculty job market has been on a decline ever since -- (that is, from the average postdoc's point of view of success % when seeking a faculty position).
You do understand right, that the faculty system relies on a pyramid of people entering and leaving the system? And only a certain fraction getting to the top, and people having to vacate the top of the pyramid for anyone else to get there? (for stable, or in other words, stagnant fields)
When the US was in a college-building phase (funded by economic stimulus / public programs), all these posts were new and empty, waiting to be filled. So it enabled a generation of new professors to fill those ranks. As that became stable, now instead of a fresh pyramid you fill with eager people (who think that's still how easy it is), you have grad students and postdocs seeing who can outlast each other (or publish more) to get to the top through attrition or publishing prowess.
Certain fields, let's say, pure math, or history, until a professor retires or dies, there's just no spot for the people below even to compete for. That's why you see people going to Asia, Middle East, etc. where the new money and universities are. Follow the money. I mean this is pure population pyramid, demographic stuff that you can predict. You almost don't even need to know the student's thesis topic to say what chance he/she has of becoming a professor.
And Covid put all this on hold now -- or at least the departure end of the pyramid. No one in their sane mind would retire or give up their faculty position in this environment. And colleges can barely bring in enough revenue to maintain their classes, let alone expand some department. And yet you see stories of more students going into grad school for this limbo period.
Joining the climb up the ladder -- it's not going to end well. Or, it's going to be even worse than before, I'm guessing.
Another way to state the conservation of professors: in the lifetime of a tenured professor, of all the grad students (s)he suppervised, the number that will succeed in getting a tenured position is (on average) equal to 1.
And yet governments provide incentives to train ever more PhDs as though that will somehow turn into a knowledge economy rather than just producing a plethora of unemployed researchers. I would be much happier to cut funding for and limit the number of graduate students in exchange for more permanent research positions.
Because a PhD is useful for a lot more than getting a permanent academic position. My first "proper job" was at a research division of a big corporation. They had ~20 PhDs when I started and expanded to ~100 over 3 years. I don't think any of those people would say their PhD was wasted because they didn't get an academic job at the end of it.
Some PhDs are useful outside of academia. Many are not. It really depends on what you work on, your personality, and what other skills you have. I have spent much of my career in academia adjacent roles, and most of the time, there is far too great of emphasis on the PhD and not enough on the skills to do the job that needs doing. I think our researchers would benefit greatly from better support staff in the form of engineers, programmers, and so on rather than letting those tasks fall to postdocs or even grad students. I suspect your "research division of a big corporation" had those other roles supporting you and your colleagues. Academia generally does not.
I often see PhDs filling roles that really do not require a PhD. Does that mean that the PhD was a waste? No, not necessarily, but was it the best allocation of resources?
Where I work I've had to hire people who can write well about complex computer science topics. The nice thing about PhDs is that they typically know how to write well. Most software engineers are terrible writers. In general, most engineers are terrible writers.
When I look at a resume and I see that someone has a PhD and has published a few papers I am much more comfortable hiring them. They almost definitely know how to approach a large writing project and break it up into smaller pieces. They've had training in how to work on large writing projects and they have atleast 1 experience of doing so and finishing it. Of course I've encountered PhDs that are terrible writers, but they're an anomaly.
I doubt this transfers well into other fields or positions where writing matters less. Most programming positions don't require strong writing skills, for example. All other things being equal, when I am hiring I prefer PhDs over non-PhDs, because in my experience they're better writers.
That’s horribly inefficient economically. Sure, some jobs benefit from PHD adjacent skills and companies can employ such people cheaply, but the time and cost to train a PHD is extreme.
The other half of this is many people put PHD’s at the bottom of the pile as a sign of poor judgement, or just anti intellectual bias. Which plays into why employing PHD’s is so affordable.
Agreed. If we had a European style system where a master's + PhD could be done in 4 years versus the insanely long duration of American PhDs, the whole system would be better off. Of course, faculty have no incentive to graduate their students quickly (they are trying to amortize the year or so of ramp up time). It really has to be up to the funding agencies to refuse to fund any students beyond year 4 unless there are extenuating circumstances.
It is a quite sad situation when the skill required to write a smallest publishable unit for the publication mill compares favorably to other writing skills. Wasting the time of the competition in the publishing rat race is actually incentivized now...
That's a good point, but again this only applies to some types of PhDs. Maybe a computer science PhD would be useful to you in a position like this. But a literary criticism PhD would not.
The con is that this can create a form of credentialism. As the number of PhDs rises, some roles which previously required bachelors move to PhD - creating artificial barriers to forward advancement.
Would these positions have existed as experienced Bachelor's positions before? would companies have directly trained industrial researchers?
Exactly. And let's not forget that the "training" is actually new scholarship, not just learning an existing skill, so even if the PhD doesn't do anything after earning their degree, human knowledge has expanded ever so slightly thanks to their years of effort.
> Because a PhD is useful for a lot more than getting a permanent academic position. My first "proper job" was at a research division of a big corporation. They had ~20 PhDs when I started and expanded to ~100 over 3 years. I don't think any of those people would say their PhD was wasted because they didn't get an academic job at the end of it.
Why do they have so many more PhDs now? Because PhDs are a now a dime a dozen, not because a PhD itself is valuable. The opportunity cost of a PhD is four years of lost income during prime employment age, plus extra student loan debt.
Even with a higher salary (and higher tax burden), it's not clear that you come out on top during your lifetime. If you don't come out on top, it's a waste, unless maybe these years you spent doing your PhD were the best years of your life (probably not).
Because these jobs are researcher jobs, and research is a distinct skill-set than what is learned in the typical undergrad and masters program. Could we train researchers in another, more efficient way? Maybe, but PhD program are the current means of training specialized researchers.
> plus extra student loan debt
For researcher jobs, this will almost never be true. The vast majority of STEM PhD students are fully-funded and given a stipend (although usually small). The dynamics of course change if the student has to support other dependents.
> Even with a higher salary (and higher tax burden), it's not clear that you come out on top during your lifetime
For fields like Computer Science, there are many viable and high-salaried career for non-PhDs, so a PhD will likely lose lifetime money. For other fields like biomedical research, then they will probably profit over a full career. But really, people don't do PhDs for the money, people like their fields, they like the university environment, they like being around other researchers, or they like the independence—all of these things can be valuable beyond lifetime salary.
In engineering possibly not. Often tuition is paid for plus a stipend.
>If you don't come out on top, it's a waste,
I don't know. I didn't get a PhD but I did spend a couple of years getting a Masters. I didn't really use what I specifically researched but, who knows, may have helped me get a couple jobs and I enjoyed the time well enough. Of course, engineering salaries tended to be a lot lower then relative to what many CS people today consider normal so I don't think losing out on a couple years salary was a big deal.
Well, in sympathy with those governments, you have to ask what else can they possibly do?
The response I heard directly from the head of PPARC (defunct UK research body) 10 years ago was, "so, instead of having us train and produce capable researchers, even if they don't all get faculty positions, you would prefer we cut their numbers?" This was in response to the question, why aren't we funding more permanent positions in proportion to the number of students we're training.
It's not an easy situation to solve. You end up having to trade off permanent positions against students. But in some countries, including a lot of EU countries, training students is a hidden way to prevent unemployment. And would you say that denying willing people a useful education just for less competition for faculty jobs is the ideal outcome? What would the best choice be? Not clear.
When a pie isn't increasing, but the number of people is, things get uncomfortable.
"so, instead of having us train and produce capable researchers, even if they don't all get faculty positions, you would prefer we cut their numbers?"
Instead of training and producing large numbers of capable but underemployed researchers, I would definitely spend more on permanently employed researchers. I am certainly not advocating one student per permanent position: some of those excess PhDs will go into important roles in industry, but most will not:
I'm ok with grad students not having a shot at an academic position, and not getting paid much, since it's an internship really. The problem is that postdocs also don't get paid much (last I checked the mandated maximum salary for postdocs in biosciences was ~45k/year), and they're being strung along with the hope of professorship. Even worse, a lot of professors will take as few grad students as they can get away with, and mostly use postdocs, since they're only about 50% more expensive, but they're much more productive from a research standpoint. Also, a lot of professors will string grad students along for a while towards the end, since that's when they're the most productive, but they're still cheap.
We need to have fewer postdocs, and pay them more. We also need to make grad school follow a more regimented timeline, with raises over time, to protect the students' interests.
There's a reason miserable grad students are such a meme, it's a terrible system.
Is it easier to start a research lab when you are competing for a small pool of researchers with a bunch of already established labs, or when there are 3 underemployed PhDs at every coffee shop in town?
If a world war lasts 4 years, and a typical PhD takes 5 years, which country can more easily spin up research: the one with an excess number of PhDs at the start, or the one which waits for the outbreak of war to fund more PhDs who will graduate 1 year after the war is done?
Yes, some resources are spent on training a PhD who doesn't use it, but there is also a cost to not having enough PhDs available when you need them. If the latter is greater than the former, excess PhDs are optimal.
Not sure how useful the PhD who's been serving coffee for 10 years will be to the next Manhattan project.
Perhaps we should initiate some moonshot projects or something to keep the skills sharp. Low pay but you get to do (perhaps self-directed) work on the coolest problems. You would need an army just to process the applications I believe.
If you only produce just enough PhDs, then when you start the next Manhattan project you need to scrape the bottom of the barrel and grab someone who's been out of the field for 10 years, or wait several years for the rate of PhDs being completed to increase.
If you produce a substantial excess, on the other hand, you can instantly scale up to meet increased demand. It's all about that pipeline.
But yes, moonshot projects can also be utilized so that past PhDs can be kept sharp. Indeed, a huge number of science programs currently do exactly that - society may see little direct benefit to discovering methane in the space around Uranus, but the people optimizing those radio telescopes are pretty nice to have around if you think you'll ever need people to optimize radar systems.
There's a fair bit of truth to this, but it does leave out the fairly substantial number of faculty who teach in undergraduate or Masters-level institutions. I teach physics at a small liberal arts college so I never train grad students myself, but I definitely needed a Ph.D. to get this position.
That said, even if there were just as many of us as there are faculty at Ph.D. institutions, that would only raise your number who get tenured positions to 2.
This is not true because it is a multi-agent problem. There is not just one professor, but there is a competitive pool of professors working in different areas. In some highly productive (or otherwise "hot") areas, some profs place every student in faculty positions. In some areas, this number is almost zero. So it is a competitive field.
The problem of pyramid-scheme, etc. occurs when people don't realize this and enter academia with an expectation of entering the tenure track. I find biomedical academia to be the principal culprit in this academic Ponzi scheme. They require high skilled labor, which they procure in the form of underpaid grad students and permanent post docs. Only a small minority of biomedical faculty care about their students entering the tenure track.
The other set of fields that are bad for post-PhD careers is liberal arts. Mainly because colleges started lots of liberal arts departments to boost enrollment and inflate grades. So the demand is artificial.
On the other extreme is b-school and econ PhDs who almost all enter academia.
Other hard sciences (physics, chemistry, etc.) fall in the middle: it is a struggle, but people end up landing well after PhD. Physics folks get finance, developer, etc. jobs. Chemistry folks are usually absorbed into pharma/chem companies.
Math and engineering academia works pretty well too: almost all engineering PhDs get good R&D/developer jobs that are reasonably high status and pay well. I don't know any super-star PhD in engineering who didn't get a reasonable academic position.
The defense industry is another big employer of math, engineering, and sciences PhDs.
Good point. Assuming a 30 year career, the US population grew from 250MM in 1990 to 330MM today. So it could average as high as 1.3, maybe rounded up to 1.5 considering an increase in average educational achievement.
> When the US was in a college-building phase ... all these posts were new and empty, waiting to be filled. So it enabled a generation of new professors to fill those ranks.
Funny story about that. Shortly after the war, my grandfather, who had a Ph.D. but had not been working in academia, landed a position as professor of economics. Not only was it an academic job, not only was it a full professorship, it was in fact an endowed chair. Granted, he was brilliant, but back in those days, being brilliant was all it took.
> You do understand right, that the faculty system relies on a pyramid of people entering and leaving the system? And only a certain fraction getting to the top, and people having to vacate the top of the pyramid for anyone else to get there? (for stable, or in other words, stagnant fields)
To put it differently and in terms that's easier to follow and understand, demand for tenured faculty positions is far smaller than the current supply of skilled labour.
> No one in their sane mind would retire or give up their faculty position in this environment.
This environment will probably drive some faculty to retire. Distance teaching is a lot more work than in-person teaching, and it's a lot of new skills and fiddly technology. Someone who could retire anytime now, and was planning to retire in the next five years may decide to do it sooner than later.
Although, they may not be immediately replaced, given enrollment/revenue drops.
My father is a 65 year old professor and he now loves digital teaching. He’s terrible with computers, he single-finger types (despite all my attempts to help him improve over the years), and still loves it.
His college has him pre-recording lectures, which the students can watch the following day (and can rewatch them). He doesn’t have to travel, doesn’t have to be “on” that day to teach, and doesn’t have to deal with managing students. He just sits down in front of his laptop and gives his presentation.
He interacts with his students more, it’s way easier to field questions from people over the course of a day, as they all watch the lecture, than it is to try to force out some questions with the leftover time at the end of a lecture.
He was definitely looking to retire before covid, but I sense a renewed passion as he’s finally discovered the digital frontier.
Nice story. It can go either way, I think, depending on the courses you teach, how you re-structure them for teaching remotely, and how the college helps you with it. This is a good example of changing things for the better!
On the other hand, I think, certain courses and disciplines that require university facilities (experimental labs) or more immediate individual instruction are hard to do fully remotely.
>certain courses and disciplines that require university facilities (experimental labs)
My sense is that, by and large, they're not being done remotely at the grad level. The schools I'm familiar with also have undergrads back in limited numbers in part so that they can take care of courses that have to be done physically.
This environment will probably drive some faculty to retire. Distance teaching is a lot more work than in-person teaching, and it's a lot of new skills and fiddly technology. Someone who could retire anytime now, and was planning to retire in the next five years may decide to do it sooner than later.
Not if they're tenured. They can simply wait it out until retirement and the financial and other incentives are strong to do so, even if their rate of work falls off.
Tenured prof here. The changes have turned teaching from productive, creative, and enjoyable to frustrating and unsatisfying. I have a number of colleagues who have retired as a result. (Personally a bit too young.)
There are definitely two schools of thought (that go beyond academia).
One is that the research/teaching situation is frustrating for many so if you're near the time you were going to retire anyway, you might as well spare yourself the frustrations and retire early.
But the other is that everything is frustrating. Travel, for example, is hard. So you might as well get a couple more years of salary while the getting is good.
Very true. But in response to the question, "Are there a significant number of folks who are leaving because of the current situation?" my personal experience is yes. (Not a study, just an anecdote, of course.)
I'm not too knowledgable about tenure, but is it the case that when you hit the retirement criteria they kick you out? If not, some people may already be eligible and were still working because they enjoy it and may leave due to changing conditions (yes, some like the new conditions).
I agree that people will probably tough it out if they're close to retirement targets.
I recently finished a pure math ph.d at at a highly, but not THAT highly, ranked public school in the US. I didn't continue in academia, but based on my classmates, most of whom did, the market is not as much of a pyramid as you're portraying it. Most of them ended up with postdocs at equally or more prestigious institutions than the one we graduated from.
Edit: to be clear, this is based on the pre-covid experience. I gather that this year things indeed look pretty bleak.
You do realize it wasn’t that long ago that most PhD graduates went straight into a faculty position right? The fact that you think getting a postdoc is some indication that things are going okay is just a sign of how broken things really are.
Look at the CVs of some of your full professors and older faculty. You won’t see nearly as many “postdoc” years on there.
Just did this exercise with three senior faculty who are all ams fellows. They all did 2-4 years of postdocs, including one guy who now is quite famous.
> Most of them ended up with postdocs at equally or more prestigious institutions than the one we graduated from.
Postdocs are not a tenured position. They are just another step in the temp job/contract work level of the food chain.
To put it differently, no one retires from a postdoc.
In my days in academic research, postdocs were humorously described as paid positions to send out CVs and file job applications. The faculty also gave postdocs their own office so that they wouldn't bother undergrads with their crying.
Senior faculty appeared to be a little out of touch when I finished the contract early in favour of a job in industry which utilised my skill set. No one else was surprised.
In the "good old days", postdocs weren't even really a thing and you only did one if your PhD was too marginal to get a position straight away. It's pretty telling though that some fields are so bad that even getting a postdoc is considered hard.
> Most of them ended up with postdocs at equally or more prestigious institutions than the one we graduated from.
And then another postdoc.
And then another postdoc.
And then another postdoc.
This is not an example of doing OK.
To give you context, in the 80's, the math department at my (average) undergrad routinely hired faculty members straight out of their PhD. Postdocs were only for people aiming for a faculty position at a top school.
I just checked all the new faculty members there since 2010. Most had 2 postdocs before they got in. A few had only one postdoc. And this much trouble for a no name school.
I don't know if it's different in the US, but here in Europe I know lots of career academics that consider their postdoc(s) as one the favorite parts of their career. Decent enough pay, very little teaching or management responsibility, and more time than they'll have again to just focus on a single research question. In fact I have a couple of friends who kind of wish they could have spent their entire career hopping from postdoc to postdoc.
> I don't know if it's different in the US, but here in Europe I know lots of career academics that consider their postdoc(s) as one the favorite parts of their career.
How well do they get paid? What kinds of benefits do they get? In the US, the annual salary is $40-50K/year - roughly half that of a tenure track faculty member. I just checked one university and picked a random post doc and a random assistant professor. Postdoc is getting $51K/year, assistant professor is getting $110K/year.
It's fine if you do one stint, but a lot of people need to do multiple of them. It's not all that unusual seeing someone approaching 40 before they get a tenure track position.
I think my wife's salary went up around 15-20% when she went from her final post doc position to her first associate professor position. Benefits didn't change since both post docs and associate professors are considered full employees of the university.
There is some hindsight bias there--_during_ the postdoc, most postdocs are worried about securing a permanent position. That memory fades once a permanent job is secured.
Fuck. Are we already up to when everybody does 3-4 postdocs? What's next, the "ten-year'ed" postdoc?
Yeah, I 'member when postdocs were not a thing for math. I 'member internships for math majors weren't really a thing, either. I think internships were barely a thing, but, I'm not sure.
I've seen it claimed now several times in this thread that in the post-war period it was typical for mathematicians to get hired into tenure-track, or even tenured, positions directly after graduating. I don't see any evidence that this was true. Checking the cvs of three randomly chosen very famous mathematicians who graduated in this period (Stein, Atiyah, Mumford), it looks like they all did postdocs.
> I don't see any evidence that this was true. Checking the cvs of three randomly chosen very famous mathematicians who graduated in this period (Stein, Atiyah, Mumford), it looks like they all did postdocs.
This was addressed in my comment:
> Postdocs were only for people aiming for a faculty position at a top school.
Don't look at people who are outliers. Pick a random university in Oklahoma, Kansas, etc. Find someone who joined in the 80's or earlier. Check their CV. Did they do a postdoc?
Only one I could find at OU of that age with either a bio or cv online was Andy Magid, who graduated in 1969 and did a postdoc before taking a tenure-track position there. Seriously, if you have evidence that this was common, provide it.
I think you just showed that such evidence is not likely to be available at a casual Google search. Older professors who probably didn't have to do postdocs are probably less likely to post their CVs online.
Hah, in some fields things are much worse. My wife was actually (seriously!) offered two postdoc positions in her field. One was unpaid (!) and the other was even worse: the university wanted her to pay a fee for the honour of a postdoc position. Needless to say, she did not accept.
The soft money vs. tenure track / tenured positions is a huge difference in money, future, and security, and it is supprising to me how many future doctorate students don't understand the difference until it is too late. Next stop for many of those postdocs after the soft money runs out - teaching at a community college on semester contracts at a fraction of a university salary, probably not what they had in mind when they started their professional acedemic journey.
> (...) and it is supprising to me how many future doctorate students don't understand the difference until it is too late.
Oh don't be confused. I assure you each and every single one of the understands the difference very well.
What it seems you're not understanding is that to them it's not a matter of having picked the soft money track over the tenure track. No, that choice was never on the table. Their choice was between the soft money track and no track at all. Thus the ones who are fortunate enough to be in a position to choose will pick the soft money track in hopes that it puts them in a better position to transition to a tenure one.
> Certain fields, let's say, pure math, or history, until a professor retires or dies, there's just no spot for the people below even to compete for
Lots of research happens at government agencies, non-profits, museums, for-profit companies and international projects (e.g. ITER). As long as a grad student doesn’t insist on making faculty, they’re not necessarily constrained to a zero-sum field.
Yes, but the scope of the comment and article was just about the state of faculty path.
But it follows the same logic even if you bring in your point about other outlets. Those obey the same rules too. Unless government expands, museums grow, or some tech company has a need, there's also a finite set of jobs being competed for by an increasing population.
Some fields have it better. In biotech, computer science, engineering, etc. at least those are growing, viable, and profitable fields (and respected). In other fields, not so much. Not only do you not find a job easily, you get looked down upon for leaving the "pure" path, when in fact most people eventually have to face that future anyway.
I would interpret these values with care. My experience leads me to suspect that these numbers might be a textbook example of correlation does not imply causality. Just because you are employed it doesn't mean you are not underemployed or working in an entirely different field due to circumstances that have barely or no relation at all with your academic work. I mean, it's already a widespread stereotype of old graduate/PhDs in unrelated STEM fields pivoting to data analysis/ machine learning positions even when they did no work in the area.
And then there's the "just learn to code" cliche.
And I mean a PhD working at a McDonalds still counts as employed, right?
As long as a grad student doesn’t insist on making faculty, they’re not necessarily constrained to a zero-sum field.
But this is a life of hopping from low-paid job (supply and demand) to low-paid job every 2-3 years trying to build the connections and reputation to eventually hop back into academe. The alternative is getting out of "research" and becoming a normal employee, where noone even cares about your PhD or publications.
Hey, if this is your experience, then I suggest you take a step back and look at the world outside of academia a bit more carefully. I was a naive post-doc and wanted an academic job, but soon realised that it wasn't going to happen without years of hanging round in crappy roles. So I got out and didn't look back. I can assure you, there are plenty of "normal" jobs out there where people _will_ care about your PhD and the skills you learned while getting it.
And also, in some jobs, having a PhD puts you at a higher starting point even for the first job than other non-PhD holders, whatever the PhD. The mistake most PhDs make when going into the tech industry, especially when coming from non-traditional academia-to-industry fields (say, biology, genetics), is trying to shove down the throat of hiring managers or recruiters their specific papers or research, when they have zero relevance for the industry job they are applying to.
So, where is the competitive advantage? It is in the PhD itself (first), the methods that have been used and the skills acquired (second), maybe the volume of publications and the number of citations (third). Talking about research and papers is like trying to convince a potential partner that you are interesting and charming and lovable, when you are extremely good looking. Use what you have, not some idea on what other people should appreciate in you.
Well, they probably won't care about the PhD. In the circles I move in, it's just a piece of paper some people have and some people don't, kind of like stars on sneeches.
> As long as a grad student doesn’t insist on making faculty, they’re not necessarily constrained to a zero-sum field.
This assertion doesn't play out in the real world. A graduate student does not have exclusive access to these non-academic positions, nor is the skillset developed in the academic niche world applicable in non-academic environments.
In fact, the realization that graduates with an academic background underperform in non-academic settings is widely known, not to mention the negative impact that some soft-skill traits developed in academic environments have on their employability (for example, the false sense of entitlement).
while you are downvoted I think, there's a certain truth to your comment.
Imagine a corporate lab: there's trained researchers, as well as technical/lab staff (preferably with a solid apprenticeship). Now you have a 30 year old technician who worked in the field for >10years and in parallel did some community college BSc, so has at least some calculus, very basic mechanics and whatever domain-specific-science background there is. Both this one and a MIT grad apply for a technical, managerial position managing technical aspects of the lab/department.
I bet, today, the MIT grad is not too far behind, even if he has no idea of the social dynamics with all the people, skills in procuring stuff or even properly doing labwork. Great, not?
> No one in their sane mind would retire or give up their faculty position in this environment
Tenured professors who were already about to retire might consider the addition of Zoom to that one undergrad class they had to teach but always hated may very well retire earlier than they wanted. I know some people in other fields who pushed their retirement up a year or two because Covid made things worse in their industry.
You seem to imply that there is a general expectation among grad students that if they just keep at it long enough and do good work, they will become a professor one day.
Isn't that kind of a crazy assumption?
What's wrong with continuing your career as a researcher indefinitely? Or leave for industry/NGOs/public sector/politics/entrepreneurship if that's not what you want?
I'd think that the vast majority of people who enter grad school now don't do that with the intention do "climb up the academic career ladder", and if that is true, it doesn't need to be a problem at all.
There seems to be this assumption that it's desirable for everyone to always be progressing upwards in the institutional hierarchy.
I don't think all these people are as delusional as you imply.
I guess historically grad school was an apprenticeship for academic research and teaching. I don't think you "need" this kind of skills (working 4+ years on one thing with a very small team) anywhere else.
Nowadays, the excess of graduate students made this _the_ convenient signalling criterion for a lot of jobs (ML at FANG, liberal arts jobs (for which studying makes real sense - think museum curator, school curriculum development)). While this has been around for these kind of jobs for ages, the glut of PhDs, etc. effectively limits access to people being able to finance their PhD and having access to the required signalling from their undergrad. In the US in general and liberal-arts worldwide this effectively means that the aforementioned positions (of a certain power) are only available to the already privileged. If you get a rare living-wage scholarship or happen to live in certain parts of the EU, this can be quite ok though if you want to increase your signalling value and do something off the beaten path.
> You seem to imply that there is a general expectation among grad students that if they just keep at it long enough and do good work, they will become a professor one day.
That's because there is. It's not universal, but it's much more common than what would be healthy. And it's often incentivized by the professors and academic administrations (most with the best interest of the student at their hearth, but also delusional themselves).
> Isn't that kind of a crazy assumption?
Yes. That's what the discussion is all about.
> There seems to be this assumption that it's desirable for everyone to always be progressing upwards in the institutional hierarchy.
There is this generalized assumption that it's desirable for everyone to always be progressing upwards on whatever hierarchy they find themselves. Students happen to find themselves on the academic hierarchy.
It's not a healthy assumption in any circle. But the academics get the worst form of the problem for many reasons.
You are perfectly correct in thinking that an academic formation should primary lead into some innovation related career, or into some high complexity practical field. You are not correct in thinking that people are not delusional enough to be a problem.
> Certain fields, let's say, pure math, or history, until a professor retires or dies, there's just no spot for the people below even to compete for.
Sadly, 100% true in pure math. The worst part about it is that, you know those same 2 or 3 people who pop up in most of your classes? Yeah, they're your competition. Times every university that does anything in your specific subfield.
People doing their PhDs is one of the main ways in which actual research gets done. It’s a good in and of itself. Also, there are tons of research labs and other research positions that need PhDs.
Let's put things in perspective: tenure positions are seen as a kin of retirement: you do what you love and at your own pace, and are paid generously for the privilege.
The only impact of retirement is that you cease to be paid generously, and also you lose status.
That's essentially only necessary if you want grant money or want to be seen as a team player (and get promoted, and not have your colleagues be annoyed with you, etc)
That would be one of my professors from grad school. At the time I was there, his teaching load was 2 courses a year, or maybe 3? The only reason 3 is sticking in my head is because he teaches the course he literally wrote the book on, during the summer.
I spoke with a famous dean who told me, to the effect that, we have been instructed to focus heavily on candidates with the right gender and certain attributes (that you may imagine). Basically if you are not born in this pool, forget it.
By the way, politics has got really extreme. Networks are super important. I see a lot of local hires. In some places, they only hire their own students or swap with students at partner labs.
With these developments, I doubt funding academia is efficient allocation of public resources. I support cutting funds. This system will not produce science. It’s shocking how much money is spent, and how many people are in the chain, each outsourcing the problem to someone below, until a graduate student typically an immigrant will simulate something.
> I spoke with a famous dean who told me, to the effect that, we have been instructed to focus heavily on candidates with the right gender and certain attributes (that you may imagine). Basically if you are not born in this pool, forget it.
Posting this type of hearsay is kind of irresponsible. It’s so vague and suggestive. We don’t know who the dean is or where this happened but he’s allegedly famous (juicy!), and apparently he didn’t literally say this but said it “to the effect” (surely we can trust you interpretation), and we’re left to imagine the type of attributes that might give a candidate an edge. What are we supposed to do with this?
You then go on to cite this as a reason why academia is no longer an efficient allocation of public resources. As if academia has not long been a place with arbitrary gatekeeping. Have you noticed that until not that long ago female faculty in STEM fields weren’t that common?
I’m not saying diversity efforts are implemented well in all institutions. But criticism of these measures so often feel hollow. Any hint of the system favoring a different type of candidate and a certain pool of applicants (with demographics that you may imagine) suddenly start caring about truly equal treatment. Before, being a woman would automatically reduce your chances, but somehow that didn’t affect the credibility of these institutions. Suddenly now we care about whether they are a good use of public resources.
I'm pretty sure the Terry Taos of the world are still getting their pick of faculty positions, regardless of their "pool". The people who are being displaced, while certainly talented, are not indisputably more talented than the people who "are born in this pool". So it's probably not the case that we're missing out on any major breakthroughs.
> It’s shocking how much money is spent, and how many people are in the chain, each outsourcing the problem to someone below, until a graduate student typically an immigrant will simulate something.
That wasn't my experience - I've never seen anything like the politics I saw in an academic department in industry. It was one of the reasons I left as I got the distinct impression that you have to politic like mad to get ahead and that really didn't interest me.
UK rather than US though. You know what they say:
"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
Yes, I deliberately, though not disingenuously, failed to mention that part, for rhetorical effect. One should also note that UCSB has a much better math department than people might think.
In a detailed profile published in The New Yorker magazine in February 2015, Alec Wilkinson wrote Zhang "parted unhappily" with Moh, and that Zhang "left Purdue without Moh’s support, and, having published no papers, was unable to find an academic job".
I don't think it was being "born in the wrong pool" that caused him not to get a academic job immediately... hmm
The argument is always that the company can do whatever it wants with it's money but the scientist uses the public money. But this seems to be a giant flawed argument since neo-liberalism hands public money to companies without taking a breath.
I’ve also known pretenured faculty who have said, out loud, that they don’t like working with women because they work less hard. This did not prevent their tenure case from succeeding.
Regarding the politics, it's not surprising in the least.
There was some controversy earlier this month surrounding a significant change in the admissions process at the top public high school in San Francisco[1].
Historically, this school based their admissions process on academic performance; a student's standardized tests scores and GPA were the criteria used to determine whether they were accepted into the school.
As a result, the largest demographic were Asian American students. So affirmative action was put in place, so non-Asians who performed worse academically got admitted over Asians who performed better. Even with this race-based discriminatory policy, about half of the student body consisted of Chinese-Americans and the percentage continued to increase.
Now, the SFUSD school board has voted to change the admissions process to a lottery. They have effectively made it clear that academic achievement has no merit. They are prioritizing racial identity over education, and even have the audacity to claim that anyone who opposes this decision is racist[2].
So, yes, politics has indeed gotten very extreme in academia.
I spoke with a famous dean and he said that they don't look at gender or demographics at all and right-wing people like to lie on Hacker News.
Basically if there's a post about academia right-wing groups will try to stir up racial tensions anyway they can. But I'm a 100% serious a "famous dean" told me that.
I had applied to a school for a faculty position when I was a postdoctoral fellow. The application was not successful. The following summer I met the dean at a conference, asked about the position and complained.
Which is less awkward: telling someone they aren't as qualified as they think they are, or making up a story about some policy and saying your hands were tied by factors beyond either of your control?
You're saying this guy is a high ranking member of an organization completely embroiled in internal politics. Would such a politically savvy person have any qualms about lying to someone at a party?
I was very close to entering graduate school for a particular field as I was absolutely in love with the research. My teachers considered me to be very talented and were grooming me for the elite schools for said field. However, the more research I did the more I realized how much hot air was being blown and how much ego was involved. I chose to not add my own ego and voice to that self inflated hall and instead taught myself to code (painfully and reluctantly).
Coding isn’t my passion and I still love that field. However, I just couldn’t in good conscience participate in it as I knew my ego would drive me far too much.
Coding isn’t particularly pleasant, isn’t something I would do in my free time, but it is interesting, keeps me humble, and pays the bills.
I started noticing the hot air when I was in my doctoral program at the #1 school in my field.
It still took me 10+ years to change careers.
I erroneously thought that I could at least steer part of my field into a non-BS direction. Maybe someone could, but that someone was not me.
The good thing is that I had a lot of fun during that time, I learned a lot, and the money was quite good for a professor. That said, I often wonder think about what I could have done better.
I suspect that all sufficiently complex fields are extremely susceptible to fads, egos and cliques. It's the worst in humanities, since they deal with hopelessly complex subjects (i.e. humans), but even science can commonly become like this. Heck, even coding is like this, as we've probably all experienced in our jobs. With this in mind, my plan to retain my integrity is to leave fields with an intellectual component and live simply on much less.
> I suspect that all sufficiently complex fields are extremely susceptible to fads, egos and cliques.
I completely agree.
> With this in mind, my plan to retain my integrity is to leave fields with an intellectual component
That’s an interesting solution. Given my personality, I’m not sure it’s one I could do.
What I have done is transition to an area in which my skills can be
used to make money for me and others. It’s interesting that when money is involved, there are people who are willing to support less-than-trendy ideas.
> What I have done is transition to an area in which my skills can be used to make money for me and others.
Money is both good and bad. Thee bad part is that it attracts a ton of unsavory personalities, who will do anything to get ahead. In coding, it results in endless self-promoting, pushing unnecessary (or downright harmful) new tech and project ideas in order to gain a promotion, one-upmanship in code reviews etc. All that bullshit gets old fairly quickly.
The reality is that, in a complex environment, it's much easier to make money by doing some work and heavily manipulating people rather than doing good work and no manipulation. Hence, I want to exit complex environments as quickly as possible, which means distancing myself from society and modern economy as much as possible. It will probably mean living on $500-$700 a month, but hopefully the peace gained will be worth it. (Currently, it's still all in a fantasy stage, as I need to accumulate some more money via coding job to make the jump).
It's sad but true. The air of superiority around academia is the primary reason I decided not to enter it.
A friend of mine in academia at a pretty prestigious university put it bluntly - it's gatekeeping for rich people. She's the only one who came from less than wealthy upbringing of her colleagues. And because she doesn't come from wealth, she's often abused by others because she has no "leverage."
I like the idea of a PhD. But these days, so much good work is being done in the private sector, why bother?
I feel the pain of people that want to stay in science and do not want to move to software engineering. At the same time, at the end of the graduate school many people loose their passion for science. I would recommend these people to learn how to write code and move to industry. The demand for programmers is pretty high.
P.S. I got PhD in theoretical Physics at UC Davis, but moved to Bay Area for a Machine Learning job.
I love Physics, and can get back to it after retirement, but right now now I am paid well, and more flexible. I like that I can choose company and geography. Postdocs and faculty members do not have this luxury.
> I believe Physics and Machine Learning are really well aligned.
> First, the level of Math that you learn in Physics is a few decades away from what you use in modern Machine Learning. This makes the theory behind machine learning easy to understand.
> Second, and the most important is the mindset. In Physics, people are maneuvering between rigorous theory and actual data, trying to connect them sensibly. Machine Learning is very similar.
> I may be biased about the alignment of Physics and machine learning. Still, I know at least 20 Kaggle Grandmasters that have Physics majors.
The Science news article reports that new STEM faculty jobs are at about a third of what they were last year. Like they say, universities, especially big public ones have had their finances nuked by the pandemic and imposed hiring freezes. The other aspect isn't mentioned but I feel has to be the case, which is that if any faculty consider their retirement portfolio hurting they won't elect to retire. That was certainly true last Spring when they would need to initiate the process to retire and create an opening for this cycle.
I'm glad I'm only finishing my first postdoc. It really sucks for people who are at the end of their second postdoc (year six post-PhD), which is effectively the limit for faculty hiring or additional postdocs. For them this is really the worst timing for the one critical year in their perhaps 15 year run-up from entering undergrad.
> I'm mildly amused. When I was an undergrad TA, there was no shortage of disdain for undergrad 'vermin'.
It's no secret that graduates tend to suffer from a false sense of entitlement. However, that sentiment quickly goes away after their first half dozen job interviews.
I've seen many postdocs creating & recording online class material. I wonder if this will be used to turn some classes into recorded classes, reducing staff forever.
I've been lead staff on a course with pre-recorded lectures, pre-covid.
Teaching well is super labor intensive. Running a large-enrollment course is more like running a small business/group than most people realize. You need dozens of staff doing repetitive stuff that looks easy to automate from the outside but really isn't.
Teaching doesn't scale well, even in CS where things like auto-graders can do a lot of the work. And even in the most automatable set of CS courses (intro programming courses).
And teaching poorly has negative value add.
The original SICP recordings have been online for decades and are 100x better than some random post-doc's first attempt at teaching python. For that matter, CS50 has been online for years. For most students in most subjects, learning requires active teaching. Active teaching doesn't scale.
Just chiming in that your post matches 100% with what I've heard, seen, and read.
I'll add that it's one thing if some of the best self-motivated students are able to learn just by watching videos, submitting assignments, and seeing their autograde. It's another thing to expect this to work for 95% of the freshman class at Random University. Many will ignore the videos or not mentally engage, muddle through the assignments or cheat. Others won't have the meta-learning skills to identify where they're stuck and resolve the confusion.
So I'm not quite sure what you have in mind when you say "active teaching", but I completely agree at least with "interactive". At least the TA staff hours-per-student has to scale linearly. Professor time probably does too, but as you say, it's managerial.
> For most students in most subjects, learning requires active teaching.
I strongly disagree with this. I was homeschooled through high school and taught myself for most subjects during high school - my parents gave me textbooks and teacher's manuals, said "ask us when you get stuck," and I went to town.
That's largely how I approached college, too - attended lectures, did the assignments and read the textbooks.
That was a big mistake on my part - I could have gotten so much more out of my education if I'd really developed relationships with my college professors and worked with them more.
Nonetheless, I did manage to learn most of what was in my CS program that way.
I'm no genius, and I really think anyone with a normal brain can do what I did (given the time and resources to focus on study).
Is self-teaching plus active teaching better than self-teaching plus lectures? Absolutely. You'll spend far less time struggling and being stuck, and your teacher will be able to communicate new ideas directly to you so much better than they can to a whole crowd.
Nonetheless, I think for most subjects it just isn't actually necessary. It's a luxury, lovely when you can get it, but not required for learning.
It sounds like your homeschool environment prepared you very well for that style of learning in college.
> I'm no genius, and I really think anyone with a normal brain can do what I did
I'm a big believer that almost anyone is smart enough to learn almost anything if they are motivated and have the time and energy.
There are two problems. One is that people don't necessarily know how to learn (and we may not be good at teaching them this). The other is that schools have to meet students where they are -- not just in terms of smarts about the subject, but in terms of motivation and commitment level.
I also taught myself to program in 3rd grade and read the classics on my own as a child.
But also, I've taught thousands of students.
Your claim might be true in some abstract sense. I could believe that if we give all students personal tutors from a young age then most any student can learn how to learn on their own by age 10 or 15 or so. Having educated and involved parents certainly made that possible for me and I'm nothing special.
But conservatively 90% of students don't arrive at college ready for that level of self-directed learning. Consider e.g. that about half of college students are first generation college students.
Most online classes are just really crappy small scale closed MOOCs and most people are incapable of profitably completing a MOOC. Those who can, perhaps 10-15% of the population, are the same people who could have done reasonably well given a textbook and told to complete all the exercises and the test is in three months. Learning materials are not the limiting factor on learning.
This might be a good time to be in grad school to weather the storm for a year or two, and then benefit from the likely upswing afterwards (if someone is intent on academia). Unless a substantial proportion of colleges go bankrupt and the number of job seekers increase even more.
If you can afford to go to grad school without borrowing to do it, maybe that would be a good idea for some people. But this is probably a terrible, terrible time to bet on getting a well paying job in the future based on current degree programs (edit: by "bet" I mean for purposes of repaying student loans).
The pandemic has upended the economy and the economy was already something of a mess. We don't know what the future of work looks like and people are pretty bad at predicting the future under the best of circumstances.
Academic here -- this brings up something that I always like to spread the word about: Contrary to some apparently common perceptions, grad school, especially in the sciences, generally pays you rather than the other way around.
Things like professional masters degrees (incl. some engineering degrees) are likely to cost money, but in the sciences both MS and PhD should be fully funded at reputable universities -- either through TAing, your advisers grants, or if you're lucky, fellowships.
I'm 32 years old, and returning to school to finish my undergrad with the intention of grad school afterwards. A grad school salary is a starvation wage that would be tolerable if it were just me, not so much now that I have a family. Which is fine -- I'll pay my way though grad school and study part time. Thankfully my field of interest is one where this kind of arrangement isn't so unusual.
But I'm mainly responding with this because a lot of "perks" of schooling like this are structured assuming you followed a traditional path -- namely, you're 18-24, single, no dependents, not much in the way of actual, adult responsibilities. The more you deviate from that the more inaccessible grad school and school in general become.
You're definitely right about it being structured to assume you followed the traditional path. That said, top schools will pay grad students about the US median salary ($35k/yr). Other schools potentially much less. Whether the US median salary is itself a starvation wage is, I suppose, another question.
I have a relative at West Virginia University who is paid $32k while doing a bio PhD. Not a top school, not terrible money given the low cost of living.
This doesn't seem quite right to me. $35k seems like a big overestimate, outside of very high CoL areas or the richer private institutions. Top-ranked public institutions will offer more like $20-25k because they can get away with it due to prestige. Lower ranked schools seemingly have to offer more to try to attract students.
Here are the current grad student salaries at UC Davis [1].
A "Teaching Assistant" (AKA a grad student is TAing) is paid $45,138.00 per year, and a grad student who is currently paid out of grants earns between $42,729.00 for "Graduate Student Researcher - Step I" and $83,727.00 for "Graduate Student Researcher - Step X". I was slightly shocked, but this is the official salary scale. Granted, very few grad students are likely compensated at the upper end of that range, but still.
UC Berkeley [2] and UC San Diego [3] appear to be quite similar, so this is would seem to be somewhat representative of the UC system overall.
My own institution would seem to be actually lagging behind somewhat compared to this.
In any case, graduate student compensation has increased significantly in absolute terms over the past decade or two.
You were slightly shocked because you are misunderstanding the table. Those are FTE (full-time equivalent salaries). The actual students work at most 50% time (during the 9 month academic year), so get at most half the amounts listed there.
I remember being a Graduate student in math at UC Berkeley in the late 90s, and getting just over $13K/year - it sucked (and grad students were striking back then)! So I also took out many student loans, which worked out for me because my salary once I got a real job was enough to pay them back very quickly (as I was used to living on so little money). I was a grad student at NAU in Flagstaff before that and got under $9K/academic year...
there's gotta be something weird going on here. either they are rolling "tuition" waivers into this, or they are quoting salaries for 40 hours but the actual positions are paid at 20 hours (on paper).
as a more typical example, the University of Illinois offers somehwere around $22k to CS grad students (and it's one of the strongest CS programs in the world), and $20k to math.
I can confirm that $20-25k at top public schools is about right circa 10 years ago, and that $35k is currently about right at a top Ivy League (both for math).
I’m 32 and planning to attend a PhD program. I don’t have kids I am single and I’m fine living off a graduate student wage. I find research much more satisfying than what I’ve done in industry and am looking forward to the opportunity.
I discourage everyone from doing a PhD, but it sounds like you've made your mind up.
Be very careful with your choice of advisor and department, and if it isn't working, be ready to walk away--sounds like you have a career to go back to.
Having just finished a 10 year PhD stint, I second this advice. It is absolutely critical to have a supportive department, secure funding sources, and an advisor with whom you can work well. If any of those is not the case, it’s a recipe for a bad time.
If you can arrange to further your education without incurring new debt, furthering your education is the only way to be unemployed that has a pretty consistent track record of improving your future career and earnings.
But ability to arrange to do so without incurring new debt is very much a personal matter and depends on many variables, such as marital status, existing dependents, current debt load, existing health issues, etc.
A PhD -- especially in CS -- is not really best understood as "furthering your education" in the traditional sense. It's better understood as a paid apprenticeship in R&D.
It's preparation to become either a professor at a university or an independent researcher at an industrial/government research lab. It won't increase your lifetime earnings or job prospects, but it does open up doors to jobs whose primary allure is intellectual freedom rather than material reward.
If you don't go one of those two routes after a CS PhD, then a CS PhD has rather high negative expected value except in a few special circumstances (e.g., BS from NoName Branch Cappus to PhD from mit/cmu/stanford. But that's not the typical case for non-immigrants.)
Going to school where college is cheap and/or cost of living is low.
Testing out of classes.
Taking a job where your employer will pay for your education.
Living with relatives while attending school on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Different people work this out different ways. The exact details will vary tremendously.
I have done all of the above at various times. I have nearly six years of college and only ever took out one student loan for a boot camp style summer program where I completed a year-long certificate program in eight weeks.
Only if you're young enough and unattached enough to live off relatively small stipends. For a 35 year old with a family, that's not really an option. Retooling for a career change is very expensive, in time, money, and salary lost when you start on the bottom rung of the ladder.
I interpreted medymed's comment to mean it's a good time to already be in grad school. If that's the case then you likely don't have a family (for all the reasons you just mentioned). I don't think people are advocating now as a good time to switch from industry to grad school.
Correct, no change, not if you already have a job or the ready prospect of getting a new one. But if you were a regional manager overseeing a dozen restaurants in a now bankrupt chain, your job prospects aren't very good, and retraining a long upward hill battle.
It was never meant to be even close to competitive to a senior-level professional salary. Besides, to be competitive in academia, which is the actual end goal in mind for any student going through a decently ranked PhD program, the target demographic is not someone looking for a career change so late in life, nor would they even be admitted if they had no relevant research experience or potential.
You're absolutely right, but it seemed to me the context of the suggestion was that an economic downturn was a good time to go back to school if you were without a job, and that a good PhD program would pay you while you were in it. I was pointing out that such a thing wasn't an option for many people.
But who is getting 30k anyways? If that is the stipend of one grad student, you need to double it to get the household of two grad students, and then it is over the median household income. The median income is not poverty
Typical grad stipends outside of top-5 schools are closer to $20K.
$30K is damn close to an upper bound. That's what the tippy-top schools pay the top 1% of students. The few schools that go higher -- AFAIK in CS only NYC+Boston+CA -- are in markets where a single bedroom in a shared house runs $1K+/mo. And in that sort of rental market the federal poverty guideline is rote bullshit.
$16K is perfectly normal for the vast majority of folks who aren't at top 5 programs in the most in-demand field.
> But who is getting 30k anyways? If that is the stipend of one grad student, you need to double it to get the household of two grad students
Yeah but then you subtract child care and someone might as well stay home because it's literally costing them money to work.
>Typical grad stipends outside of top-5 schools are closer to $20K.
I am doing a PhD in Germany and get 54k €
The wage is regulated, everyone who has worked full-time at the university for a few years will earn the same. Although most grad students will earn much less, because most only have a part time position, and finish their thesis sooner.
In the first year without a full-time position, I was getting 20k €
>Yeah but then you subtract child care and someone might as well stay home because it's literally costing them money to work.
In Germany, child care costs between nothing and 500€/month depending on the city (e.g. in Hamburg it is free for 30h/week)
Pretty certain any type of engineering is a good bet. But you wouldn't have trouble finding an engineering job with just an undergraduate degree (possible exception of CS since there are not many junior roles).
I actually think it's not a great time to be in grad school in the sciences. With everything remote and on Zoom, you miss out on much of the networking that is so important if you want to stay in academia.
I place great value in the humanities, but from a practical jobs perspective they don't do a lot more than check the box marked "degree required" on a job application.
I'm all for people focussing on the humanities in their college career, but most should also be looking at a minor that gives them more concrete job prospects. Or reverse it, and minor in the humanity subject of choice.
This was the advice I gave my sister: one major for passion, one for future employment. I graduated during 2010 with a humanities degree, and while I loved the things I learned and did really well academically, I was auto-rejected from a lot of interesting job opportunities during a really shitty economy because I simply didn't have a resume that distinguished me from anyone else and said "this guy could be valuable." My sister studied something she loved but also tried accounting, realized she hated it, and switched to something else practical, which got her a great job right out of school and put her way ahead of me financially and career-wise. I would give the same advice to any young person. You may not love every single class you take, but the investment will pay off immensely in terms of overall lifetime happiness, financial security, and career growth. You might also discover some passion in an unexpected place. On the flip side, don't study only for practicality. College is one of the few times in life you will have total intellectual freedom to follow your curiosity without restriction. Don't squander it only learning a trade. Find some subject that piques your curiosity, practicality be damned.
It may not have returned to its previous high, but it definitely bounced back. I know people who were hired into positions that were frozen unfilled during the recession and subsequently reopened.
Tenure is a thing of the past in low-industry-demand fields (e.g., the humanities and some life sciences). Nearly all full-time jobs are instructor or ad junct. This has been true for years.
In CS and a few other fields (some applied math, biz, econ, finance), tenure is non-optional because universities can't pay.
Every single decent candidate in CS can make $300K minimum in industry, but even the absolute best universities cannot afford more than $150K at the asst. prof rank (maybe 200 at the very best but also highest CoL places and even then only for the tippy-top candidates).
NB: that's at the very, very best universities. The budget for a tenure line is closer to $65K or so at the vast majority of the country's ~1,400 colleges.
If you're competing with a FAANG offer and your budget is $65K, tenure is your only chip to play. And even then you'll be super lucky to get a halfway decent candidate.
Via industry I "run" a professor at a top university to direct their research (like partnership I think), on the advice of the board. In exchange I fund many of their students and the professor themself gets a sweet consulting gig with my company at exorbitant rates (and equity) to supplement their income. Not only that, but they almost turned us down, it sounded like they had their pick of industry projects and wanted to only do things that were highly paid in compensation and equity for their work.
That is to say, professor salary can be only part of the story.
Sure, I've also been on both sides of such arrangements. Suffice it to say that they're extremely rare and basically unheard of at the vast majority of the country's 1400 colleges, though.
1. Absolutely not. Some people enjoy teaching/research and interacting with students. The "life of the mind". It's true that even people who really enjoy that life are unlikely to take a $100K+ paycut for the lifestyle, but people willing to take that paycut in exchange for security do exist. See also: people who leave SFBA FAANG jobs to take "stable but boring" engineering positions in the south/midwest. Just because you're not on the corporate ladder climbing route doesn't mean you're incompetent.
2. Some people are extremely risk-averse and therefore value stability higher than the typical candidate. Often to a fault. Arguably sometimes not to a fault, though. Do you know how to perfectly price perpetuities or annuities and compare the long-term value of that investment to something more volatile? Because that's basically what this "tenure vs. industry" calculation amounts to. And it's not trivial -- undergrads and even masters students struggle with the math. Point is, most people don't know enough about finance to make rational economic decisions, or even if they do, choose values for parameters in the calculation based on personal anxieties because there's no perfect access to future ground truth. Do all the math and learn what you already knew -- the values of a few parameters determine what you should do. But those parameters are unknown and ultimately instantiated by your particular animal spirits.
3. But most importantly, consider the counter-factual. So what? What's the alternative? Pay better? You're a department chair at a tuition-dependent institution. Your budget is your budget. Paying better isn't an option. The best you can do is offer tenure and do your best to recruit the right type of candidate. But without tenure on the table you'll never recruit a competent candidate. Seriously, what competent person would take a less secure job for $100+K lower salary? So it's "try or die" in some sense.
If these alternatives aren't broadly available to every competent candidate -- so basically everything outside of CS and maybe a few other fields -- the dynamics change and you can ad junctify. And universities do ad junctify in those cases. See: the humanities.
So far the direct impact for me, a third year tenure-track prof: a one year extension to my tenure clock, an extension to my startup account, and optionally excluding this semester’s course evaluations.
Tenure jobs have been slowly eroding for decades as extremely underpaid adjuncts are brought in to fill the courses.
Actually right now though, many schools financially strapped from the Covid-19 hit they took are firing their adjuncts pairing back the amount of courses offered, and making tenured staff teach the courses (like intro subjects) normally reserved for adjuncts.
We've had a few pestilence-related retirements before the start of fall term, and so far the extra load has been distributed over existing faculty. Nothing has been advertised for Spring, perhaps for Fall, but the administration is waiting on enrollment figures. Not holding my breath.
I expect more adjuncts, less non-tenure-track teaching faculty and the same amount of tenured faculty, even at teaching institutions where tenure-track faculty members are not expected to bring in external funding. The caste system is as strong as always, and shit flows downhill.
A few comments (if memory serves from my earlier reading of this thread) the faculty job market is a pyramid. With the number of people exiting the pyramid being very high due to the few positions at the top.
Is there another structure that would encourage a less severe forced exodus of people while maintaining their jobs?
As an aside this pyramid seems to me to function a lot like the government with the leader/president at the top. Only the president has limited tenure. Should professors with tenure have a term limit too?
One thought. Find an adjacent domain that intersects yours, maybe an industry vertical, and develop a specialty aspect to your primary field. It can really be a differentiator and give you a fallback skilset and network should shit hit the fan.
The entire US university system is a joke. $40K/year for similar academics you get almost for free in Europe. Hundreds of universities who rely on foreigners who come to the US for studies for their survival. And most of these foreigners are only coming because they want to immigrate and student visa is an easy entry ticket.
Keep in mind that in many European countries, even if college is free, not everyone gets to go to it. In Germany, students are heavily segmented into tracks from an early point in their academic career, and if you're not in the traditional "college" track, tough luck: it's very difficult to get moved.
Honestly I don't know whether or not that's a better system. Whether students come out with a degree or a trade, they don't come out with debt. It's trading a degree of social mobility for economic gains, but in the US you can find yourself left out of either choice.
As for cost, $40,000 is the typical private school. Absent the top tiers, there's no reason to pay that price over a public University, where tuition in most states hovers around $10k per year. And if you do 2 years of community college first and finish up at a 4 year school, you can cut the average cost per year down to something like $7k.
Part of the student debt crisis are families making poor economic choices. Choosing the massive debt of a private school, or paying and extra $12k per year to live in a dorm "for the experience". That's how you run up $100,000 in debt before you even get a job. Don't have the money without taking out loans? Stay local, commute, find friends that live on campus and crash at their rooms every once in a while. College is expensive partly because our society treats it as a right of passage rather than an educational experience.
> paying and extra $12k per year to live in a dorm "for the experience"
This is disingenuous, as there are many universities that do require first year students to be on campus, with limited exceptions.
> Part of the student debt crisis are families making poor economic choices.
Sure, but the impression most families and arguably American society at large have (which is a mix of truth, "belief", and maybe self fulfilling prophecy) is that the more prestigious schools, which also tend to be private, will land you a better job by virtue of the name or networking. It's harder to turn down an opportunity with that in mind, especially as student debt is hard to really grasp the magnitude of as an 18 year old never having dealt with that much money.
There's a state college in almost every city that you can commute to. It's not disingenuous to talk about forking an extra $12k a year "for the experience".
> Part of the student debt crisis are families making poor economic choices.
I am not sure families are the ones to blame here. Astronomical tuition and loan interests that cannot be forgotten in bankruptcy is a predatory combo.
In the European countries you mention no student start their professional like with $50k-100k in unforgivable debt.
Parents and their children choose these astronomical loans when there are much more affordable options. Every student coming out of a mediocre private school with $120,000 in debt could have received the same education for less than a third of that. They're absolutely sharing a large portion of blame when they make that choice.
What? A predatory system isn't predatory because poor, uneducated people should make better decisions? That is exactly why the European systems don't have gotchas.
The US system sells dreams that don't come true, and you blame them for believing that they can do better in their life than their parents by getting an education? Absurd.
The gotcha in the German university system is studying 4-5 years and then dropping out without degree, because there is very little support and a culture of expecting knowledge and not teaching knowledge, which hits underclass students the hardest.
> In Germany, students are heavily segmented into tracks from an early point in their academic career, and if you're not in the traditional "college" track, tough luck: it's very difficult to get moved.
I heard the last part is changing thanks to "Gesamtschulen" (schools with all 3 tracks and a way to switch after you finish your track).
But anyway, it’s not as if that’s the only way. Vocational training is another way to go to college.
Not just the west, plenty of states in the country have excellent public universities that are extremely affordable, and even more so when you go to community college for the first two years. I graduated with a degree in computer science from a pretty good state school a for around 14 grand in debt. My wife has 3 degrees and has no debt now. My student loan payments were 200 dollars a month, pretty affordable.
"Pedigree", and other terms used to refer to the same concept, are nothing more than the reflection of the track record of an institution regarding scientific quality and training.
"Pedigree" also reflects a pre-screening of candidates with regards to academic and technical potential.
It might be true that I won't become the next Niels Bohr if I attend the same universities he attended or lectured in, but let's not fool ourselves into assuming that you'll learn the same from a course taught by amateur underperforming lecturers than what you would from a course taught by nobel laureates to a room of top-performers.
I don't think the quality of the lecturers matters that much. It's all about the students for me: good students create an environment and expectations that drive the whole thing. An excellent teacher isn't going to drag average students to amazing, but conversely a decidedly average teacher will not make amazing students average.
Also, I am not convinced your average Nobel laureates is a particularly good teacher. If anything, from experience, research focused professors often see teaching as a chore and it has a clear impact on the quality of their teaching. If we're talking about teaching calculus 101, I'd much rather have a no-name professor who is a good pedagogue and loves teaching than a Fields medal winner.
Of course, in reality, the fact you were taught by $famous professor is probably more valuable than what you actually learned in the class.
> than what you would from a course taught by nobel laureates to a room of top-performers
Do you really think you're getting a full course taught by a Nobel Laureate? Do you really think the room is full of top-performers? Sure, the average might be better than a state college, but not much better (with some exceptions, surely)
> $40K/year for similar academics you get almost for free in Europe.
It helps to recall that taxes pay for this 'free' service. American tuition has risen pretty much in lock step with state funding cuts, which itself is often motivated by a combination of partisan politics, constitutionally mandated balanced budgets, federally prohibited bankruptcies, and negative economic shocks.
> $40K/year for similar academics you get almost for free in Europe.
If you pay $40k a year in the US and think that you are paying for an education, then, yes, you will be disappointed.
For schools at that price point, you are paying for the network. Whether the network delivers or not is a different issue — sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s very context-specific.
Without the university system we'd just be Saudi Arabia though.
It's just a matter of time until we nationalize everything and finally get a modern system. It's inevitable, the US university system just isn't competitive anymore for actual US citizens.
State schools provide adequate education and are affordable. I hope the same people who introduced federal student loans don't decide to nationalize the education system because the former was an absolute disaster.
If the European university systems are so great, why are their results so horrible?
Where's the great wealth, economic growth, high productivity, and high incomes? The majority of Europe is languishing very badly and it's getting worse by the year.
> $40K/year for similar academics you get almost for free in Europe.
It's not free at all, and everyone knows it's not free.
Let's see you do the final tally, which includes income across a lifetime vs tax rates.
Europeans pay epic taxes in part for that 'free' college. The US middle class pays very low taxes by comparison. That has to be factored into the equation.
The US middle class is richer than the middle class in: Sweden, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Greece, Poland and Czechia among numerous others.
The US median wealth figure is comparable to Norway.
I think it's important to restate that: the US middle class is richer than the middle class in Sweden, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands and Denmark - you know, just four of the supposedly best off nations in world history.
So where are the great results for that non-free education?
I would much rather pay an equivalent amount for university (and healthcare and so on) through taxes rather than through debt. Having debt introduces risk and makes me fragile in a way that taxes just don't.
What if you get in a bad car accident? Your kids have to go to university, right? Oh, and any decent public school comes with an equivalent tax burden. What about public transit? Also no access to cheap, fresh food... something that these "undeveloped" countries all have. The list goes on...
A middle class Dutchman is way better off than a middle class American. I am so glad I left the USA for the promised land.
Enrollment is down ~ 20 % this year at my regional institution, even at community colleges, which usually experience an upswing in enrollment during recessions enrollment is down. Even at top-100 institutions, like the University of Vermont, enrollment is down ~ 20 %. Must be a good year to get into Harvard or Stanford. There's also the secular trend of decreasing student numbers, the echo of the baby boom is wearing off.
It's bad. Neither party has a political response to the coronarecession, public institutions had their funding cut severely because states can't print money, they have to balance their budgets. Private institutions will drop dead like bogflies. Ordinarily one wouldn't cry for any of the many low-ranked sectarian colleges that will bite the dust, but their faculty will compete in the labour market.
And no political response is to be seen. Traditionally, under Democratic leadership the science budget is bigger, but we haven't heard anything about that from the incoming Harris-Biden administration. It's really bad and makes you want to vote Republican because of protectionism and reduced immigration.
I believe you are wrong that there would be no response from democrats, and that republicans might be better. Democrats will fund education traditionally, and that hasn't changed. They are the ones pushing to give federal funding support to keep state and local governments operating and reduce potential massive cuts. The republican senate is strongly against this direction; the president wants to give unemployment boosts but doesn't want to help 'blue states'. He's not too keen on education either.
I agree the situation is terrible and private colleges should be dying off rapidly.
"Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has rolled out campaign proposals over the past month that include major increases in federal R&D spending, with a focus on clean energy and emerging technologies."
Everyone wants to see firm commitments on the NIH and NSF budgets. The article here is just wishy-washy with bits of social justice thrown in. It's not what's required, we need industrial policy.
Universities became bloated over the decades as federally guaranteed loans ballooned and tuition creeped ever upwards. Assistant to the Assistant Dean of Water Aerobics positions multiplied.
Now universities have to operate like a business. Revenue is down and isn’t going to come back for a long time. Consolidation for the lucky and bankruptcy for the unlucky. Honestly it’s a good thing to happen, the sector produces way too much nonsense (we don’t need more papers on 19th century fiction authors that no one reads but other academics) and costs far too much. Society simply doesn’t need this waste anymore with the internet able to provide esoteric knowledge to the masses for free.
I’m fine with my tax dollars funding fundamental scientific research, but an online study group can enable people to study the classics and debate what it means to be a good person. A lot of these majors should not be funded by the state anymore.
Those papers you deride aren't what college professors mostly produce. What they should produce are citizens via the study of what great minds have thought in the past. The increasing narrowness of scholarship has destroyed the liberal arts.
Totally agree, but I also think the same curriculum can be provided at a fraction of the cost of a 4 year degree. We can produce thinking, reflective people for less than $200k in tuition.
State schools FTW; if you are the top 5% of your average state school, you are going to match the top 5% of your Ivy League students. Make sure you are taking advantage of all the opportunities that the state schools offer, push yourself a bit more than you think you can, and you will be prepared for whatever career path.
Plus, you’ll have the added benefit of a chip on your shoulder wanting to prove you are as good as those colleagues that paid 200k.
Dunno... an english professor where I went to college listed his primary research on his faculty website as “determining from the writings of Mark Twain whether he was gay”. I often wonder how much of my tax dollars went toward that. On the whole I have a low opinion of the “english” department, since they get to study a blend of communication, philosophy, psychology, history and so on without ever contributing concrete advancements to any of those fields. For instance, it took all of one month of my first job before I realized that the essay format was a completely ineffective way to communicate (tl;dr) and learned a completely new bullet-point-driven style that would actually deliver ideas to the intended recipient. I taught myself; it would have been nice if the people who study communication for a living actually knew the best way to communicate ideas to others and could have taught me that. Instead they basically taught me the most artistically pleasing way to communicate with other english majors. I’m also generally irked by the english major attitude that there are no wrong answers and every interpretation is equally valid. This attitude prevents them from ever making useful advances at anything.
The science departments produce even more nonsense that nobody reads or cares about. It's hard to tell in advance. Plus you want a strong research culture even if not all of it is directly productive.
I also think people tend to underestimate the positive externalities of the humanities departments. (Nobody reads academic history mostly, but the existence of historians makes bullshit claims more difficult.)
I think your proposed study groups would work at first, but eventually wouldn't be able to sustain themselves as the scholarly communities providing the background vocabulary and paradigms you need to even have a conversation collapsed.
I might go even further and suggest that a strong research culture implies not everything will be productive.
I swear somewhere here or elsewhere I read a story that one of the major quantum computing contributions that accelerated the field was essentially the result of a faculty member spending several years doing nothing but teaching and thinking about the problem, with no grants or anything but salary. Maybe it's a myth or I'm misremembering it though; I've tried searching for it (to confirm or disconfirm my memory) with no luck because of the volumes of irrelevant results.
Also, history is an interesting example, as it seems one of the first sets of experts everyone seemed to turn to with all the events of the last few years are historians. "What happened with previous pandemics?" "How did past pandemics effect economics of the time?" "What did people do then?" "Is this the first time this situation occurred?" So forth and so on. The more "unprecedented" the problem the further back in history people will look for precedents and guidance.
It also seems implausible to me that the same sorts of history research could happen by hobbyists as happens at universities, just due to time and funding constraints.
There's a lot of problems in academics at the moment, at least in the US, but I think 2/3 of it is actually coming from outside those in the field (pick your field). Administration problems, federal incentives, state incentives, private incentives (yes, corporate management requiring useless degrees or offloading employee training elsewhere to decrease investment costs and its consequences) etc etc etc
I agree there is a ton of BS produced in science as well, but if we are making a pecking order then I would defund hard science last.
I still don’t see why there should be no creativity. Left to their own devices the university system has produced worse product at higher prices for decades. The time has come for innovation.
i think you are failing to see the value — much of what the academic community produces is a public good.
i agree there are huge problems with higher education, but I think if all humanities departments were disbanded as you suggest, you would miss them after they were gone.
Look at how terrible and shallow a lot of journalism and popular nonfiction is. Imagine if that was the highest level of thought available on most topics. Nothing but Medium posts forever.
You are asking me to debate a straw man - “The only alternative to $200k a year to study English is no humanities at all”. I think if universities were forced to innovate, the same value and product can be provided at a vastly cheaper price.
We shall see if I’m right, as there aren’t any alternatives.
The tuition prices are because of market forces. Ivy league schools created brands and market themselves across the world causing huge (not very justifiable) demand, together with their lobbying for the structure of tuition loans this situation was created.
Universities shouldn't be judged as businesses, it's the exact opposite of their reason for existing. You need freedom and leisure not tied to economic pressure to do research and create a reflective infrastructure for humanity.
It was always subsidized by the ruling class, be it a king, or the society via taxes in democratic times.
The thought that everything is a business and should be analyzed as such is just shortsighted and lazy thinking.
i think it might just be a misunderstanding then — i assumed no state funding of the humanities would mean completely eliminating those departments at public universities.
Federal money was just one of basically 3 co-equal causes for tuition inflation. The other 2 are 1) drastic reductions in states funding their state colleges As a result of that, there's 2) the arms race to have the newest and shiniest facilities and amenities for students so they can compete to raise enrollment and get more revenue.
online study group can enable people to study the classics
An online study group can replace Shackleton Bailey? That's just nuts. Literature requires deep study (and perhaps we shouldn't foist it on every last kid seeking a paid career in nursing, but that's a different topic).
The amount of admin jobs in universities is many times what it was ten years ago. In my last uni, the tek support staff was calculated to be 50% over what was required. The reason was that a large proportion came into work and did the bare minimum to scrape past a performance review. This was a calculated ploy on their behalf.
Elsewhere, somewhat pointless positions and departments abound. On a whim, a HOD bought a massively expensive 3D milling machine. For an undergrad Product Design program? Crazy. Of course, we had to hire a dedicated person to operate it. Also, tons of 'quality assurance protocols' require another layer of staff to oversee and manage.
Several months after they eliminated all open positions and stopped contributing to 403b funds (at least for staff), the University president sent out a self-congratulatory note about how they'd scored a coup by recruiting the CFO/COO from Johns Hopkins to replace the retiring Executive VP.
Oh and nearly all of the austerity measures put in place back in 2008 are still in effect despite them being "temporary" (caps of 1% on annual cost-of-living increases, no more than a single merit raise per department per college per year, no new positions created without highest-level approval, etc).
Some states do something like this. New York, for example, has the SUNY System, and while schools are semi-autonomous, there's a certain amount of centralized resource sharing that leverages economies of scale.
I work in Ed Tech, and a quick mental run down of a few examples seem like states with that sort of system often have cheaper tuition.
Would be interesting to see a more detailed breakdown, as in STEM vs "underwater basketweaving" faculty. Could be that schools are trying to shed some dead weight and using COVID as an excuse to do so.
Isn’t the fundamental problem here that old people are living a lot longer than we thought they would? So you have granted tenure (and pensions and retirement) to people who are gonna seek it for longer than you thought they would so you don’t have place and money for younger people. The same thing applies in the job market, where there is literally no place for someone hired in the last decade or two to grow in management because no one above them in the hierarchy is retiring. Then you have government jobs that are paying out pensions for way longer than anyone expected them to.
Over and above this the the government will not dare to cut any policies that would adversely affect old people because they are the only age cohort that votes reliably. What they will try and do is mess around with social security, which, ironically, is one of the few programs that both predicted the baby boomer issues and accordingly created a trust fund to handle that and is actually paid for.
All these costs are being picked up by younger generations and all they get in return are the olds complaining about why they can’t just do a part time job to pay for their college degrees like they did in the 60s (nvm that the changing pricing and salaries mean students today could work multiple full time jobs and not be able to pay their college tuition without loans while the boomers complaining could pay their college fees with their weekend burger flipping positions with no debt).
My sister-in-law works as an adjunct at a local college. A few professors have retired as a result of COVID concerns (they’re back in person). Instead of hiring new faculty, drawing from any of the pool of long-standing adjunct staff, they’re instead just replacing them with more, new adjuncts.
I expect the future of American colleges and universities will follow this trend, where bloated administrations preserve their position and make the academic labor more and more precarious.
It's a common trend because adjuncts can easily work near or below minimum wages when factoring in time commitments and nature of the job.
It's not just universities and tenured professor positions, businesses are attacking labor and pushing hypercompetitive behavior on labor everywhere because it's become common acceptable business practice now.
Many of these trends you see have been going on for quite some time, COVID has really just acted as an accelerant on the dumpsterfires raging through our country.
When I worked at a research corporation connected to a university, one of the deans asked me to adjunct a few times. I checked the comp and it was laughable. I could make more money and have less stress and overtime working at a stable minimum wage position and this was for a doctoral position. The problem is, for some people it's the only option or the best option for their career.
It was inevitable. Higher education has become an escalator for the wealthy. The value of the advanced degree has lost the shine it once had.
Education as a whole is due for a massive realignment. Courses can largely be taught online and at a fraction of the cost. Fitting butts into expensive seats and selling pricey books that are constantly re-written is not sustainable.
You do understand right, that the faculty system relies on a pyramid of people entering and leaving the system? And only a certain fraction getting to the top, and people having to vacate the top of the pyramid for anyone else to get there? (for stable, or in other words, stagnant fields)
When the US was in a college-building phase (funded by economic stimulus / public programs), all these posts were new and empty, waiting to be filled. So it enabled a generation of new professors to fill those ranks. As that became stable, now instead of a fresh pyramid you fill with eager people (who think that's still how easy it is), you have grad students and postdocs seeing who can outlast each other (or publish more) to get to the top through attrition or publishing prowess.
Certain fields, let's say, pure math, or history, until a professor retires or dies, there's just no spot for the people below even to compete for. That's why you see people going to Asia, Middle East, etc. where the new money and universities are. Follow the money. I mean this is pure population pyramid, demographic stuff that you can predict. You almost don't even need to know the student's thesis topic to say what chance he/she has of becoming a professor.
And Covid put all this on hold now -- or at least the departure end of the pyramid. No one in their sane mind would retire or give up their faculty position in this environment. And colleges can barely bring in enough revenue to maintain their classes, let alone expand some department. And yet you see stories of more students going into grad school for this limbo period.
Joining the climb up the ladder -- it's not going to end well. Or, it's going to be even worse than before, I'm guessing.