The ratio of PhDs awarded annually to tenure track positions that opens up suggests that a lot of activity in the sector isn't leading anywhere.
If I put you in a dark room, and ask you to find a way to light it, how many times will you fail to find the switch? Oh wait, I lied. There's not actually a switch, but there might be a candle in that general direction. Maybe.
That's how little we have to go off of. That's how empty any information on your study is. I don't think people really understand how hard this type of work is.
Research is a purely exploratory and creative work. Like art, science requires time, patience, and many many failures. You don't just get a bunch of eureka-Einsteins that come out of MIT day one knocking down Theorems and discovering new physical laws. That's just not humanly possible and it's ridiculous if you think it'll ever work that way
I am perfectly willing to admit that the vast majority of research and PhD's went nowhere and will continue to go nowhere for a long time. But that doesn't mean they're useless. Research requires exploration. It requires trial and error. It is highly inefficient and does not fit well in a consumerist society like ours, but this is the way that works best for us so far.
If you have some better idea, then why don't you go out and do it? How are you going to get a bunch of incredibly intelligent, creative, and independent people funded and provided for in a society that values immediate results over long term achievements?
I'm not arguing the academia system is perfect. Any one knows it's screwed up beyond belief. But it's not out of malice. We're not purposely trying to make the world worse, or something ridiculous like that. You have many people who care a lot about the science, who need to eat and sleep and need money to do that. Sometimes the money goes to their heads, sometimes their massive egos get the better of them, but do you seriously think we don't care about science? You'd have to be an idiot to do a PhD for the money or the fame. Why do you think we put 7+ years of our lives into stuff like this?
So most PhDs don't actually get tenured positions. What are you actually trying to say? Are you saying there aren't enough tenured positions? Or are you implying that these PhDs don't deserve tenured positions? Do you have any evidence for either of those claims? Because otherwise you're just participating in more armchair speculation.
No it's not, plenty of people get PhD with the goal of ending as a researcher in the industry.
Plenty of junk science, including a thesis I decided not to publish, while my advisor wanted the extra points on his resume. Many PHD students are stuck because they got a hard stem degree (like physics) but realized that job pickings were a little slim without further academic development. Or they are foreigners and cannot stay in the U.S. without studying.
Passion does not always last forever. Especially when you got off-ivy league schools. Didnt you hear stories in school about graduate students who were simply stuck for a decade because of lack of interest from them and/or their advisor? Not totally farfetched.
Maybe it will help these poor fellows if I say look, I have a PhD, I work in research, and I agree with everything krick says. Yes, papers are unnecessarily jargonistic and borderline illegible. Yes, there are massive problems with the incentive structure in science. We openly say science is "publish or perish"; how can we not expect that to incentivize lower paper quality, irreproducibility, and status signalling in the form of unnecessary jargon? Even if we assume the noblest of intentions for every single scientist, which is...idealistic.
spaceseaman is equating (IMO unfairly) criticism of the process of science in its current US manifestation with some kind of disrespect towards its obvious beneficial outcomes and motives. The whole thing IS full of inefficiency, and that's not solely because science is hard. Taxpayers have a right to demand that we don't waste their money and perhaps even to present our findings in a way they can understand with a reasonable application of effort (ideally not paywalled as well).
Motte: all the valid critiques of how institutional science works, all of which are well-known.
Bailey: full Paul Ryanism, cut the NSF and NIH to the fucking bone and tell scientists to go get "real jobs" in industry. Subject academics to yet more administration and reporting requirements that further incentivize bad science and just generally make everyone miserable.
We'd all be less tetchy about the motte if it wasn't used as an excuse for the bailey.
I am perfectly happy to admit that institutional science is screwed up - really bad. Scientific texts are often un-readable, and the entire community has major systemic issues. But I react incredibly poorly to the opinion that scientists enjoy this system or even benefit from it. We hate the way academia is structured. It's just that no one can figure out anything better and the benefits for enough people are important enough that swaying them is incredibly difficult.
It's also that everyone who wants to do science is held hostage to this system. There is no other institution focused on original research, beyond shipping a product within three to five years.
Academia sucks. There are no full-time research positions for good researchers anymore; grant funding has gotten as selective as the startup lottery. Even the people who "make it" have to work horrendous hours and spend all their time marketing themselves.
Even from the very outset, you're forced to put your heart on the line, declare science your calling and your passion, and then just suck it up when you can't find a tenure-track job.
Some fields don't have an "Exit" option that makes anything better, just a "Voice" option or bust. Besides which, every "Exit" is a betrayal of the social contract, a tiny declaration that society would rather rot and burn than fix problems like mature adults.