Full disclosure: I'm a last year Ph.D student in cognitive neuroscience, and I'm neck-deep in post-doc applications...
I think a large part of the issue has to do with government policy as it relates to science. I notice that many politicians reason in terms of "producing more science" as if it were a commodity good that should be produced and exported en masse.
The problem, then, is that the current academic system actively encourages people to pursue academic careers without disclosing the reality of the situation. They push masses of people through undergrad, then grad school, then post-docs, until the end of the line whereupon most people hit a huge brick wall.
I'm all for promoting research in STEM fields, but simply upping the quota of Ph.Ds won't cut it. As far as the U.S. is concerned, I think this has more to do with turning a blind eye to the dismal state of public education than anything else. It enables politicians to say "we trained 200% more scientists", while conveniently omitting the following truths:
1. Virtually none of them will be employed in the sciences at a level that warrants a doctorate.
2. For all the chest-puffing we do, we still get humiliated by the rest of the civilized world in terms of education.
3. Those people actually employed in research positions in American universities are majority foreign.
"3. Those people actually employed in research positions in American universities are majority foreign."
Even if this was true (which I doubt), that just reinforces the article's contention that postdocs aren't paid enough: the jobs are only attractive to foreigners, while Americans have other options.
Getting a visa to work in academia seems to be way easier than for private sector jobs. (I have ben working in academia in Europe and many people I know finished their PhD's and do postdocs in the states. One friend has changed to working in a company, but says it took nearly a year to get the paperwork sorted).
More than 95% of people in the world are not American, and good American universities have access to the top talent. If the US is doing a competent job of hiring the best people then the majority of these researchers will not be American-born.
Anecdotally, ~50% of the faculty in my department at a large American public university are foreigners. I've been told, but not verified, that if you count dual-citizens, that number gets closer to 65%.
Because realistically, most of those dual citizens started out as foreigners and were eventually naturalized as a consequence of pursuing an academic career in the US.
My guess would be that a large number of dual citizens obtained their citizenship in the course of their scientific work. It speaks to the training problem we have.
actively encourages people to pursue academic careers without disclosing the reality of the situation
Sure, but everyone including a freshman undergrad is an adult and the odds of ever becoming a tenured professor are public knowledge. No-one can realistically complain that they just didn't know.
You're missing the import of the Profzi Scheme (http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1144): the lower levels of the pyramid are necessary. Graduate students and post-docs aren't really independent researchers pursuing their own ideas, and basically never have been. They're (highly educated, scientific) laborers who work for a boss.
By most metrics, a system in which most of the actual work is done by low-paid laborers with long hours - who are then thrown out as soon as they've got experience and tribal knowledge! - is not only an abusive system but a stupid and counterproductive system.
The point isn't that they're unaware. The point is that it's irresponsible to push people towards academic careers without attempting to separate those who are interested in science from those who are also good candidates for tenured positions.
I've always known that the academic market is saturated. I still don't know what it actually takes, in practice, to penetrate.
I contend that this guidance failure stems from a policy that aims to inflate certain non-informative statistics.
More to your point, however, I think you over-estimate the quality of the information going around. Every college professor will tell you it's difficult, but they'll also guide you based on their experience from 30 years ago.
I still don't know what it actually takes, in practice, to penetrate.
Nobody knows. That's the long and short of it. If you find any set of traits in common among tenured prof's, and look for those traits in the grad student body, you'll find a roughly 10x surplus of people who are good enough to be in the pipeline.
Disclaimer: I was not one of those people. I got my PhD in 1993, and knew that I was clearly not professor material. So I steered myself into industry.
As for experience 30 years ago, the oversupply of PhDs was already widely known at that time. We called it the "birth control problem," and it was discussed over the then-nascent Internet. I mentioned it to my dad, a chemistry PhD, and he said: "Oh yeah, we knew about that in the 1950s."
A perpetual optimism about career advancement is possibly just a social convention. At my workplace, the HR message is that anybody can move up. But we can't all move up, and none of us are ever told our realistic prospects.
By the way I'm not trying to play "internet tough guy" here, but am just trying to be realistic. I'm actually quite sympathetic about the problem.
>> I still don't know what it actually takes, in practice, to penetrate.
> Nobody knows.
I do. You need to either be outstandingly, obviously better than almost everyone else, or you need to be good enough and lucky. You can probably think of examples of both of these cases.
I knew those people. But my contention is that if you have those things, you're still competing with a surplus of people who also have those things. What we don't know is how to reliably raise the chance to a level above about 10%.
I'd add a couple of other factors: The people I know who got into tenured jobs, had binders full of shovel ready research ideas (backed up by literature and/or preliminary results), and a comprehensive knowledge of the literature in their specialties.
You can't. There are academic jobs for fewer than 10% of PhDs. You have to be incredible or lucky.
We do know exactly how change this, though. Since it's probably not affordable or sensible to triple the number of profs (you can't do this without making profs much worse), the only way to increase the chances of the average PhD is to graduate fewer PhDs.
Back in the mid-20th century only 10-15% of people even got undergrad degrees and we did not have this problem so much.
That's right. But I wonder if increasing the chances for the average PhD by rationing the degree is actually a desirable goal.
Disclaimer: I'm a PhD, and have spent my career in industry. My dad did likewise, and my grandfather had a consulting business. I was no threat to anybody's professorial aspirations, and I was in grad school because I just wanted to have the education.
Should I have been kicked out, to make way for more worthy students?
Also, limiting the degree could backfire, because it could end up driving away the best students along with the worst, while attracting mediocre students who figure out how to play the game.
I would certainly welcome some reforms to graduate education, but I don't think that the PhD degree can be turned into a guaranteed career path.
> Also, limiting the degree could backfire, because it could end up driving away the best students along with the worst, while attracting mediocre students who figure out how to play the game.
Maybe. Does the astronaut program drive away the best and attract mediocre people?
I'm being extreme to make a point. I don't think high standards drives away the best people.
> Should I have been kicked out, to make way for more worthy students?
I don't understand the point. You competed with others for your spot, right? If that was working properly, the more worthy would have taken your spot. Sounds like you made the cut.
I think we'd agree that the problem is in expectations of students going in. I agree with others in this thread that profs have a duty to help people make realistic decisions. And as long as some subjects are set up to rely on a badly-paid middle class of postdocs, they are missing the incentive to do so.
In AI and robotics right now, it's very hard indeed to get a good postdoc since their opportunities are so good. I'm a prof and I'd love to exploit some but they all make more money than me. Good institutions are routinely hiring AI people straight out of PhDs. The problems we are talking about vary enormously by field because the supply and demand are wildly out of whack in some fields.
You make a good point. I'm guessing that a lot depends on the nature of the standards, how, and when they are applied.
I made the cut, but to reduce the number of PhDs by (say) a factor of three, I might have been cut at some point. That could have been at the entrance to grad school, or somewhere else down the line, up to being told not to bother submitting my dissertation.
One idea is for funding agencies to set a minimum salary for post-docs, say $100k/y. Doing so would automatically change the number of post-docs and the standards for hiring them, while letting those of us with no academic career aspirations do our own thing.
I suppose that supports your point. ;-)
In AI and robotics right now, it's very hard indeed to get a good postdoc since their opportunities are so good.
Maybe that's the solution. It means that the people you're training actually have realistic career options, and you don't have to create an artificial job market for them.
I went to graduate school in a STEM field, intending on finding an academic job afterwards, with industry as a backup. I knew it was competitive, but nobody told me exactly how competitive it is. I noped out after I realized I was entering a field where I would literally have to wait for someone to die before getting a job, and some of the professors at my school had graduated 10+ PhD students already.
I considered myself maybe a 60th percentile researcher, which I knew wouldn't be good enough. It's a good thing I opted out when I did. I know people who were as good or better than me who are keeping it together with a string of visiting positions, still hoping for that tenure track line to open up. I expect most of them will be giving up on academia in the next 2 or 3 years.
When I did undergrad in Mech Eng, I knew that the "shortage" of engineers was a myth, but it was still the best option for an all-round technical education, and I figured I'd wing it when I graduated...
You've been watching too much Big Bang Theory. Sheldon is supposed to be a parody of a scientist, you know.
The point is that everyone who goes into any STEM subject at any level ought to know upfront that there are far more graduates than there are jobs in those fields of any sort including "researcher". It's no secret.
>You've been watching too much Big Bang Theory. Sheldon is supposed to be a parody of a scientist, you know.
What a snarky and strangely dismissive comment!
Clearly there's a lot of overlap in the subject matter (it's science, after all), but employment prospects are most assuredly not the same for engineers and academics. You can get a job as an engineer; I cannot. As such, I don't see the relevance of your experience as an engineering student, hence my question.
So again, I'm not sure what your point is. I'm open to being wrong, but in order to see my error, I need to first understand your point.
It would be nice if you could explain it to me without being disrespectful.
I found a major problem is that many people graduating with PhDs in biomed suffer from the misconception that rejecting the null hypothesis somehow allows them to conclude their favored explanation is the correct one.
This is a widespread, top-to-bottom, worldwide error. I was trained to think this in grad school, surrounded by people who thought it, and have read innumerable papers by those who pretty much explicitly write that down and publish it.
Since rejecting the null hypothesis is much easier than coming up with and deciding between multiple research hypotheses, these people appear to be much more productive (when measured in publication output) than those who try to do it right. I tried, and no longer believe it is possible to do a good job in the current academic environment.
It is just not possible to compete with people who only reject a null hypotheses and skip everything else, not according to the metrics being used to assess performance. It's a race to the bottom.
There is another problem with this null hypothesis focus as well. The literature simply does not include the information required to really develop and test quantitative models (do a good job). Instead, nearly every claim is of the form "A makes B higher/lower". But this is not the type of information we need, it is near useless!
Here is an example of someone trying to figure out whats going on, but being unable to really check. The information required to constrain the parameter values is not being reported in the literature:
>"Although the signals that transduce the external cues to the GTPase network are becoming clear (21), most of the chemical parameters remain unknown. Because many of the reaction coefficients in Fig. 1 B are also unknown, we allocated a number of possible parameter sets to qualitatively analyze the kinetics of these reactions."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1366631/
Here is another, we don't even know how many cells are in the human body to within 8 orders of magnitude, let alone how quickly they are supposed to be dividing (which is related to mutation rates), etc. How can you expect a cure for cancer in the absence fundamental quantitative data like this:
>"First, we noticed that these data were typically mentioned
in the literature without citing a reference; second, we
observed wide ranges among data reported by different
sources, ranging from 10^12–10^20."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23829164
There is one thing that is not mentioned in the article: very-short term post-docs.
For instance, I just started my first post-doc after having defended my PhD, but my contract only lasts for one year. This is not atypical, at least in France and in computer science, to have one-year post-doc. And since you can't do a post-doc at the same lab where you did your PhD, it means that in the course of one year you have to:
1- get to know a new domain or at least a new subject,
2- become proficient in this new domain or subject to the point you can publish something in a good peer-reviewed journal or conference,
3- apply for competitive faculty positions and/or another post-doc position (in which case, rinse and repeat, unless you get to extend your current post-doc for one more year, but that depends on external fundings that you have no control or effect on).
Of course 3 requires 2 which requires 1, which means that you only have something like a bit more than half a year to complete 1 and 2, otherwise your applications for your next position will seem weak ("you didn't do anything this year?").
It is really a horrible feeling to be urged to do science. Especially when you just finished your PhD, you have lots of ideas that you want to explore and being so short-sighted (one year term is really peanuts in science) is an atrocious feeling.
In general yes (not so much in my particular case though), but even then entering a new research project, even if it is close to the one you were working on before still take some non negligible time.
But you are right, the time to complete step 1 from my comment may vary a lot and might be short in some cases I guess.
In my particular case, I did my PhD on "cryptographic implementation security against physical (side-channel and fault injection) attacks", and my post-doc is on "privacy as control". I chose to apply for this post-doc rather than take one of the few that were offered to me on my PhD topic, because it also interests me scientifically a lot, plus it interests me politically. On the one hand it may have been a bold (or stupid? we'll see that later :)) move career-wise, but on the other hand it was a good time to change topic, as it may be harder to do later when you are even more specialized. And that is not specific to me.
In December 2014, a committee convened by the US National Academies released a report aimed at highlighting and improving the postdoc’s plight. The committee called for a hike in salaries, from the current recommended starting salary of US$42,840 to $50,000...
Hands up, everybody who would love to hire a scientist with a PhD for less than $50k/year.
Depends on the scientist. My personal experience is the best postdocs are more than 10x more productive than the average. Some post docs are worth $300,000 per year, while the bottom 20% are worth -$100,000 per year. The real problem is that everyone gets basically the same salary and as an employer you have no ability to pay more to the great postdocs.
As a post-doc, I'm not sure people willing to stay in academia care that much about salary. I don't want to be paid a lot, if that was my priority, I would get a job in the industry. What I would like is a stable position where I could engage in mid- to long-term research projects, where I have less pressure and can focus on doing great things even if it means working hard without tangible results for a few years, etc. Salary-wise, I only want to have enough money to not have to worry about it and be able to focus on my research and my life. In many places in the world, $50k/year is largely enough for that.
I also agree with this, but once you get to a certain age and start having a family (or start thinking about having one) then just saying money doesn't matter does not cut it anymore.
In my opinion good postdocs are massively underpaid. This has an big effect as You could live without having a long term project if you had the savings to survive between positions.
I totally agree with your first point. But I stand by my case. I didn't say "money doesn't matter", I said "I want to have enough, rather than as much as possible". $50k/year means that you get something like 3000€/month. Early career researcher with faculty position are paid less than that in France, and it lasts years and years before you get to this salary level. And is you don't get a full professor or senior researcher position, you won't ever go much higher. A lot of people, if not most people, have children while earning less than 3000€/month and have no money problems.
On your second point, the problem is that even if you have enough money to live between temporary positions, not being able to get a position at some point is a huge red flag in your application file, and this kind of gap are often fatals in competitive recruitment process, as the people in charge of the recruitment are looking for ways to discard applicants.
I'm really not saying you are wrong as I don't think so, my point is to say that the problem you highlight (salary level) is not the one that needs to be addressed to "repair the system".
I don't want to be paid a lot, if that was my priority, I would get a job in the industry. What I would like is a stable position where I could engage in mid- to long-term research projects, where I have less pressure
Sure but there's cash-equivalent value in that too. Ask anyone in any volatile industry in the private sector, the cash premium is there because your company no matter how well established, might not even exist in a year.
Of course I understand that, that's why I specified I'm talking about "people willing to stay in academia" (which is in my understanding the main focus of the linked story). I'm hoping that universities and government labs are not volatile ;).
There are several angles to this. Yes, a scientist with a PhD might be able to make way more than that in industry, and they are welcome to do so. Meanwhile, at public universities in the US anyway, taxes paid by the rest of us help to sustain PhDs through sometimes 7+ years of grad school with things like subsidized housing and free minimal/no copay medical and dental insurance plans.
So I'm not particularly worried if they don't immediately start getting paid at industry-par rates by the same universities. A lot of them do go into industry later and make a lot of money.
A reasonable number of my friends did particle physics PhDs in the States. None of them had their housing subsidised and one got very sick and had to sell her car to pay for her medical treatment so I don't think her health plan was great. I'm fairly certain dental wasn't included. And the ones I know worked 10-12 hours per day usually six days per week.
Some grad students do have better conditions from endowments that fund scholarships, but not many. And the supplementary work that they do as teaching assistants allow the taxpayer-funded undergrad programmes to run at a much lower cost than if they had to pay people actual wages.
There is an argument for saying that there's enough money in the further education sector - but the idea of grad students with cheap housing and great medical plans living off the taxpayers are not supported by any of the observations that I have made.
> but the idea of grad students with cheap housing and great medical plans living off the taxpayers are not supported by any of the observations that I have made.
My observation was based on my own experience as a grad student at a state school. I had free medical/dental insurance and grad-student specific housing incredibly close to my workplace. Possibly this is not wide enough to be true on the general basis; which is why I restricted my comment scope to say "state school". I have heard similar experiences from people at other state schools as well. So I'm not sure why there is such a big disconnect in our experiences. Can other people weigh in?
12th year as a postdoc? While I don't think the postdoc system is working very well, this example is not the face of failure of the postdoc system. This example is a failure of market signals to overcome an individual's sense of entitlement.
Working hard while getting paid peanuts to have a shot at your goal in not exactly what I'd call entitlement. She obviously didn't expect the position to fall into her lap if she thought it was still worth working for it at year 11.
I'm not saying it's rational, but it's not like she threw a tantrum when she got turned down.
you stay in a postdoc because you think you're entitled to a professorial position. You could advance to a staff scientist position or move on to industry, or just do something else. If you've spent 12 years doing something, it means you were probably a bad experimentalist, really unlucky, or just bad at 'playing the game'. If you're in science and any one of the three above applies, you should quit. The market was trying to tell her that, she didn't get the message, even when her institution forced her out.
There are no real "staff scientist" positions less competitive that an academic position. In regards industry have a look at how many Ph.D.s have been laid off by the pharmaceutical industry in the last 10 years. Not every field has had the run comp sci has had in the last few years.
I'm a biochemist so I'm aware. After four years of postdoc, I quit my job and drove for Lyft for a year. Now I contract code. So, I read the writing on the wall.
And by the way, staff scientist positions are most definitely not as competitive as professor positions.
Maybe every year she received several rejection letters telling her just how close she came to making it. I remember getting a few "you were one of X finalists so please try again next year" letters; they made it really difficult to move to industry and really easy to think that all would work out in my favor if I just stuck around for another year.
I was in the humanities, and maybe the process is different in the sciences, but 3-5 finalists for each position would always be invited for an on-site interview.
Your rejection letter might not spell out that you were a finalist, but it was clear from the interview process.
>And by the way, staff scientist positions are most definitely not as competitive as professor positions.
I did say real staff scientist positions, not temporary postdoc-like positions or admin jobs. There are relatively few true research jobs that are not fixed term outside of academia (I am excluding industry of course as that is a totally different path).
The complaint is that the salaries and roles are very bimodal. You're either a postdoc with very low pay and few responsibilities or a prof with pretty good pay running your own lab. There are few roles in-between. There are some - soft money researchers - but these are not as common as they might be.
There's a whole structured career ladder between those two roles. I guess it takes most people at least a decade after they finish their last post-doc before they become a professor. During that time you have fellowships, lecturerships, readerships, with increasing pay and responsibilities.
Those are the UK-derived names. In North America those are all referred to informally as 'professor'. Even the lowest, Assistant Professor, is usually expected to run their own lab. Many people don't ever make full Professor.
edit: and the jump in pay and responsibility from postdoc to assistant prof is huge - maybe a factor of 2 in pay. The rest is incremental.
I think a large part of the issue has to do with government policy as it relates to science. I notice that many politicians reason in terms of "producing more science" as if it were a commodity good that should be produced and exported en masse.
The problem, then, is that the current academic system actively encourages people to pursue academic careers without disclosing the reality of the situation. They push masses of people through undergrad, then grad school, then post-docs, until the end of the line whereupon most people hit a huge brick wall.
I'm all for promoting research in STEM fields, but simply upping the quota of Ph.Ds won't cut it. As far as the U.S. is concerned, I think this has more to do with turning a blind eye to the dismal state of public education than anything else. It enables politicians to say "we trained 200% more scientists", while conveniently omitting the following truths:
1. Virtually none of them will be employed in the sciences at a level that warrants a doctorate.
2. For all the chest-puffing we do, we still get humiliated by the rest of the civilized world in terms of education.
3. Those people actually employed in research positions in American universities are majority foreign.