Poverty and social background remain huge barriers in scientific careers
nature.com
nature.com
Seems like HN has a very warped view, this view that "there's no money in research" means some poor kid is better off flipping burgers into her 50s than becoming a lab manager.
I would say that in my experience the closer you get to science (or the further from money, perhaps?) the harder good money is to come by. (Left an academic tech position myself a while back; tripled my salary overnight)
What kind of jobs did you have experience with before lab manager? I'm curious.
- you're comparing what seems to be highly skilled vs. more unskilled labor; (as well as more typically PHD requiring vs not) which if anything seems to support my point given that frankly the pays are similar enough. (at least compared to the delta you'd make using higher education to go into industry)
- clinical managers (general lab managers as well, fwiw) are actually far more to the administrative side than the experimental side so it does not seem surprising that it biases upwards compared to pure researchers.
Jobwise, for myself, I built solutions for an astrophysics research group, hers was in applied psychology for certain classes of severely impaired patients.
Maybe the difference between how I see it and what you're pointing out in your two points is that "failing out" or stepping out of pure science research into science industry/admin preserves or increases pay, while "failing out" or stepping out of business or communications leads mostly to unskilled jobs which pay poorly. The expected value of a job after a science degree is higher, because there are more good paths (even if some don't pay super-well).
Don't you need to "condition" on aptitude and ability then? A person capable of getting into a decent PhD program would probably also be able to get into a solid medical or law program. At the undergrad level, that might mean a nursing degree (APRN or something) instead of a bachelors' in biology.
The science degree is not particularly lucrative at either level.
Also, I think you're flipping the causality around in other people's arguments: they seem to be claiming that pushing science degrees is not a particularly effective way of addressing poverty.
I've already seen this happening in certain labs. It can be an odd experience walking into an empty lab. In one particular bio lab, they employed one particularly talented tech who knew how to do experiments that weren't yet being done by robots. The other guys were all programmers or doing bioinformatics. They're all well-paid and getting papers in NEJM, Nature, Cell, etc. (I didn't get the job :-/ )
Of course there is tons of money in science. But it does not go towards scientists.
Some of my friends have PhDs in oceanography. Most of them are working in the lab, cutting fish (sampling) for minimal wage.
They are not even permanent employees, but on sliding contract extended every 6 months. Every 4.5 years they have to take one year break, because after 5 years they would become permanent employees.
Half empty building they work in has price tag over 200M euro (30M would do). Institute has over 60% non scientific stuff (all permanent of course). For example 10% of people are in HR, my corporation had 0.5% people in HR.
And if you studied 10+ years to write documentation which only needs 3 years degree... That is lot of wasted time and money.
That job pays miserably relative to the education required, and it's usually incredibly dull. Do you like pipetting? How about washing test tubes?
Yep, it goes to the cost of doing research, paying the CEO and VPs, marketing, etc. Industry positions pay vastly better than academia, but still quite poorly relative to the amount of work and expertise needed.
Patent law is anti science.
If anything it helps prove the point. We all know science degrees lead to money. It's practicing science that perhaps is not as $
No! It is social and gender issue! Lets push even more students into this career path.
It's only that stupid social justice that makes people talk about demographics and socio economics as we all know. There is no other reason to look into it...
The scientists are in it for love. The people who have the money understand that the scientists will do it practically for free if they had to-- and so, they have to.
By (imperfect) analogy, what you're saying is equivalent to looking at our crumbling infrastructure, lack of investment in infrastructure, and high unemployment among construction workers and saying "the problem here is an oversupply of construction workers".
However, in this case, the oversupply is so obscenely high [1] that you would have to allocate something like a fourth of the economy (roughly all government funding at all levels) in order to exhaust the supply and pay it the no-labor-of-love wage (i.e. a significant premium over the typical bachelor-educated labor).
(By the same analogy, imagine if we had pressured every schoolchild to go into construction. In that case, you would be correct that we're underinvesting in infra, but it would still be a correct to say that we over-pressured kids in the wrong direction, and that the correct level of funding would still not exhaust the supply of underemployed construction workers, and they would still need to find a better use of their skills.)
But I also think there is a case to be made that "things to discover" (through this mode) is being exhausted; it shows up as the "replication crisis" you may have heard of in the social sciences, where all the results fail to replicate because of so many people looking for whatever effect they can find and this inundates the system with false positives because it's the best they can get.
(Do you believe the above arguments remove the circularity, even if perhaps still insufficiently substantiated?)
[1] every schoolchild being taught they they need to educate themselves to the level of "prerequisites for grad school", while also receiving a lot of "advertising" for going to grad school
TL;DR: I (and IMO this thread) was speaking of hard sciences, not social sciences: there doesn't seem to be nearly as much of a replicability issue due to people starving for discoveries (there are still process improvements to be made, however). As such, the only bottleneck I've seen evidence of (in the hard sciences) is funding. I do of course think it's possible to fund science _too_ well, I just think that what evidence there is doesn't imply that we're on the point on the curve where excess funding is the problem. The "oversupply" in hard sciences is only relative to the choked-off funding, not to any reality-grounded assessment of the value of further research (and researchers).
I did think the social sciences would come up and considered clarifying that I was speaking exclusively of the hard sciences; I assumed from the conversation about "science careers" that we weren't talking about the majority of the social sciences (I don't think sociology/economics/etc are commonly held to be "science careers").
When you're saying that 1/4 of the economy would be necessary, I'm not sure if you're basing that on the situation where every schoolchild thinks they need to go to grad school? Frankly, I don't think this assumption is reasonable: I don't think the current system even encourages that. Universal undergrad is heavily encouraged, but culturally, grad school still remains very much discretionary. Hell, the last three generations of my family have been thick with advanced degrees on both sides, and I still didn't end up getting one (though it's certainly possible in the future).
>I'm not sure if you're basing that on the situation where every schoolchild thinks they need to go to grad school? Frankly, I don't think this assumption is reasonable: I don't think the current system even encourages that. Universal undergrad is heavily encouraged, but culturally, grad school still remains very much discretionary.
My point was that grad school "overuse" is tightly coupled to undergrad "overuse" -- colleges are dominated by professors that think highly of post-grad education ("hey, it worked for me!") and will therefore overpromote that as an option. Therefore, overpromotion of college will translate to a saturation of grad school (and jobs with grad-school prerequisites), even if policy "only" encourages undergrad; this is where I think we are today.
The "replication crisis" is not focused in the social sciences; its a name for a problem across the sciences, and is of particularly acute concern in medicine.
A big part of science are 'ideas', and ideas are interesting things in Human culture. To be the 'idea person' in a social group requires considerable social status. I see so many people in corporations battling to have their ideas win. I see so many people of higher status claiming ownership of the ideas of those 'beneath' them. I see plenty of great ideas being ignored because of who proposes them. And, it's very rare to see an outsider's idea gain influence.
They say that execution matters much more than ideas - but they go hand-in-hand. The person who gets to execute also gets to choose the idea.
Given the comparitive physical weakness of the Human, 'the idea' is their number one weapon and asset. It enables power. So, there are probably a lot of social reasons why most lower-status (lower income) people are kept out of science and research. It's probably more of a systematic result of Human behavior than just being poor.
My own kids and their friends often express that science is interesting but they won't get into it because of that.
When my father died and my personal gold mine with him, I had to drop out of mathematics (which I was half-assing anyway), find a way to make money, and here I am now: software developer.
Growing up with nothing into an adulthood with no support network and few prospects, where our society blames you for being in that situation, is a harder draw than being taken care of until you're halfway through college then having to find your own way.
The former quickly breaks down in presence of money, but it is a great enabler for financial risk-taking. ("worst thing that can happen is that I have to go back to ramen", call it scalability of personal finances, if you like).
The latter is quite the opposite, it seeks financial peace of mind and will take stability over opportunity any time. People with this mindset will tend to find the solid, but not stellar pay scale of science rather attractive. Self selection happens.
Are you talking about your math undergrad degree, or graduate degree? Pure math is perhaps a bad example here: in my experience, damn near every high paying field is glad to see a math degree (including seemingly unrelated fields like law, medicine, etc). I've done really well in tech and my math degree (both on paper and in practice) has contributed a lot to that success.
A math graduate degree is a little less of a definite pay-off, but I had a math PhD under me at Google who got hired in with no engineering experience whatsoever at something like 200k/yr. It took him about six months of a bit of handholding but he ended up being one of my most dependably talented people.
I wanted to keep doing math and that's why I was having a hard time finding money.
FWIW, I kept my eye on the ball and five years after finishing undergrad I mostly have work that's heavy in math but is still as lucrative (more actually) than a programming job. It's not a guarantee, but if you like it enough and try to point each step forward towards doing more math, it's definitely possible. I did get other degrees during undergrad though, so that probably shaped the opportunities available to me.
*he struck through painting and poetry.
I went into tech as a designer before the wave hit largely because I love computers and the digital medium. They opposed it because of the uncertainty of the industry ("How do you make money as a designer?") but supported me financially while I went through college. Long story short I was able to help make a lucrative company in SV.
I guess to answer your question, I very well could've gone into science because of my parents and well, the prestige.
I pushed my daughter to go to a two-day university bio discovery thing, she absolutely loved it, but said that all the research assistants confirm they can't afford to live and most of them are thinking of dropping into the industry so they can stop asking their parents to help paying the rent.
If you have a trust fund waiting for you, you can pursue idealistic dreams of changing the world rather than worrying about what will be most likely to leave you with enough money to eat.
This has been the case for centuries: the wealthy simply have always had more means to do more things.
Most of them don't. But not everybody is materialistic or subject to social pressure.
Actually, what annoys me the most as a professor isn't the (comparatively) low salary but the lack of recognition. My family always blames me for not pursuing a more lucrative path and don't understand what I do and what purpose it serves.
My father made the opposite choice and regrets it every day now that his career is coming to a close.
It's important to note that the spectrum you laid out has two other "corners". Many PhDs do mind-numbingly boring work, even if it's original research, while getting paid a pittance.
Conversely, there are many ways to do fascinating, intellectually vigorous and challenging work every day with only a Bachelor's or Master's qualification while getting rich.
There's a second trade-off here too.
PhD/Postdocs do stuff that's mind-numbingly boring at a "micro" level (e.g., actually performing most experiments), but really exciting at a macro level (e.g., figuring out how the brain--or the Sun--works). In industry, there's often the opposite opportunity: exciting day-to-day work for uninteresting goals, like using state-of-the-art machine learning (fun!) to figure out whether a webpage should show a Papa John's or Pizza Hut ad (meh).
We're very much the exception not the norm. As much as my mother believed I could be anything I would not be able to drag myself through university even without external factors pushing me down and throwing me around like a sack of meat.. for years..
But it's recently become pretty clear to me that all the best opportunities I've ever been exposed to were through connections, and not all of those connections are attributable purely to merit. Had I not had these, I would be doing pretty well on merit, but the fact that I'm doing extraordinarily well is due to the fact that I got opportunities that many others never even had a shot at. About half of these were from family and friends, which has almost nothing to do with revealed merit. The other half was from smart classmates in my CS program, which is a little more correlated with merit. But it's not a coincidence that most of the people in my friend group were somehow similarly upper middle class. I had a really talented, smart friend group, but it's hard to imagine that coming from a similar background didn't have any affect on how easily we got along.
Poverty and social background remain huge barriers in all careers.
Why single out scientific careers?
People with little family money get free grants and low-interest government backed loans to attend college. She is attending a public university. In NYC, there are many students that are attending City University of New York and I meet some. They are studying biology, engineering, and other sciences. They generally but not always live at home.
The annual tuition and fees are less than $7000 and for transportation, the MTA subway/bus is $115 per month, unlimited rides.
Students like those mentioned in the article get Pell Grants and Stafford government backed low-interest loans. Pell Grants are $5,800 per year. Stafford Loans are 5,500 the first year, 6,500 the second year, and $7,500 for the remaining years.
In my particular case, I paid for 90% of tuition/housing/living expenses by programming computers beginning in high school. I was not eligible for Pell Grants nor any form of loans including Stafford Loans.
So, I really don't understand these arguments. Public universities provide a first class low-cost undergraduate education and of course have PhD programs and so on.
Once one has an undergraduate degree with good grades, in the sciences and engineering, if they are admitted to a PhD program so they are fully funded for both tuition and housing.
CUNY Tuition and Fees: http://www2.cuny.edu/financial-aid/tuition-and-college-costs...
Pell Grants: https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/about/announcements/pell-2016-1...
Stafford Loans: https://www.scholarships.com/financial-aid/student-loans/sta...
> I paid for 90% of tuition/housing/living expenses by programming computers beginning in high school.
It's commendable that OP did this - that's great and plenty of people have squandered their gifts unlike him.
However, just because funding is available doesn't mean people aren't at a disadvantage due to their situation.
Does OP really believe that you're on equal ground if you:
- Live in a ghetto, often with an stressed-out, overworked single Mom.
- Go to a shit school without adequate fucking literacy education - let alone programming classes.
- Have no family / friends who have professional jobs.
- Often fear for your physical and financial safety.
- You don't have a computer / internet at home.
This breads a very difficult kind of scarcity to dig yourself out of, and we need programs to help these kids get out. Cash is great, but not sufficient.
(Of course, their schools should be improved)
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3...
Much of the issues mentioned are true of anyone that wants to go to college. But the article to me was about paying for college and ironically, the poor have more opportunities than the not so poor because of the Pell Grants and Stafford Loans.
At any rate, in NYC, I see students who were immigrants from disadvantaged backgrounds getting a top education at CUNY (and there are other low-cost schools in NYC).
My mother and sister both do some one on one tutoring of kindergarten age economically disadvantaged children. They've told me about the kids that come in that you can tell are very bright. But due to some of the factors like described in the previous post (eg the stressed out single mom who is always working and has less time to do things like reading with their kids etc., the less safe environment, or even just parents that for whatever reason don't know how to engage in that way), many times they still often come in significantly behind. Which makes sense. If your family actively engages their children in learning from the start, you're going to be better prepared.
Is it possible to overcome that? Yes, but not by simply throwing a Chromebook at them. The good news for instance is that this type of volunteer-led tutoring seems to work very decently at closing some of the gap (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/can-volunteer...). So I think it's going to take more or less solutions in that direction.
The Nature story is decidedly sensationalistic or the writer(s) didn't do their research. I think they should come to NYC and interview the students at CUNY and other NYC public colleges. Most of these students come from families without resources.
Those are the beliefs, uncomfortable or not, and as is often the case with this type of topic, they are the products of a fundamentally different view of the world. I am not here to fix cosmic injustices using further injustice, nor do I want my tax money going towards it either.
Furthermore, the implication that people in poverty are any less "hard-working" than those that have achieved financial success/accessibility to the sciences seems like a claim that needs some citations. Quick Google searches suggest that escaping poverty with children would actually require working more than 40-hours a week. Seems like a catch-22 for trying to achieve financial, familial and educational success. [1]
[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/05/06/u-s-minimum-wage-e...
60% of poor adults (age 18-64) don't work at all. In contrast, 81% of non-poor adults do. 58% of non-poor adults worked full time year round, whereas only 11% of poor adults did.
http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication... Table 3 on page 21.
Why is this a remotely controversial claim, as opposed to simply standard knowledge that all educated people know? Would you also require a citation that proves Trump is a Republican, or that rich people don't commit much violent crime?
The answer is no, because there are confounding issues I left out. This should sound familiar, you just did it yourself.
Here's a great blog post that reviews the academic literature: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-m...
Since you seem to believe there is some confounding factor that causes the census to incorrectly count the number of poor people who work, feel free to expand on it.
> 60% of poor adults (age 18-64) don't work at all. In contrast, 81% of non-poor adults do.
I'm having trouble believing that it is possible to make an argument that % of people in a group who are employed is a good representation of the degree to which people in the group are hardworkers seriously, no matter what the group in question is.
But when its poor vs. non-poor -- that is, when the groups are divided up by an attribute which is fairly strongly influenced by whether or not you have the income derived from a job -- its even harder to believe.
> Why is this a remotely controversial claim, as opposed to simply standard knowledge that all educated people know?
That poor people are less likely to be employed is not a controversial claim, nor was it the claim at issue. That they are less "hard-working" was the claim at issue, which is not one which can be resolved by looking at the degree to which they are employed.
(To get that number, I took 10.5M in labor force / (45.3M poor people - 16M poor children).)
So yes, I think it's fair to characterize a group of people who don't work, and aren't even looking for work, as "less hard working" than a group that disproportionately is working.
What does "hard working" mean to you? And why do you believe poor people are comparably hard working to the non-poor?
Lower labor force participation could mean they are less hard working -- or it could mean that they have less opinion of their ability to be gainfully employed, or it could mean that working has a high cost (because, e.g., they have children to take care of, childcare isn't free, and the jobs they could reasonably secure wouldn't provide a net gain before considering child care that's enough to pay for childcare.)
Or lots of other things.
> What does "hard working" mean to you?
Willing to expend effort to improve one's condition, essentially.
> And why do you believe poor people are comparably hard working to the non-poor?
I haven't argued that they are. I've argued that the evidence that you've presented to prove that they are not has virtually no probative value on the point it is offered to support.
It's true - I can't rule out that the poor aren't sitting at home praying for a job while taking no action to find one.
But what I've presented is strong evidence that the poor are not hard working.
Suppose your prior is P(!hardworking) = A, P(working) = B, P(looking for work) = C, P(hard work in non-labor force activities) = D. Of course, A + B + C + D must add up to 1.
I've just shown B and C to be false. So P(!hardworking|evidence I've presented) = A / (A + D) > A. Feel free to tweak this and try a more complicated model, I don't think you'll get a different result.
What evidence - if any - would cause you to acknowledge that the poor actually aren't hardworking?
(because, e.g., they have children to take care of, childcare isn't free, and the jobs they could reasonably secure wouldn't provide a net gain before considering child care that's enough to pay for childcare.)
Strangely, poor Indians have solved this problem. One poor person looks after multiple children while the others work. But poor Indians, unlike poor Americans, are actually hard working.
If done outside of the formal economy, that would produce, ceteris paribus, lower labor-force participation among the poor, which is, surprise-surprise, exactly the result you said indicated that American poor are not hard working.
So, thank you for illustrating one of the reasons your "evidence" doesn't justify the conclusion you've drawn from it.
Suppose that the 65% of poor adults who aren't in the labor force decided to enter into such an arrangement. Then 3 of them would work (or look for work) while the 4'th watched their children. The labor force participation rate of the poor would increase from 35% to 83.75%.
Can you name any piece of evidence or measurement which would cause you to believe the poor are not hardworking? Or is your doubt more religious in nature?
If you assume thatpoor people are more likely to have to resort to mutual aid outside the formal economy for that while non-poor people are more likely to be able to be either consumers or suppliers (or both) of childcare in the formal economy and that is the only factor affecting differences in labor force participation between the groups (which is, no doubt, an oversimplification), then you'd expect -- no matter what the mutual aid ratio is -- a lower labor force participation rate for the poor.
If you more generally assume that this is hardly unique, and that regulatory costs force those with less means out of the formal economy in other ways, you'd expect the labor force participation rate of the poor to be even further depressed.
> Can you name any piece of evidence or measurement which would cause you to believe the poor are not hardworking?
I'm not convinced that the character trait of "hard-workingness" has a good objectively-measurable proxy, but then since I'm not the one making a positive claim about it, its not my obligation to present and justify a valid measure of the trait.
> Or is your doubt more religious in nature?
False dichotomy much? Thinking you are making a positive fact claim about something for which no good objective evidence exists and which, while it might in principle be measurable, it is unlikely that objective evidence could exist in practice, isn't a "religious" objection -- if anything, its skepticism that you are making what is essentially a claim of a religious nature (that is, one that is held as true statement of material fact about the world without being either objectively justified nor even necessarily practically objectively justifiable.)
And here it is - you think those who didn't have the same benefits as you and me (presumably) are takers who want "a free pass" and "cash".
What's missing in your diatribe is the fact that what everyone wants is opportunity or even a chance of opportunity. Not a handout - most people just want a fair break.
Navigating how to apply and pay for college is difficult if nobody you know has done it before.
I'm sorry that your college didn't help you as they should have.
I did not grow up in NYC, but there are several free public high schools for gifted scientists and engineers to be including Stuyvesant High School and the Bronx School of Science. Entrance is based on merit.
So, it is certainly possible to get a top rated education not coming from "privilege." Other communities offer Magnet Schools and more should be offering them. A huge systemic problem in this country is that we spend enormous sums of money for "special education" but very little for academically gifted children. That is a real problem.
If one is concerned that children "without privilege" can get to be scientists and engineers and so on, then they should be solving a systems problem which is not enough public Magnet Schools for academically gifted children.
You created something that, at first glance, seems like a reasonable argument, but when exposed to a cursory examination, collapses under the weight of it's own bullshit.
D-
They get almost $24K free money in 4 years of free money in Pell Grants They get about $27K in 4 years subsidized Stafford Loans
People in poverty also get other kinds of grants/fellowships.
The Nature article was about people from poorer backgrounds not being able to be Scientists. The truth is they receive plenty of money for college and as I pointed out there are many in NYC that are doing just that.
You are saying that the school you went to was run incompetently. I am sorry for that. You should count yourself blessed that you received money for college without, say, serving in the military as others must do using a G.I. Bill to pay for college.
I could not get Pell Grants or Stafford Loans, if you'd read the entire thread with my posts, including my original post, you'd know that.
I wouldn't complain about any free money. So what if you win a scholarship and then the Pell Grants are deducted? 4 years of Pell Undergrad is a free $24 K. I didn't get a single penny.
I had no financial safety net that you suggest. I had to do it on my own.
So, people get Pell, they get Stafford, there are quality low-cost public schools such as City University of New York (CUNY) where Pell grants alone cover the cost of tuition.
In addition, people can serve in the military to get even more money through G.I. Bill (and many have).
After undergrad, PhD programs in science and engineering are funded including tuition and living expenses.
There are programs to pay for an entire medical school education including both tuition and living expenses such as serving 4 years as a military doctor (or perhaps other programs such as underserved areas).
Don't take your anger out on me or others because your school was incompetent for not processing grant and loan applications at the correct time. Instead be thankful for all of the free money received (Pell is now $24K for 4 years) and subsidized loans you got (Stafford is $27K for 4 years) subsidized by people like me that never could get either Pell or Stafford.
That has shit-all to do with doing science.
Because having the option to take a course teaches me nothing in itself, and the occasional interesting, non-intensive video doesn't begin to compete with semi-mandatory hours of instruction and practice every week.
A few people will learn a lot without taking a class, but far fewer people have the motivation and drive to do that than have the intelligence and drive to benefit greatly from a class.
A scientist doesn't learn everything they need in classes and then stop. They need to continually improve their knowledge; when I had an academic career I spent perhaps 4 hours/day going through papers and keeping up with the literature. Nowadays that's probably dropped to 2 hours/day, since I'm in a space where old school techniques (operations research FTW!) are generally pretty effective.