As Silicon Valley fights for talent, universities struggle to hold on to stars
economist.com
economist.com
Departments aren't stupid, though. They realize that grabbing star grad students with highly marketable skills in industry as they are walking out of their dissertation defense is probably the only shot they'll have at getting them. They will often "try out" industry or take a job at Google or MSR on the advice of their PI, noting that it's just as good as a postdoc but pays four or five times as much. Problem is, they then have to walk away from their $180k/year to take a faculty position that might not pay half that and could very well dead-end in a few years if the department leadership changes (or any of a dozen other precipitating factors) and they don't get tenure.
All that said, I personally know of tenure-track professors at two of the schools you mentioned, plus ones at quite a few other top-flight CS departments (Cornell, Toronto, Washington, Cal), who were hired straight out of grad school.
And while it is harder to transit (learning basic computer skills, while way easier than quantum field theory, takes time and effort), the opportunity gap is way higher. And it may be not a surprise that many data scientists with PhDs are physicists.
Remove the nice dorms, cafeteria, and fitness centers. Remove the community outreach programs that isn't really the job of a university. And yes increase the number of introductory level classes taught by graduate students and post docs.
I'm not worried about people moving from academia to industry. My hope is as we increase the rate at which people finish high school and go to college, we will have enough people for industry and academia. It is tempting to say we need to offer better wages and benefits for teachers but we can't digress. Cost containment should be our first priority.
I think it is possible if we understand and agree with the compromises we will need to make.
"Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-re...
People are offering solutions without following the money.
no doubt. Just look at these salaries :) http://ucpay.globl.org/
My thought is a cap on the multiplier on the minimum wage (for example, a 50 times multiplier at a minimum wage of $15 per hour would mean an annual cap of $15 * 2000 * 50 or $1.5M). Similarly, a private corporation could declare that it will cap its pay at 100 times multiplier of the minimum wage.
I think this is something the Regents of the University of California system could easily impose if they had the will to do so. Would a pay policy like that be illegal? Would it be considered conspiring or "fixing" if it applies to everyone at the organization?
I don't see what being not-for-profit has to do with salary caps. But the whole reason that the head coach is paid so much is that the football team is being run as a for-profit enterprise, which is a seemingly rational thing for the university to do, yet I think it makes sense to restrict universities from distracting themselves with that sort of enterprise related to their purpose.
"The compliance problem is exacerbated by the sheer volume of mandates—approximately 2,000 pages of text—and the reality that the Department of Education issues official guidance to amend or clarify its rules at a rate of more than one document per work day. As a result, colleges and universities find themselves enmeshed in a jungle of red tape, facing rules that are often confusing and difficult to comply with."
You don't think colleges would rather have the money than all these extra paper pushers?
- "We want all responsibilities, Minister, if they mean extra staff and bigger budgets. It's the breadth of our responsibilities that makes us important, makes YOU important, Minister. When you see vast buildings, huge staff and massive budgets, what do you conclude?"
- "Bureaucracy?"
- "No, Minister, you conclude that at the summit there are men of great stature and dignity who hold the world in their hands and tread the earth like princes."
(Also, much as I'm disdainful of university athletics, declaring that only the most profitable programs have a place on campus seems like a really amazingly horrible idea.)
WaPo writeup: http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2015/11/23/runnin...
"The frantic spending race is playing out differently across the country. Higher coaches salaries, while common, are just part of an array of expenses soaring at athletic departments that fail to profit.
At the University of California Berkeley, the mortgage on athletics buildings went from $0 to $23.4 million in a decade. At the University of Wisconsin, annual maintenance and spending on facilities went from $10.5 million to $38.2 million. At Florida State, pay for athletics staffers — not including coaches — went from $7.7 million to $15.7 million. At other schools, rising costs for travel, severance pay, recruiting and other items combine to keep athletics in the red."
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case...
Woah, this is the logic that is getting us in trouble!
66% of people already go to college. Of those who go, only 50% graduate. So...
1) Does "college" matter or does learning a marketable skill mater? If we had 100% college enrollment and completion but everyone was getting a degree in native American studies, would we somehow be better off?
2) At what level of enrollment does it become more cost effective to simply extend high school 2-4 more years and just consolidate it?
College in its present form is in trouble because the lions share of college attendees are; white women, taking non STEM degrees, taking on federal loans, and having a lower workforce participation rate at the end of it.
College is about learning, not about what a huge chunk of it has become; safe spaces, community outreach, nice dorms, cafeterias, dating, fitness centers and generally taking a hiatus from life. We really need to redefine college in its present form, it is no longer what it was 50 or 100 years ago.
> safe spaces
haha political correctness is so stupid right!?
> We really need to redefine college in its present form, it is no longer what it was 50 or 100 years ago.
The norm in Australia is to "take a break from life" for 2 years, living on campus, and then to live like an adult, buying groceries and cooking food for the final two years.
You know the dorms and dining halls at these schools were pretty much the same 20 years ago (before tuition costs started mushrooming as insanely as they have) as they are now, right? So perhaps one should look elsewhere as to where the rising costs have been coming from.
(Fitness centers being an optional expense at many schools, and something from a different animal than the subject of basic operational + living expense costs).
But "remove" them?
For those people, one thing that's changed is that academia, in STEM at least, has grown into having a big management component. You're expected to run a significantly sized lab, and to continually bring in enough grants to pay for it. Professors at top universities spend a large amount of their time writing grants, hiring people, and networking with potential funding sources, and it's no longer really optional. There is a certain style of researcher who actually excels in this kind of position, managing a medium-sized research enterprise, and advancing a field by putting together good teams, providing high-level direction, and mentorship. It's like running a startup in some ways (obv. different in other ways). But not every researcher is good at or interested in that, and some would rather opt out and find a job that lets them focus more on their individual research.
Another thing that's changed is pay. Academic salaries in CS have gone up significantly, to the point where $100k+ is common, and $150k+ for big names is also getting common, whereas professor jobs were traditionally more lower/mid-middle-class than upper-middle-class (more like "$75k+" than "$150k+"). But salaries at tech companies have gone up even faster. If a big name in deep learning gets offered $300k base plus a big stock package, the university's retention counteroffer isn't likely to come very close.
Also, specifically in AI (which this article focuses on), data access and engineering/infrastructure support are other lures of industry. If you do machine translation, for example, moving to Google will solve many of your dataset problems. If you need a distributed cluster, there's expert IT staff working on it; if you do autonomous vehicles, there's expert engineering staff supporting your "demo platform". In academia you rarely can afford that kind of infrastructure or engineering support, so there's a lot more of grad students cobbling together DIY demos, and the postdoc hired mainly for his/her mathematics knowledge also moonlighting as the cluster admin.
To be honest I wonder if the academics that are still there just don't realize how lucrative industry is...
a) California state employee salaries are online [1]
b) UC Berkeley is a top school for CS professors and competitive with everyone else on salaries. Looking at random AI faculty members shows about 100k at hiring, about 150k at tenure, while machine learning king of kings Michael I Jordan gets 300k.
Google pays starting undergrads > 160k, and fresh PhD students > 225k[2] (all in comp including first year vesting stock + base pay + expected 15% bonus). I imagine if they're poaching faculty, they're getting significantly more than that[3].
Basically I'd say the industry salaries are at least 2x the academic salaries, if not higher. The flagship hires are paid a lot more (think Yann LeCun, or Andrew Ng), and importantly, given the freedom to hire and build mini-empires to do stuff.
As a final note, I know talking about salaries publicly is awkward, but this is all public information, and grad students talk freely about this sort of stuff with each other, so I don't feel like I'm revealing anything super secret beyond showing you how to look up the relevant information in publicly available areas.
[1]: (http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/state-pay/arti...)
[2]: Source: Glassdoor Google for "research scientist", which is the position that PhDs in AI/ML are hired into.
[3]: Google levels are public, and while Glassdoor data is sparse, faculty who are poached are hired at at least the "senior staff engineer" level, which glassdoor says about 500k, which sounds around right to me, if not a little low. As an aside, salaries at the higher levels have much higher variance than at the lower levels, and to entice someone away from a tenured position probably requires hitting the higher ends of the salary band.
The amount of money BS graduates make at Google is giving me a complex.
I guess the shitty part is that he has to live in SV and work for Facebook. I'd be tempted to take an offer for $300k, but having to work at Facebook makes it almost not worth it. So I guess the comp matches the job.
It's just strange how much of gap there is for SEs and developers (or anyone in tech for that matter). You could be making $75k in the midwest working on something important and living pretty comfortably (if you have a spouse with income). Or you could be making $300k with less experience working at Facebook on some feature that'll never see the light of day. You're barely scraping by because the $2mm mortgage on your 1200 sqft house is killing you.
Over the past ten years I've seen my alma mater replace almost a third of its campus with brand new buildings 2 to 3 times the size of the old ones, and it has plans to replace almost half its campus by 2025 (its plan is a public document). The buildings it replaced were starting to show their age a bit, but they were still plenty usable (one building legitimately had health code violations. Ironically, it's one of the buildings that still hasn't been demolished yet).
Meanwhile tuition there has more than doubled in less than ten years. Some of that is due to the government reducing its subsidy, but a good chunk of it is going into these massive construction projects.
Some of that money can go to better salaries for professors getting lured by higher salaries elsewhere, surely (although I do worry more of it will go to administration salaries instead).
Whining about losing employees because you aren't willing to pay enough (or offer enough ancillary benefits to augment your pay), especially when your tuitions are astronomical anyway, just comes across as arrogant, and they deserve to lose their best people.
Established professors can dictate their own rhythm. They can work hard all year long, or they can slack for some months and concentrate on their families more. They can change sub-fields of interest as they see fit, and work on problems they want to solve. Also, they get to teach which is by far the biggest privilege one could ever achieve.
Of course private research provides very interesting deals, but most stars and talents are exactly that because they had the freedom of doing things as they see fit. Putting them in a company structure with quirky rules is not their natural habitat.
In short, in academia you are bound by hierarchy, local politics, grants and bureaucracy, 1-2 year lag in anything. As a freelancer I have enough $$$ I am free to pursue my intellectual interests (any side projects, teaching students topics of my choosing, etc). And when it comes to teaching - I get _only_ students that are interested, not - diluted by the crowd who just wants to fulfill the curriculum.
You're right that there are professors that are bound to hierarchy, local politics, grants, etc.. But the important point is that it is their choice to be bound to that, not someone else's.
David Graeber once said "Every society has something to do with brilliant, imaginative and extremely impractical people ...we used to put them in academia, but now academia is all about self marketing." - https://youtu.be/IHAJiuU5xhk?t=9s - I think this really hits the nail on the button. Academia was and should be a place where these impractical stars can shine to their potential.
No, I am not a PhD student (I defended 1.5y ago). And I saw that I really don't want be a postdoc; not even as a "purgatory" to go through - I didn't envy professors either. While professors do have a lot to say, they are still bound by administrative duties, pointless meetings, maneuvering grant calls so they can use it for something they actually consider useful, etc.
Sure, for some its fine (or at least - acceptable; or - they don't have other intellectually challenging job opportunities). Some others (e.g. the ones in the article) are happy to join Google. And I am sure it is not only about money.
It's a very different experience than being a professor in 50s or 60s; e.g. one day I talked to (now late) Kenneth Wilson and he told me that he had changed his field overnight (into one that gave him the Nobel prize). Right now it is unimaginable.
Sure, I also consider the current shape of academia sad. But... when it comes to the "impractical" dreamers, let's not colorize the past. Vide my another writing: http://crastina.se/theres-no-projects-like-side-projects/ (for academia, look at the John Bell's example).
Yeah, that's kinda not true. In academia, you have the freedom to work whichever 60-80 hours a week you want, but no one becomes a "star" (or even an "associate professor") by slacking for months at a time.
> Also, they get to teach which is by far the biggest privilege one could ever achieve.
lol.
do you have any experience with academia? it is very much not free in spirit. even getting a ph.d. these days requires more exercise in tedium and logistics than creative thought.
The private sector now offers top talent what they used to go to universities for in terms of access to the best resources, freedom of exploration, a great talent pool of co-workers and decent working environment. Therefore is it any surprise people leave academia?
and being successful at one time does not necessarily guarantee later success. Mozart died alone and with no money. Turing killed himself at the age of 41. It's not hard to look for more recent examples.
As for the second point: Depends on how you define success in life. If life's a paycheck maximization game to you, many science superstars weren't very successful...
The head of the CS dept of my undergrad once said to a corporate recruiter, "You can hire our undergrads, but we exist to turn them into Phds"
When I started college, for some reason, I also thought the most interesting work was being done in academia, without exception. Now, a few years out, it is clear that the most interesting work is done at a crossroads - between top CS and engineering universities and industry. I do think it is getting harder to resist the lure of industry (based on the experience of my friends with PhDs), mainly because of comparable pay and far fewer peripheral responsibilities like managing labs, advising students, etc.
Maybe it is just me, but I have a lot of interests in a lot of different areas, but AI just isn't one of those areas.
Maybe I simply didn't study it enough, but I can't see in AI the challenges that makes interesting programming.
There is some resources I should explore before to say that I simply don't find AI interesting?
1. You have to wait long for your results to come out.
2. You have little clue about what you are doing, but if you just do what everybody else is doing, then you'll probably be ok.
3. You never get the results you really wanted.
4. When something goes wrong, you can't explain it.