IMHO the big problem in experimental sciences is what the article kindly describes as power imbalances. I'd call it perhaps neofeudalism.
I've seen many cases where principal investigators / professors are completely disconnected from research, including an absolute lack of any basic knowledge related to the field. They are just middlemen. For someone coming from pure mathematics, where professors routinely come up with great results themselves, this was incredibly shocking.
Those I've met who don't know much always run the same scheme. They have a few postdocs doing all work and writing all grant proposals, but never getting their names on them. They always work towards some vague promotion that never comes. Whenever they obtain any good result, the professor or principal investigator will take all credit. Usually they will get diluted quickly, by simply pushing follow up experiments to others.
Bell Labs, MRC LMB and Cold Spring Harbor were somewhat successful in preventing this kind of middlemen behavior. Among other things, they banned anyone from supervising more than 5 people. It worked.
Outside of a class, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked for any feedback about a professor, program, or department, neither as a grad student nor postdoc. If I were king of academia, I’d make this an important part of hiring and funding decisions.
Right now, individual fellowships to grad students and postdocs are scored, in part, on the “training environment” but weirdly, research grants to a professor (to hire grad students and postdocs) are not. This would be an easy thing to flip. Faculty applicants could submit a letter from a trainee as part of their package too.
For me, doing a postdoc would mean relocating regularly, my wife having to find new jobs with me (a big stress point for her), a huge amount of job insecurity, etc.
By not doing a postdoc, I’ve been able to find a permanent job that pays significantly more, buy a house, and actually start to think about starting a family, which is more important to me.
I think if you’re single and male then it’s OK but it’s not surprising for e.g. that there are underrepresented groups in some fields of science at lectureship level when they basically have to sacrifice any stability in order to get to that position. I grew up quite poor and do not want to get into that position again - and I can’t afford to not have a job gap for 4 months which is the sort of length I’ve seen friends endure while one contract ends and another starts.
I'm finishing my PhD in the next couple of months, and am fortunate enough to have a fiancée and a house. I interviewed for one postdoc and found myself hoping I wouldn't get it because it would mean living apart for a few years, or else uprooting our lives and moving across the country, only to repeat the process in a few years' time, with no guarantee of ever finding a permanent position.
I'm completely lost now, I have no job lined up and no idea what I'll be doing with my life in 3 months' time, but I do know I'm getting out. I love science, I love the research I do, but it's not a steady career. It's nice to hear someone else who feels the same way - inside the academic bubble, anything other than giving your life to the broken system is seen as failure.
On the other hand how can you become an experienced researcher if you just work in your own bubble? By spending time in other places, you see different ways of working, thinking, organization, approach to problems, focus etc.
It looks like as college has become standard that everyone "needs" or even "deserves", we are getting to the point where academic positions should also be handed out on a basis of some social distributive program.
Yes it's hard to do and involves sacrifices. But not everyone needs to do it. It's not immediately obvious that we gain a lot by opening the gates wide and accommodating any life choices to be compatible with any prestigious careers. Artists and scientists used to do this kind of traveling around and being under the patronage of various rich people or institutions. It isn't clear that making it into a steady stable job with orders of magnitude more people chipping away at it incrementally has brought proportional results at all.
If it's not for you, why not find something that is?
I postdoc'd for 4 years, then was an instructor for another 3. When I finally got out of academia, my life became so much better. So much more: money, stability, free time, choices, advancement opportunities! Research science is absolutely a broken system and you should strive to exit as soon as possible.
A long time ago the best talent from PhD programs tended to stay in academia. That was considered the “prize.” Over the last 15 years or so the tables have really turned. Not saying top people don’t stay, but I now see much if not most of the top talent continuing their careers in the private sector or elsewhere. We’re in an era where the most cutting edge and impactful research increasingly does not take place at academic institutions. Between that and the vastly different compensation structures in the private sector it’s not too surprising top people want to go elsewhere.
As someone mentioned to me recently “Success in academia is defined by publishing papers mostly read only by a few other people that define success as publishing papers. Success outside academia is defined by doing amazing $&@! that has a measurable impact on the world.”
That's a bit biased. I could argue the other extreme by highlighting the quest for truth aspect in academia, the freedom from market influence and safety to pursue wherever the interesting research takes you etc.
Contrast that with working at an adtech giant to increase measurable engagement by applying some amazing $&@! that make users addicted and miserable, your workers burned out and the upper classes even richer. Or work on some prototype that never gets in the hands of users, either because it's just a PR stunt pet project for a higher-up or it gets killed off for internal company politics reasons.
You can pick your narrative by picking which academic and industry position to focus on. You can do awesome stuff at both and be miserable at both.
The top of the top usually do both at the same time. They spend part time at a top university, but also advise top companies with top research groups.
You are confounding two things. The impact of research and the impact of the researcher.
Increasingly more research is done in publicly funded academia, not the opposite at you claim. OTOH the relative impact of individual researchers has gone down, but this is mostly due to problems being tackled being increasingly harder.
In industry you can have relatively more impact because you are not doing research but you are building things using knowledge somebody has already collected for you. Maybe that is what you wanted to say.
I’m a staff scientist and watch post docs and students get ground up into grant fodder in a regular basis. Sure there are discoveries but at what cost to our mental health?
I think there are two politically convenient roles to academia: (1) allow a country to posture about money is has to spend, case in point are EU flagships which everyone agrees is a big waste but it puts EU on the map, research wise. (2) it keeps smart, will to power people occupied far enough away from real society problems such as racism, climate change, poverty and so on, to stabilize the status quo. Imagine what would happen if people who can do 80 hour weeks churning through genetic data to generate new insights (or similar for different fields) started working in earnest on evidence driven policy change?
I think these roles are more explanatory for the funding of science than the discoveries themselves.
a) I don't think the overlap between postdocs (especially STEM) and those that would work in politics is all that high. I think the vast majority would be working in tech/industry.
b) if this were true we might expect republicans to support government funding for academia over democrats, and the opposite is true.
I don't think the claim in 2) is that they'd necessarily be in politics. It's that they might be way more productive than incentive structures currently permit.
The academy can encourage social climbing, pointless competition, and careerism to the detriment of intellectual honesty, sane policy, and good science. Academic institutions can be moral mazes just like other public or private organizations.
As for (a), I agree that a lot would not be in politics but, if you have seen it first hand, academia sucks the life and minds of out of early stage researchers in a way that other jobs do not. The salary means they are comfortable enough not to complain and no time for it anyway.
This seems to be a common misconception that the slow progress in politics (whatever that means depends on your own political compass) is purely due to the lackluster presentation and evidence finding for policy changes. If the past years have shown anything it's that preconceived notions and ideologies are very hard to change even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
I hope you'll forgive me ranting, but it's almost exactly a year ago since I left academia (was a postdoc), and I'm feeling very down about it and need to let out some thoughts.
First the positives: academia has some amazing qualities. If you "make it" (or, alternatively, until you "fail" and drop out) you'll spend most of your time working on problems that you are truly passionate about. The kind of problems that you can't stop grinding over in the back of your head anyway. You get peace and quiet and a paycheck to sit and work on those all day. To me, doing this for life is an absolute dream!! Maybe a student two help you out. And then you get to travel the world and speak to other people who are equally passionate about this or similar problems.
Yes there's teaching too. But unless you hate that, it's not a big downside. I for one enjoyed it. I've heard horror stories of the american teaching burden though, so maybe it's different if there's too much of it. And yes there's grant application pressure. Maybe I speak from too European a perspective, but I absolutely loved almost every week (every day would be an overstatement) of my 4 years as a postdoc. Every day I miss it.
But the instability was killing me. I had the kindest most wonderful boss who shielded me from most of it, and in the end gave me 4 years of peace and quiet, and would have helped me go anywhere next. But I couldn't take the repeated uprooting. I wasn't good enough for a permanent position yet, or rather - not good enough for one in a place I could possibly imagine living - and forced uprootings crush my mental state.
So I gave up.
I don't wanna sound bitter. Hats off to those who make it. Truly! But the system has become so selective for a few "types" that I worry about its health:
- Incredibly bright people. This is obviously good.
- Incredibly hard working people. This is good, to a point. Not if the norm becomes giving up your life.
- People who'll accept any terms. Not good, this is a slow march towards serfdom.
- People who are fine with complete instability. I think academia is missing out on a lot by selecting for these.
I've just accepted a semi-permanent professorship after being a postdoc for several years. I've had a handful of grants accepted and the vast majority not -- some schemes have a <2% success rate (with applications coming from the best people on the planet) and the thing that just kills me is how the 'peer review' of grants tends to be "do I like you or not". I've been outright told that unless x- or y- is on the grant, it won't get funded. And, irritatingly, those complaints are right. I'm faced with the daunting -- but exciting -- prospect of trying to somehow be one of those academics who people do not hate. I very much think that the pressures are there on both sides; they're different, but being a postdoc does just suck for everything aside from the work – I think I was on my 13th short term contract (three of them 3 months or less!) before getting a permanent post. Naturally, this post is in a different country from my friends, family, and partner. I signed the paperwork last week. It's been three days and I desperately miss my partner -- who is also an academic -- and the cat.
One (tenured) professor I knew left to go and work for his spin-out full time in industry. He told me that his belief was that academia was so bloody awful because it was a luxury: society wants you to continue to justify your existence sitting around and thinking every few years, whereas in a company, the $/€/£ is all the justification needed. I'm not sure to what extent I agree with that, but it's definitely plausible.
The best of luck to you! And remember that the grass tends to look greener on the other side. At least you're on the side from where it's pretty easy to jump the fence if you should decide to – the other way around is a different story.
> If you "make it" (or, alternatively, until you "fail" and drop out) you'll spend most of your time working on problems that you are truly passionate about.
I wonder to what extent this is correct. I heard professors saying they can do actual research only in their free time. Rest of the time is managing, administration, teaching, attending various committee and so on...
Early postdoc is probably the sweet spot for (individually) working on what you love.
As you become more senior, responsibilities start to accrete around you. You can make more progress on something, but you start to do so by supervising others and writing grants to make it happen, rather than just doing the work yourself. This can be satisfying, but can also devolve into endless paperwork.
I've heard similar stories from the US. In the European countries I'm familiar with, tenured staff certainly have time to do research. More of that research happens through student supervison than directly, perhaps, but still.
I’m currently writing my dissertation and still debating whether to stay in academia or not. I mean, even if I had not been academically unsuccessful during grad school I will get a piece of paper saying "You have a PhD" in the end. If you fail during your postdoc you are left with basically nothing. That’s a huge burden.
I have a PhD. The acquisition of that certification was perhaps the most meaningless thing of my life. Behind my Bachelor's by far. No one was really proud of me, and I only finished it because I have a problem with not finishing things. Finish it if you have it in you, cut it loose if you do not. Dr. means nothing, and no one in the real world will care either way.
Quite the opposite for me. It gave me the needed time and open-ended-ness to play around with methods and tackle problems in a way that best suited and interested me.
The things I learned during my PhD makes my bachelor’s and master’s subjects seem almost worthless.
Yes, of course one can do that and it’s probably the most reasonable strategy (as opposed to another postdoc, for example). But then, what was the point of the postdoc? I’d rather move earlier into industry. It’s ultimately a gamble.
My suggestion - never do a job just because it might lead you a better place. It probably won't.
Fair enough - a lot of the time people have to take bad jobs. If you can't move due to family, if the economy is bad or if you have no leads for some reason you have to take what you can get.
But if you can pick, pick something you actually want to do, if that leads to great things - wonderful. If it doesn't three years of your life isn't up the chute.
These may be the last three years of your life. Remember that.
To continue to develop as a researcher and build up your research skills, publication portfolio, and network, ready to move into industry.
If you do an ok PhD you could spend a couple of years as a postdoc refining that research and building on your foundation to really making a name for yourself and then apply to industry at your peak into a senior position.
It varies by field, but in my experience companies value experience in academia at about 1/2 the rate of experience in industry. So someone who spent five years in grad school getting a PhD and then spent another three years as a postdoc might be considered the equivalent of someone with four years of experience in industry. If you are going to leave academia anyway it is much more efficient to do it as soon as possible.
It does depend on the role though. If the company is hiring someone who is a world expert in your specific research subject it makes sense to have stayed to become the world expert. But I think that's unusual. Much more commonly people leave academia and go into more generic "data science" type roles in which case extra postdoc years don't really help you.
Of course if you enjoy the research and don't mind the opportunity cost then there's nothing wrong with staying.
Really insightful comment, I completely agree. It also has to do with the resources available in industry that increases the time value. You can get so much more done in industry because you have larger budgets and tighter timelines. The beauty of academia is it allows you time to ponder. So yes, it's less efficient but you typically find serendipity on the long way home compared to taking highway.
This is not a great idea, unless you’re sure the specific expertise you are building will get you a job.
In tech, we typically hire PhDs and postdocs in at the same level. Sure, you’ll probably advance a little faster with experience from a postdoc, but not faster than if you started straight out of your PhD.
Postdocs are preparation for academic research in a specific field. Most industry jobs don’t work like that, and most PhDs don’t end up working in the subfield of their PhD, either.
Don’t mislead yourself into thinking that a postdoc is a good default option for a PhD graduate. Way too many people do postdocs, and end up looking a little foolish when they look for industry jobs later.
That's pretty normal for hiring PhDs in my practical experience. My first job was 'senior' and it's the same for everyone else I can think of. You are senior - you've been part of the community for around four years by that point and by graduation you're probably part of several committees and starting to mentor others. Why isn't that 'senior'?
Not the case in my field - biomedical. The hiring manager at a large pharmaceutical company told an audience of postdocs & graduate students at a career event a few weeks ago that they prefer to see a postdoc of at least 2-4 years to be considered for a senior scientist position.
Whether you have senior in your title is just nomenclature at pharma companies. Plenty do have it in your title just after PhD, reserving Scientist roles for those coming out of BS who are doing grunt work. That said, other companies have those as “technician” and PhD (maybe masters) is start of Scientist.
Getting hung up on title in Pharma is not a good move. It isn’t uniform at all.
I agree that nomenclature is just jargon. There's also the context of the parent, that senior jobs are typically available right out of university. I do not know the field the parent is in, though. In my experience of the biomedical field, this isn't the case. I'm a postdoc at a good medical school in the US, and most of the postdocs I've interacted with would happily take an industry job if they could manage it - there just aren't enough jobs to go around. The prospects for fresh Phds are even more grim.
Worked pretty smoothly for me. Probably helped that I had some relatively good looking private sector consulting gigs during my doctorate and post doc.
I think this depends on the field. If you're working 5+ years at a postdoc earning no money that time would have probably been better spent in industry.
the point of the post doc is to give you additional chances to get an academic positions, it's also an opportunity to work on cool projects, and experience a different culture if you do it abroad.
I have what should be a relatively employable background (ML + Neuro with a smattering of biology), and yet I rarely hear from recruiters (though I would love to).
I see it the exact opposite way: 5/6 of a PhD rounds down to nothing, more or less, so you’re somewhat trapped. As a postdoc, you have a lot more flexibility to leave whenever.
I think the academic path should be compared as analogous to other “creatives” paths (eg writer, musician, artists), although probably less extreme.
People continue to do it because of the ownership of the work, the nearly unlimited potential upside from discovery, and the ability to build on serendipitous discoveries into your own portfolio.
The downside is being stuck in a bad situation in academia can be psychologically damaging and difficult to recover from.
"the nearly unlimited potential upside" is very low probability, and if people are being fully honest with themselves, they often already know before they start their postdoc whether it's going to be worth their time.
The reality is that in academia, pedigree matters, being surrounded by very smart people matters, name matters. If you don't have all of these then your postdoc is doomed to be nothing more than a mediocre-paper-mill at best. Better to get out sooner rather than later.
It's like a weighting function to your research output: (Pedigree + Name of PI) * first author CNS papers. You sure can succeed with a ton of first author CNS papers, but if you have some good pedigree and name of PI you don't need any many.
And of course, your ability to get CNS papers is strongly determined by your Pedigree + PI too.
It obviously matters when submitting a paper, but it even determines what sort of experiments you can afford to work on and for how long. An HHMI-funded megalab can keep throwing things at the wall until they find some CNS-bait. Smaller groups may have to publish something to keep the lights on, even if it's less "complete."
When I was a postdoc at Stanford i simply stopped showing up at the department after 9 months. The chairman later told me that i was the first one in the entire history of the department to have done that. By the way there was absolutely no pressure; they kept paying me and in fact by mistake they raised my salary to $10,000 a month. Then they called me from the payroll office to ask if I would voluntarily return it and I said yes. I did get very depressed though and I became acquainted with all night cashiers in the Menlo Park Safeway that was then open 24 hours.
> Long hours and a lack of job security, combined with workplace bullying and discrimination, are forcing many to consider leaving science
I've never encountered any form of bullying or discrimination in my 15 years academic career (in three different countries).
What I witnessed a few times though where post-docs that just got disinterested in their work and unproductive for months. It's not uncommon for post-docs spending months looking for their next job, and usually, their advisors are fine with that. They understand well the difficulties of their students or post-docs.
Academia is hard because it's extremely competitive, not because professors are some kind of bullies harassing their students. I'm certain it exists but it's far from the norm.
It's competitive because you're competing with the whole world, and there are some people out there who are much smarter than you. And you are constantly reminded of this fact, when you go to a conference (or because you don't get to go because your paper isn't accepted), when you read your colleague's paper and so on. I've worked with well-known people (including a Turing award recipient), and even them were insecure at times.
And of course, it's hard because you don't know if you'll find a job after your current post-doc. The more average you are, the more insecurity, the harder it gets.
>> I've never encountered any form of bullying or discrimination in my 15 years academic career (in three different countries).
Great to hear that you've not encountered bullying in the academy, but it absolutely does exist and is unfortunately thriving. Often when it occurs, the university will side with the academic rather than postdoc or PhD students, which puts them in an extremely difficult situation since their manager is often the bully. In addition, you're likely in a position of power since you've been in academy for 15+ years ... It could be that you do not interact with certain circles to observe this behaviour.
An appendum: I acknowledge "thriving" is not the ideal word to use. However, bullying within academia exists and is increasingly more common than people release. Often because it's something that goes unsaid and unreported, in part out of fear of repercussions for the reporter rather than the bully because the academy protects the latter.
> but it absolutely does exist and is unfortunately thriving
I'm sure it exists. I may be wrong since it's based on personal experience, but I can't believe it's thriving (at least, in my field, computer science). These things are taken more and more seriously. If anything, I can only imagine they occur less and less frequently.
It’s not thriving in computer science because that field is competing against a tight supply of labor. Compare that to a field where you have an oversupply of PhDs, and I’m sure you’ll find different average experiences.
If people know they can walk out and get a job tomorrow making good money they are a lot less likely to tolerate abuse of any kind. That’s true in CS, most Engineering fields, Economics, a few other places. If you’re in a field like English literature or Anthropology with 10-100 applicants per tenure track job and shag all industry demand for your skills your exit options are substantially worse. And culture reacts to incentives. In the end people will treat others like garbage if they can with no consequences. Good labor conditions always come down to having a good BATNA, a good exit option.
I agree, but in practice this is rarely the case for multiple reasons depending if we're taking about PhDs or postdocs.
For PhDs, they've commited to a long project, so might feel defeated for quitting.
For postdocs, it's true that they could likely get a job if they left, bit at the same time, the may be half way through a role and want to pursue a job in academia. Switching careers is not an easy thing to do, and that's essentially what you're doing when leaving the academy.
In addition, it's worth noting that computer science is very diverse, including broad subfields such as HCI, so it's not necessarily correct in your framing of CS.
In my experience, and that of my colleagues within a UK institution, also in computer science, the university does indeed take it seriously. We've had external auditors come in and ultimately do nothing.
The problem is that the university is setup to protect itself when such reports are made, so rarely is anyone fired or such. It's a much worse situation for the student than academic.
I live in the U.K. and did my PhD in a big department.
A friend of mine got cancer and then was told by his supervisor after he returned that he wasn’t good enough anymore and he should quit. He found a new supervisor and is now doing fine.
A female colleague did her PhD in Sweden and got hit on by her supervisor who kept staring at her chest every meeting, and eventually led to her leaving academia entirely.
That’s a minority of people I know working in academia but it’s not small.
>Academia is hard because it's extremely competitive,
The issue isn't the level of competitiveness but the cost of losing.
Now that I'm outside academia, there's plenty of competition. For example, getting a good job at Google is just as competitive as getting a tenure-track position. The difference is that I can easily get a respectable job that pays the bills if I don't make the cut for Google. A nice side effect of this is that it enables me to take a rational view of how attractive these prestige jobs really are. And there are limits on what Google can demand of its engineers because they all have other options.
Academia these days is competitive in about the same way as gladiatorial combat.
Getting a job at google is nowhere near as competitive as getting tenure, you have to live in an alternate reality to believe that. I know several people that went there after their PhD one of them got the lowest possible grade on their dissertation (rete). Both published no papers as first author.
What are the actual odds? Last I saw for engineering, something like 10 percent of phd's find a tenure track job _somewhere_ (and it was double that ten years ago). You're comparing the difficulty of getting a job at a single selective company to getting in to any college in the country.
It's a different skill set, though. Just because someone was a mediocre academic doesn't mean that they weren't a great candidate from Google's point of view. There are also lots of very successful academics who Google wouldn't hire.
For my part, I had a couple of decent shots at getting a tenure-track job, but I doubt I'd make it through more than a couple of rounds of Google's interview process. Perhaps it's easier than I think though (I've not tried it), but for sure there are vastly more people who want to work at Google than there are positions available.
The chance of getting a tenure track job can vary a lot from field to field, so it's not surprising that people are reporting very different views on this.
Overall, I'd say it's harder to get an academic position than a job at Google. But these are different skill sets as you say.
Getting a job at Google is "just" a matter of graduating from a good school, grinding 500+ leetcode problems, applying at the right time, and being somewhat lucky. I would say that anyone who managed to get a tenure-track job is able to do this (provided they are willing to spend the time preparing for the interviews - which is quite a commitment).
Getting an academic position is harder. Even though I've seen very average people getting one too...
> The issue isn't the level of competitiveness but the cost of losing.
I agree but only to some extent.
First, there are many research institutions in the world. The same way there is more than one software company. They are not all equally selective and prestigious.
There are also a lot of companies doing R&D. It may not be academic research, but it can also be pretty cool. In that sense, not getting an academic position isn't the end of the world. Even if it may seem so from the perspective of a post doc.
Yep, you can probably get a position at some backwater university that will pay (in the rich Western World) still enough to live a "normal" life. But of course everyone thinks they deserve a place at the top of the totem pole and anything less prestigious is a catastrophe. It's understandable. Many were always the top or one of the top kids in class or in school, won various local competitions but then it comes to competing against everyone across the globe and suddenly the story changes and it's no longer automatic and a given that you are at the top. It's a cold shower to many.
>Yep, you can probably get a position at some backwater university that will pay (in the rich Western World) still enough to live a "normal" life.
This is a bit of a misconception. Even if you're willing to take any tenure-track job anywhere, the odds are still against you. There are simply far fewer tenure-track jobs per year than there are graduating PhD students.
How could it be in any other way though? I just can't get into the viewpoint of people who are surprised. Did they think that getting to tenure is just a normal, default stage in life that you will progress to as a natural consequence of time passing? Do they also think that everyone who works for long enough at a company will become a manager, then a VP then a CEO and if not, then they either did something wrong and worked below expectations or the system failed them?
Who starts a PhD and believes strongly that they will with high likelihood become profs? You have one prof as your supervisor and the same prof has many more PhD students. Do people not notice this?
After a certain point of bloat, growth cannot be sustained. Especially in America the system has ballooned up to an unreasonable degree and will collapse when people realize that value is elsewhere and will refuse to pay into the system through tuition.
Prestige, status, attention, fame etc. are scarce resources. Not every garage rock band can become superstars, most will not even be able to sustain it as a job or even to earn nonnegligible money.
Prestige is zero sum because it is relative. If everyone can become a professor then being a professor will inflate its meaning (already happening). But be assured there will be new concepts to signal prestige and people will be disappointed that they aren't all getting that prestige.
Yes, you're totally right. I think in general people do these things because they think they're special. You could ask the same question about why people found startups or attempt to become olympic athletes.
> getting a good job at Google is just as competitive as getting a tenure-track position.
From my experience this is not true. I personally know about 10 classmates who either dropped out of the (pure math) PhD or left academia immediately afterwards and ended up at FAANG as generic SWE. They all said that a few months of DS and alg prep was enough.
I should have explained that I am thinking of a pure software engineering job. I.e., the kind that you can apply for if you're smart and can code, but don't have a research background that jives with the kind of research that Google is doing. If you want that kind of job you're competing against a lot of very smart people who've studied very hard for the interview process.
If you have an ML PhD or something like that, it may be a different story.
Postgraduate student depression and suicidality is at horrifying proportions. The universities don't care. No one cares. Academia is super fucked and super fucked up, and it just keeps marching onward with blindfold on and fingers in ears, yelling "LA LA LA LA" as loud as possible.
Academic positions are basically gone. Whatever didn't vanish completely after the 2009 recession is definitely gone now. Universities continue to purge full professorship as a possibility and continue to shovel more work for less pay onto adjuncts and graduate students making less than minimum wage. And then they put on a big smile for the kids and say "One day you will be a college professor. Look how nice it is. You should join us." A huge lie. A huge malicious pyramid scheme of a scam. Every program churns out PhDs by the dozens every year. Which academic positions are they going to fill? Which of their advisors are retiring? There aren't any positions. Nobody is retiring.
And if you think that _science_ is bad, try a non-science field. There's lots of machines being built out there in the world. There's not a lot of people these days giving enough shits to pay historians.
I can't think of any other area where it's the _norm_ to need a support group to not quit or kill yourself because a fortress of gold has gaslit you into a deathmarch toward a tiny-fraction-of-a-percent chance of success.
On a personal level, I feel empathy for you and your struggling peers. You should not hate your life that severely, no matter what your line of work is. And it's not right to be lied to by people who should be looking for out for you.
But to be honest - as someone who was born and raised working class and has a perspective colored by that - I can't for the life of me understand why you do this to yourself. Why don't you quit and learn a skill that's actually in demand? Is it just sunk-cost fallacy? Or do you feel that hard work and some degree of intelligence entitles you to a career that's meaningful, respectable, ethical, and well-paid - regardless of it's value and demand as determined by the rest of the world?
It's hard to say, but either your position is more valuable than you're getting paid for - which means you all need to unionize, or it's not actually that valuable and you need to quit. Or maybe it's worth exactly what you're getting paid, because so many others will line up right behind you, and take those terrible odds because they like the environment / self-pride / respectability they get from working in academia.
To play the devil's advocate: We really, truly, desperately need academics. The human race would be very much worse off if there weren't a significant number of people spending their lives on purely intellectual pursuits in the name of curiosity instead of quarterly profits.
The problem is not the role of academics in the world, that's clearly very important.
The problem is the current economic situation of Universities and their relationship to post-docs. It's more akin to a pyramid scheme or a ponzi scheme than a valid career. The music hasn't quite stopped, but it's already fading, and the people that are paying attention are starting to cry foul.
I luckily escaped this death march, but I still keep up with Physics research, and I've noticed that the political structure of modern academia has caused fundamental research to stagnate. Risk is no longer rewarded. The tall poppy is the first to be cut. Small, incremental improvements are rewarded, big theoretical leaps are never approved for funding.
High energy particle physics in particular has completely stalled since the 1970s! Similarly, we still don't quite understand how high-temperature superconductors work. Fusion research has burnt a lot more money than helium. The efforts to marry GR and QM have produced a lot of papers, but no results.
Take a casual stroll through ArXiV, and you'll discover that 99% of the stuff that is published is a total waste of time. It's "diploma mill", "publish or perish" garbage. This means that sifting through the endless torrent of worthless papers for the occasional insightful one would be a full time job all by itself. This alone is sufficient to stall progress!
Scientists are no longer standing on each others' shoulders, they are now trampling each other in a mad scramble for funding and tenure.
I don't deny that the world needs people who can be dedicated to intellectual pursuits - but the stagnation you've described might be further proof that academia itself is the reason the job isn't getting done. There are hundreds of well-regarded universities in the world, many with massive private endowments - if just one of those universities could prove that they are capable of advancing valuable knowledge without falling into that publishing trap - why wouldn't they? All of these institutions claim to have education and knowledge discovery as missions, but all they seem to do is build up barriers in the name of elitism.
The world needs innovators, discoverers, creatives, and engineers - but why is a university structure required for someone to be acknowledged as such? The market's needs certainly can't drive every valuable intellectual discovery - but I don't think they preclude them. Government agencies (NASA, EPA) are also capable of doing research and publishing.
To be clear, I do think academia does serve a valuable role and is a good thing in general. I just think that it's grown too broad in scope - probably because of the massive availability of government grants and competition for those grants.
I did after several years. I, luckily, was in CS and landed on my feet. My partner and many friends did not quit. They, unluckily, were not in CS. So I have the displeasure of seeing it from both ends of the degree and many angles.
> Is it just sunk-cost fallacy?
Some but not all. You have to realize that the entire world is gaslighting kids every day into thinking that the hole-in-one once-in-a-lifetime shot is normal and common. But it isn't. It isn't normal. What's normal is failing to make it after giving 7 years of your life for less than minimum wage because there are 1000 applicants for every hyper-specialized position and almost all of them have more experience than freshly-defended-and-posted you, even if you're coming out of Harvard or Yale. But most people at the bottom never see this until it's too late, because nobody at the top talks about this ever. Worse, people at the top constantly lie about it or dismiss how bad everything is because _they_ made it and don't see what's so bad from where they are. They're all stuck in pre-2009 mindsets before available job postings completely fell off a cliff and never recovered.
To pervert a common expression, psychological warfare is a hell of a drug.
> which means you all need to unionize
This does happen, but, I don't know where you live, culture in the US is extremely hostile to unionization. Hell, the NLRB only decided that graduate students qualified as employees and were thus _allowed_ to unionize in 2016 after more than a decade of saying otherwise.
I'm glad to hear you did get out and did well for yourself. Thanks for explaining it from your perspective. As much as you were personally influenced by the people surrounding you - it was probably the exact same dynamic, but opposite (the people around me taught me was that academia was a debt-trap or a luxury for elites who didn't want to be demeaned by real jobs) and that is likely the source of my bewilderment and even low-grade bias against the field as a whole. I can see how if you are someone who respects academics, and listened to respected academics (who necessarily experienced success) - how that would lead you down a totally different path. Seems similar to what I hear about people who try to get into acting in Hollywood - they always listen to the people who make it.
Feel you about unionizing though. I'm in the southern US, and we don't see a lot success here. Still, I'm an IWW member, and my local hospital just successfully unionized a few months back - so it's something I do truly believe is worth continuing to fight for.
Thanks. It's hard to express how literally almost everyone who enters a PhD program is coming right out of undergrad and is still in many ways a child. There are no good decisions because making good decisions depends on having good insight and information and guidance, and the only people who can give good insight to the next set of children are either in therapy or quit, but the only people who get asked for guidance are the small fraction who made it.
And the entire system depends on funneling more children into the meat grinder so they have the most perverse incentive to just keep lying about everything. Graduate students are used and abused for a huge amount of lecturing, guiding, and grading so that schools don't have to pay for professors, so that they can have more millionaire administrators and football coaches and replace the flowers in the quad every week and other weirdly expensive stupid shit instead of providing basic healthcare or a decent wage for their lecturers. And then people are surprised to hear that the same schools that have grad students doing a ton of the work for peanuts don't have professor positions available at the end.
You raise a lot of good points, but I'd just like to comment on the "I can't for the life of me understand why you do this to yourself" part. I'm a postdoc in astronomy, and my situation is pretty good all things considered. But I think for many people their work becomes their identity, perhaps starting as early as childhood, and leaving is an enormous identity crisis. Going from being "the kid who has always loved space" to working on ad-tech or finance might as well be the same as changing your name, moving to France, and just hitting reset on your life. The "sunk cost" goes much further than just career skills.
The situation is actually very similar to what I've read from folks in game-dev. Almost one-to-one. And like you suggest, these sorts of situations probably all have their root in the supply/demand of labor imbalance from people choosing the career out of passion and being willing to sacrifice on many fronts for the opportunity to do it.
I can relate. I just read this at 3am while trying to stop wondering what to do with my life. I had the childhood dream of being a professor, and after a short stint in industry, when someone gave me the chance to do a PhD I took it. Life got in the way and got my PhD at 36 years old. Nobody guided me, and did not optimize my publication schedule, so it is impossible to land a job in academia. Now I am postdoc 39, non hirable bc I'm old and my cv compares badly to anyone elses. No clue how to provide for my family.
Last month we helped clean the room of a colleague after he "passed away" after 10 years of post doc.
Another colleague got a job at 36 as a bare programmer after a very successful PhD where he wrote books and was invited to conferences. At 40 he rage quit this job after a bout of frustration and we haven't heard from him since.
Luckily they didn't have kids.
Wouldn't I have kids I would definitely follow their path.
I can understand it too - I finished my PhD with 34. In the end, I could have seen it coming: my supervisor had 0 interest in supervising, so it took a huge mental strain on me.
I've also had immense luck - I've been a computer nerd for a very long time and I was programming a lot in my field (neuroscience). So all it took was a word from one guy I knew at a big software company and I was hired. I also have to say, that a PhD, or better said, a Dr. in my country still means something, especially if you have customer contact.
But I've seen things... bright people in their 40s who have to drop out in their 40s to be hired as a labor assistent at pharma. Associate professors who would run out of money and that's the end of the career. Doing a PhD was easily the dumbest and most risky decision of my life and I was extremely lucky to get away with only some mental scars. The only positive things I can think is the friendship with other PhD students (because you went through hell together!) and the confidence in my abitity to process and dissect huge piles of information. In the end, the latter is sole reason companies are willing to give you a shot. Dont undervalue it and sell it accordingly. If you have a PhD you most likely are very persistant and very capable of self-learning.
I'm curious, what advice would you give to a person that is in that position you were when the opportunity of PhD was given? (and have a childhood dream of being a professor)
I met one person at my Master's degree lab who went on to PhD, he said his childhood dream was to be a professor (and his father was a professor). I also have a father that is a professor (and have been very curious about PhD - although that window is getting narrower as I'm getting closer to 30:s) but he have multiple times told me that "it's not worth it", "it's a waste of time, the opportunity cost lost is too high", yet in my field I often see job post that requires a PhD, so I get mixed signals.
Doing a PhD is definitely not the same thing as becoming an academic. If anything, the PhD is a direct career boost: it's a recognised, high-level qualification that is known the world over (and, incidentally, if you go outside the US, you can probably get it done an awful lot quicker...). If you love the subject -- and you have to love the subject -- do it. It's like being paid to play.
Going from PhD to Prof though, is a difficult, unlikely path of awkward postings: for every 100 PhDs expect ~1 successful academic. Oh, and once you are a professor, expect a salary....less than that you'd get in a starting job straight out of your PhD.
Thank you for the reply :) I'll add it to my note of "pros/cons & advice to take in to account before important decision" that I've started to log after my repeated mistakes..!
> I'm curious, what advice would you give to a person that is in that position you were when the opportunity of PhD was given? (and have a childhood dream of being a professor)
Bluntly, if your goal is to become a professor, don't. With 99.99% certainty, you will not become a professor and the opportunity cost is extremely high.
Almost nobody with a PhD who dreams of being a professor ever actually gets to be. Most quit or only ever become adjuncts, and, in the US at least, adjuncts earn less than minimum wage and get zero respect from anyone. Most likely you will be abused by institution after institution who will keep telling you how important your dream is while stringing you along and paying you next to nothing. Or you will quit. Or you will have a mental breakdown.
If you can see yourself being happy doing literally anything else, do literally anything else. If you can't see yourself being happy doing literally anything else, spend some more time thinking about it.
If you're independently wealthy and don't really need to succeed at the goal to live a happy life of luxury, then definitely go for it.
>Another colleague got a job at 36 as a bare programmer after a very successful PhD where he wrote books and was invited to conferences.
I can relate, as this basically describes me - though I've been lucky enough to find bare programing jobs that I quite like doing.
One of the toughest things about leaving academia is discovering that (i) no-one who doesn't have a PhD has any clue what a PhD is and (ii) everyone who has a PhD has a healthy disregard for the intellectual capacities of their fellow doctors.
>I can't think of any other area where it's the _norm_ to need a support group to not quit or kill yourself because a fortress of gold has gaslit you into a deathmarch toward a tiny-fraction-of-a-percent chance of success.
I can think of plenty: Musics, Arts, Game development, (in some area) startups, "No college-degree nor drive & mid 30:s as cashier hoping for the middle-class life" people.
Academia is just like arts/musics: You only see the final result, and often from the top people; You won't see the struggling low/middle in their fields, largely being ignored in both their result & struggle.
I can easily agree with part of what you are saying, but the fatalistic exaggerated tone of your claims makes it rather hard to start a constructive discussion and definitely does not prompt people to discuss how things can improve.
> definitely does not prompt people to discuss how things can improve
One problem is there is plenty of discussion and no action to address the problems of the parent comment.
It's difficult to understand what action is possible, since the people holding the power to change the system are highly motivated to keep it as it is. But of course, we can discuss this all day.
In a tournament increasing funding will increase the number of winners but suffering will increase further if the greater number of winners leads to more entrants. Academia is a tournament. Most people who get a Ph.D. are aiming at a professorship and they’re not going to get it. They’re not going to get it after sourcing six years of their life, perhaps twelve or fourteen single mindedly chasing that goal. If you increase funding for a brief period there will be more spots but competition will re-emerge quickly. Things aren’t going to improve. The only people with the power to change anything are those who won under the current system. They have no motivation to change it so they won’t.
If you're a hobby scientist who happens to have money and goes off in an attempted to create something that would truly advance our technological understanding of the world/generally make the world a better place with whatever you're making - you'll probably be arrested by the FBI long before you ever get to succeed.
This is a bad thing. If science is to be seen as simply a hobby by the coming generations, the world as we know it is truly doomed to complete stagnation.
> I can't think of any other area where it's the _norm_ to need a support group to not quit or kill yourself because a fortress of gold has gaslit you into a deathmarch toward a tiny-fraction-of-a-percent chance of success.
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).
It is structurally not a growing, dynamic market where you're going to have an easy time. I would call it stagnant, or in the worst case, cutthroat.
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.
Joining the climb up the ladder in a generally stable pyramid -- it's not going to end well for the bulk majority, or be enjoyable while you do it. Especially if you have visible proof of friend, etc. following much easier paths.
It's suddenly dawned on me in the past month or so that the era of growth for many American ways of life is at an end. Not just academia.
The post-war, post-energy boom should have been obvious. Millennials have been complaining about lack of job growth, housing, and affordable education. Their parents had lower-hanging fruit to pluck. (I'm assuming this isn't just some myth I've been told about the 60's - 90's.) The blame is sometimes placed on "bad Boomer policies", but I'm not so sure. It feels as though we burned through the "easy" years.
In academia, international students aren't flocking to US institutions anymore. The playing field has been leveled.
Asian tech is coming into prominence at full stride and is reminiscent of Japan's meteoric rise.
The manufacturing story is obviously much different.
Is this happening because the rest of the world caught up? Or did America put investments in the wrong places?
What's causing this, and how do we get back to prosperity for all young Americans?
Am I simply missing the areas where things have improved?
Genuinely curious about thematic ideas / shifts, what we might change, or if my views are wrong.
I’m reading Capital in the 21st Century, and Piketty notes that the growth rates that characterized the decades following the world wars were aberrations, not the norm. Growth has largely been very, very slow across most of human history. It’s also worth noting that the intense post-war growth followed by a return to earth has occurred in most countries around the world, regardless of domestic policies, with some, like China, being accelerated in a “catch up phase”. Much of the third world has yet to experience this catch up phase, but are likely to in the next 50 years.
It seems entirely possible that there is no way to replicate what was a relatively short period of hyper-growth that has defined most of our lifetimes, and instead we need to base our policies and planning around the idea that what we’ve considered to be stagnant growth rates are actually the norm.
On the flip side, I've been reading other's claim that we're entering into a new era of growth and productivity, perhaps fueled by competition with China. A cold war space race. Or maybe hitting the correct technological salients.
The examples these proponents cite are GPU explosion, deep learning, M1, Tesla, SpaceX, vast improvements to protein folding, CRISPR, etc.
It's a different perspective, and I'm not sure which one is a better predictor of the future.
I get the sense that we're in broad return to normal growth rates, as you say, but with isolated peaks of innovation that aren't enough to carry the entire economy.
As a whole, there are fewer jobs to be had because we've really upped efficiency by magnitudes. Things like coal mining used to be done by teams of people (it's what my grandpa did) but now can be mostly done by machines. Houses can be mass produced by a handful of orgs. And of course the US also used to do much more manufacturing before it was mostly outsourced. So we became a service economy.
Except we automated the heck out of services too. Bookkeeping types of jobs have been mostly replaced by software tools. Likewise the kinds of jobs that connect people to other people like phone operators or marketing/advertising agencies have either been made obsolete or so efficient that a handful of companies (e.g. Google, Facebook, Amazon) can basically meet the needs of the entire nation. Nearly every industry has been disrupted now by tech, which means we've increased efficiency & reduced jobs in all those fields
On top of all of this, we have had great success in bringing women and minorities into the workforce. The economic prosperity we had post-WW2 was primarily not shared with African Americans, so the vision of getting a good job and buying a house while young was not a possibility for that group. Probably the best time for economic opportunity for minorities in the US is right now.
Most of the above is good. And I wouldn't even label what we have as "bad Boomer policies" so much as just outdated ones. We are sooo slow to adopt any sort of policy changes whatsoever. The free market is good at solving lots of problems, but it is utterly incapable of solving problems related to distribution of wealth, because companies only have the power to direct wealth inward (if the company were, on average, directing wealth outward it would very quickly go bankrupt and cease to exist).
As for academia, a lot of low hanging fruit has been had across multiple disciplines, so testing new theories has become exponenially more expensive. Cutting edge research 100 years ago would have cost $10k to set up a bunch of mirrors to measure the speed of light. Now it costs in the $billions to measure the presense of certain kinds of matter. So the return value of scientific funding has gone down... so scientific funding has gone down. Despite this, the state of the job market in the US is not very appealing so more people than ever are pursuing / staying in academia.
I have no idea what the fix is but I think a basic income policy would help
Think about this: If the number of faculty positions isn't growing, how many PhD's should a faculty member graduate in total? Probably around 1-2 in their entire career, otherwise there is a glut of PhD's with no faculty. But with so many faculty members adding 1-3 new PhD's _per-year_ there will be so many PhD's with nowhere to go.
(Excluding fields with a good route to industry, of course, since there's plenty of "sterile" industry positions where the researcher is no longer spawning new researchers).
> there's just no spot for the people below even to compete
This is often stated like a fact of life, but it’s really just a decision that we’ve collectively made.
The NIH and NSF will happily give you $75,000 to train three grad students, but not to hire one experienced staff scientist, even though there may be few positions for the students at the end and the staff scientist may be more efficient.
Where extramural NIH competing grant application are concerned, I thought PIs were pretty much free to include a staff scientist, or anyone else, in the budget as "key personnel". Anecdotally, the NIH hasn't raised this as an issue in any of the grants I've been involved with. Would you mind clarifying the context in which you've seen / heard of the NIH requiring budget revisions to exclude staff?
Overall I agree that the NIH & NSF extramural funding policy is designed with the sole goal of maximizing the number of tenure-track faculty. The messaging around sequestration, and the Grant Support Index mechanism, made it explicit that the main policy goal was to keep creating tenure-track faculty at the same rate. Even if this isn't sustainable. There are many programs to buoy the supply of (aspiring) tenure-track faculty, but few for any other career path. I'm just not aware of any policies to prevent grant recipients from hiring staff should they choose to do so.
It's not so much a policy itself so much as it is the entirely-foreseeable consequence of other policies. As far as I know, the NIH has only one mechanism for directly supporting staff scientists: the R50. I think the NCI is the only institute that does them, and there aren't many.
You're right that staff scientist can, theoretically, be funded by research project grants...but it's tricky. Students and postdoc funding comes from many sources: institutional training grants to the program, individual fellowships from the NIH, NSF, and private foundations, and sometimes even internal money (either as a RAship or in exchange for TAing). Virtually all of these are limited to those within a few years of their PhD[0]. Anyone more senior needs to be paid from research funds. The "workhorse" grant of the NIH is an R01. Most labs have 1, maybe 2, and their standard "modular" budget is $250k/year [1]. Profs with soft money jobs typically have to cover much of their salary from these grants. Adding on another $75k + 25-30% fringe for a staff scientist therefore puts a pretty big hole in the budget, even before you've started to buy reagents, equipment, scan time, etc.
This biases labs towards hiring trainees. Even if you are paying several of them them with grant money now, there's a decent chance that some of them can be moved onto a non-research grant funding stream later. In contrast, the staff scientist costs more now and will definitely cost even more later. Some places are also wary of letting staff scientists write grants[2], which makes it even harder for them to defray their own costs.
[0] The CZI-funded "Imaging Scientist" is one notable exception, but for a fairly specific type of person.
[1] You can do some extra paperwork to request more than this amount, but people's advice on whether this is wise is all over the map and depends on your study section, career stage, and the phase of the moon.
[2] Ghostwriting one for the prof to submit is an option, but an unsatisfying one since it won't show up on your CV, which makes it harder to (eventually) move on.
I especially like the point made about toxic grad schools being worse than other toxic jobs. Post docs are slightly better that way, with shorter time commitments but I suppose it adds to career uncertainty.
I’m not saying that they should, or that conditions shouldn’t improve, but if academia is that stressful to you, why stick with it? The only potential outcomes sticking with it are that you will fail later on, or you will fill a role with an increasing amount of stressors.
A couple of things. Once you leave, you're not going back. So it's a profound decision with a big unknown on the other side. Your publication output drops to zero. You won't have time to develop your own program. You won't keep up with the literature. (Maybe you're not doing those things already, in which case you should try to jump ship).
Maybe you're an academic spouse, in which case you're probably living in an area that's already crowded with like minded PhDs.
Maybe it's not really all that much better on the outside. Depending on your field of course. Even as a grad student, I noticed that acceptance into grad school doesn't necessarily select for the traits that are needed in a research or R&D leadership role, such as being outgoing, self confident, and competitive.
Disclosure: Physics PhD, graduated early 90's, went straight to industry, never looked back.
A lot of them leave. A lot of them stay because they think the effort will be worth it when they have a better position.
It's also important to note that people who want stay in academia tend to do it because they love research. It doesn't pay more, it's harder, it's more unstable... So a lot of them will enter knowing already they're going to be facing a lot of difficulty and stress.
There are more industry roles than academic roles for people with phds but there are FAR FAR FAR fewer research roles in industry than there are in academia and in some fields academic postdocs (or in some cases there are industry post docs) are required for even industry research positions! You can always off-ramp from research but very very hard to get back into if you do. Which is all to say the PI grant writing postdoc + grad student “exploitation” complex is reaffirmed from within and without. Like many self-reinforcing systems, change is... hard.
> there are FAR FAR FAR fewer research roles in industry than there are in academia
I'm not sure this is true. How many PhDs does Google alone employ in research roles? Many hundreds I'd guess. That's many many many university faculties. And that's just Google. Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, etc etc out into the long tail.
We're both just guessing but I'd reckon there are far more research roles in industry than academia.
I don't understand why this is downvoted. Sure it's short on evidence, but it seems a plausible argument made in good faith. If "Google research" doesn't sit right with you because showing people more ads shouldn't count as research, think Pfizer, or ABB, or Lockheed Martin.
It’s very humane to be trapped around our own mental/emotional constructions, and getting out of them is very very hard. It happens all the time and it happens at every level.
I think it’s more to do with lack of protections. The rulemakers know fulfilling work lies in research, but doesn’t demand much to be done. Apply basics of microeconomics and you have contemporary US academia to a T.
It took me years of trying before I could find a decent job to jump ship to. Employers are very skeptical of someone still in academia who has never had a "real" job before. Even if you've been doing crazy advanced research, the HR bots don't recognize that when scanning your resume.
A lot do (but they don't get surveyed by Nature). I quit physics after one postdoc - never thought that would happen - but reality and expectations often don't match up.
A simple change of career? Not so simple (as a software developer how do I just leave? It might actually be hard to get menial work as I’d need a cv for that)
> or you will fill a role with an increasing amount of stressors
I think when you gain a fellowship or professorship in academia it does suddenly get a lot more relaxed and you get time and space to do what you want - which is the goal these postdocs are working towards.
This is not at all the case in the fields I work in. Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather be a professor than a postdoc but it is way, way more stressful.
The biggest worry for most professors I talk to in grant-funded fields (which is most of the natural sciences and engineering) is not getting grant funding and having to lay off some or all members of our research group. In Canada, biomedical grant application success rates are around 14% so this is a pretty big worry.
People who are pre-tenure or in organizational units where there is no tenure (which includes a lot of medical researchers) also have to worry about losing their job.
In the U.S., very few professors can get paid their whole 12-month salary without getting some grant funding to pay for it. Some universities will commit 75% of the professor's salary as "hard money"—these are the ones with the bigger teaching loads. Others will provide only 5% of the salary and expect the professor to get the rest through grant funding. If you can't do it, expect to get a pay cut or lose your job. This is the prevailing model at elite medical research institutions like Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, or University of California, San Francisco.
Becoming a professor is called getting your 'chair' isn't it? I don't know any professors who don't also have tenure - that seems a contradiction in terms to me.
But if you don't know what I mean we're probably talking about different things and possibly talking at cross-purposes.
Yes, it is true that there are SOME professors with chairs. Not that all professors have a chair. analog31 already explained this in response to your last comment.
The professors I’ve worked with usually only get that title when they have a couple of decades of experience and are at the very top of their fields with international recognition and will of course be funded and tenured. It sounds like you’re using ‘professor’ to mean something far more junior which is why we aren’t understanding each other.
The terminology gets even stranger. ;-) A "chair" is a professorship that is funded by an endowment, that gets naming rights. So for instance, you might see someone like: "Bob Smith, Alice Q Hammond professor of situational metaphysics." What it means is that Alice Q Hammond gave a bunch of money to endow a "chaired" professorship, that Bob Smith occupies.
There are "chairs" like this in professional orchestras too.
The taxonomy of academic titles could fill a book.
An "endowed chair" is the best type of full professorship, but it's an exception rather than the norm. There are elite institutions where most full professorships are endowed chairs, there are very wealthy institutions where that happens for lower titles, but in general most professorships are not as such.
Furthermore, it's not something that's available right away (exceptions do happen for exceptional people, but they're exceptions).
For a random example of a successful professor, look at the carreer ot Terrence Tao (https://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/preprints/cv.html), James and Carol Collins chair in mathematics at UCLA. He got his PhD in 1996, got full professorship at 2000, and was a non-tenured non-chaired Assistant Professor for the four years in between.
Seriously, just look up a random professor from your local community college (not something like Stanford) and take a look at their CV - how many years it took for them until the full professor position.
Yes and no. First of all, you don't get tenure right away, so your first few years are brutal -- 80 hour weeks. You typically get "start up" funding, which eventually runs out. Then you have to come up with your own money. The basic salary is 9 months. Your summer salary comes out of your own grants. Also, if you stop making research progress, your promotions and pay raises evaporate, and it becomes difficult to promote yourself by job hopping.
Think of it like you're a shopkeeper at the mall, and someone is paying your rent for you, which is nice, but you have to figure out how to actually make money.
Perhaps. It might be a matter of terminology, and each country may have its own system. In the US, a faculty member on the tenure track has the job title of "professor," but "with tenure" is an additional distinction that they hope to earn. This web page explains it as well as any:
A fresh postdoc able to secure an academic job joins as an "Assistant Professor". Fresh Assistant Professors usually cannot recruit PhD students, have limited funds to establish their lab, and no job security. It takes several grades and 15+ years to reach the position of "Professor", which comes with tenure.
I don't understand how you can go from being a postdoc to being a professor. That seems to really diminish the value of the title 'professor' to me, if people can get it as basically their first permanent academic job.
In my home country (India) the academic job hierarchy used to be "Lecturer" --> "Reader" --> "Professor"
Somewhere in the last decade or so this nomenclature was revised to "Assistant Professor", "Associate Professor", and "Professor". I can't speak to the rationale for this, but it brings it in line with the naming convention in the US.
While the minimum requirement for an Assistant Professor job in India is a Masters, in practice now you really need at least 2+ years of Postdoc experience. To move up to an Associate Prof. position, the minimum requirement is at least 5+ years of post PhD experience, to have guided at least one PhD student, and n number of publications with x Impact Factor. A Professor requires at least 10 years of post PhD experience, and at least 3 PhD students. Of course, these are minimum requirements, and I know of several people who far exceed those qualifications and still waiting to move up the ladder. For example, a senior from my graduate lab has been an Assistant Prof for about 14 years now, has 15+ publications, and 3 PhD students who've gained their degrees.
For what it's worth, the job titles can be ambiguous.
The formal progression in the US/Canada is usually "Assistant Professor" -> "Associate Professor" -> "Professor." However, someone in any of these positions can be called a (lowercase-p) "professor", with the most senior job referred to as a "Full (or University) Professor."
They can, just not right away. An Assistant Prof. in Philadelphia I had interviewed with for a postdoc position told me that since his lab is new, the school won't let him recruit PhD students for the first year. He can take postdocs and trainees, though.
I think there's also a practical problem in attracting students to a new lab. Another Assistant Prof I'd interviewed with at a premier research institute in New York had established her lab over 3 years ago, and still hadn't managed to recruit either a PhD student or any postdocs. She may be an outlier, of course.
I really wish Tulane had enforced that on the two starting assistant profs I tried to work for before they took their NSF CAREER awards and ran as far away from New Orleans as their legs could take them. You were in biomedical research or math?
> "I don't understand how you can be a professor and not be tenured"
Sound like you are laboring under considerable misconceptions about the way academia works. To the best of my knowledge, there are no institutions that automatically grant tenure upon being hired as a professor, let alone a chair, which is considered prestigious.
Indeed, getting hired with tenure, much less into a chair, is rarely or ever your first job. But if you already have tenure, then you are likely to be hired with tenure if you switch to another university. You don't have to start from scratch, otherwise nobody in their right mind would ever switch jobs. The grade level and tenure are always negotiable.
It depends on the field, but in several fields (eg life sciences) if you do not keep output up, you will be unable to attract grant funding or industry funding. Without funding, you cannot really do any work. Additionally, without funding or papers, you will not be able to recruit students because students want to get their name on papers and want to work for prestigious groups or labs. Without students, you will be doing all the grunt work on every project you take on yourself which will eat up all your time.
You will also have newfound responsibilities such as teaching classes, and the university will expect you to teach more classes if you are not bringing in grant funding or doing prestigious research. It is not a free ride, and universities will take space from you and give it to people who can produce if you can't as space is scarce.
The confusion seems to be arising because in the UK the levels are named "lecturer, senior lecturer, reader, professor" and in the US the levels are named "assistant professor, associate professor, (full) professor". In the UK "professor" is a very high ranking position that most academics don't attain. In the US "professor" just means that you teach, basically.
If you get lucky in academia you get the possibility of tenure track which is a made race to publish and that means not only doing your research, but grant writing, dealing with internal politics and discovering life as a manager of grad students... oh yea, and can you lecture these undergrads too?
This isn't what I see in practice. Most professional researchers at the level of being a professor teach a couple of masters lectures for topics they're genuinely interested in and the rest of the time enjoy working on their research.
There's a significant gap between the experience of a bunch of elite research-oriented universities, and the vast majority of universities where the professors are not "professional researchers at the level of being a professor" but rather teaching staff that might try to get some minimal research done but don't get much support and aren't really expected to succeed.
The professors we read about on HN are the exception rather than the norm. The median professor working in a mid-rank institution (not a top-100 institution, not even close to that) does have academic freedom, but most of their time is taken with non-research duties, they do not have an a research group under him/her as they do not have an active research grant which would fund that, and so the median professor does a very limited amount of research which comes out, if I recall the statistics correctly, to approx. 1 paper per year.
At Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, an explicit part of the system is that almost every senior academic teaches common, first/second-year "core" courses and spends a significant amount of time -- 6 or 12 hours a week in full term -- directly teaching 18-21 year olds. In addition to running a group and everything else. It is very rarely negotiable, and usually not.
The people expanding our scientific understanding of the world being undervalued by society and institutions is the epitome of our current state. We're burning out our engines and slowing down innovation... for what?
Can any academics or postdocs express what they believe should change to improve their situations?
Academia, especially in the US and Canada, only has one viable long-term job: a faculty position. Everything else is ostensibly “training” for that job and there’s increasing pressure to make that transition as quickly as possible, in part because the low pay and stability of the other positions.
This is stupid. Since professors produce trainees, the competition gets exponentially worse. At the same time, using mostly new workers that are constantly churning over makes it hard to do good research. This is exacerbated by the emphasis on first/last author publications, which disincentivizes division of labor and teamwork. Furthermore, studies have found that outcome for the trainees are better when a mix of senior people are around.
Despite this, the NIH funds virtually no staff scientists: only one institute (NCI) has a staff scientist mechanism and it’s very small (~50?) compared to the rest of the program. Give people longer contracts (5 years) renewable bases on the output of the teams they enable, and everyone would win.
100% agree with this. If we seek true breakthroughs, we need highly experienced and focused teams working together on specific problems. These teams should be comprised primarily of staff scientists, like they have at the national laboratories like Lawrence. Given how high of a priority the US government places on funding biomedical research, it doesn't make sense for the vast majority of funding to be allocated to principal investigators who count that research project as only one of their numerous job responsibilities. Nor does it make sense for that work to be executed by under-supported postdocs and technicians. Instead, cultivate a career track that goes from grad student to junior -> senior staff scientist. Prioritize positions other than academic faculty with continuity and the ability to focus primarily on making steady research advancements.
>The people expanding our scientific understanding of the world being undervalued by society
I fully expect to get downvoted for this, but maybe it is because the expansion of scientific understanding produced by academia and academics has dwindled when it comes to applications in real life. Sure I will come across click-bait articles about new research on black holes and dark matter/energy/whatever every week, but it all seems so far from industry and application.
This will (like several other factors in society) function like a form of reverse eugenics, where people way above average in intelligence (high heritability) and conscientiousness (moderate heritability) are prevented from having children, or start having them so late that they will not have many.
I've seen many cases where principal investigators / professors are completely disconnected from research, including an absolute lack of any basic knowledge related to the field. They are just middlemen. For someone coming from pure mathematics, where professors routinely come up with great results themselves, this was incredibly shocking.
Those I've met who don't know much always run the same scheme. They have a few postdocs doing all work and writing all grant proposals, but never getting their names on them. They always work towards some vague promotion that never comes. Whenever they obtain any good result, the professor or principal investigator will take all credit. Usually they will get diluted quickly, by simply pushing follow up experiments to others.
Bell Labs, MRC LMB and Cold Spring Harbor were somewhat successful in preventing this kind of middlemen behavior. Among other things, they banned anyone from supervising more than 5 people. It worked.