The future of the postdoc
nature.com
nature.com
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.
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.
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.
1. American colleges are still overwhelmingly the best in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Univ...
2. 96% of students at American colleges are American. http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2014/...
Did some digging and found this article from 2012 which says that 38% of researchers in the U.S. are foreigners.
http://www.nature.com/news/global-mobility-science-on-the-mo...
Why on earth would you group dual citizens in the same category as foreigners?
Even if 100% of the faculty are dual citizens (Americans + something else), it would still be 100% American.
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.
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.
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.
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 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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Quite the opposite - both countries and departments/professors actively advertise the odds as much higher.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
pro-tip: don't accept a 1-year postdoc in a new domain/subject (unless you urgently need to get away from your old subject).
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.
Hands up, everybody who would love to hire a scientist with a PhD for less than $50k/year.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
I'm not saying it's rational, but it's not like she threw a tantrum when she got turned down.
And by the way, staff scientist positions are most definitely not as competitive as professor positions.
Your rejection letter might not spell out that you were a finalist, but it was clear from the interview process.
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).
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.