Time to talk about why so many postgrads have poor mental health

No - I'm not sure where you got that definition from. You can be a researcher and be on the faculty of a department. It just means as opposed to the support members of staff.

It is actually nearly impossible to find time to actually take a vacation. I had more than 6 months banked when I quit.

Edit. To add to your edit, tenure is far less secure that it appears from outside. It allows you to get away with being a moderate pain, but if you get too bad what they do is make your position redundant in the next departmental reshuffle. Since these occur about every 2 to 3 years tenure is more illusory than real.

You not only have to worry about your position being made redundant, but your whole department. It is easier for admin to get rid of a few troublemakers by killing the whole department than just going after the troublemakers directly. A fair amount of my admin/politics time was spent defending the entire department rather than worrying about my own position directly.

I think the opportunities in tech are promising towards this end, and would be interested in getting in contact with other people with similar plans.

I'm on the "build skills, save money" - phase currently, and probably will be for > 5 years to come. So that is my main focus right now.

It's too bad there isn't more of an independent academic community, but it sure beats pressure to publish and writing grant applications.

I think some platforms come close. There are places to ask questions (e.g. StackExchange) but they don't seem to like "what if" questions and if the idea is good there's no good way to follow up over months or years. Github works for some fields where the idea is tightly coupled with the implementation (e.g. some computer systems fields) but not for others.

I guess I would just like a place to discuss ideas. In academia it's common to discuss nascent ideas within your lab, but larger collaboration happens at things like conferences where you're presenting only the ideas that worked out. I think such a platform could make independent research like you're describing much more effective and attractive.

P.S. 42, with ADHD. Started University at 15, started high school at 11. Great at getting jobs. Not so great at keeping them. :P

I don't think there was much response to any of them though.

As Upton Sinclair wrote about a century ago: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

How does that apply to the exploitation of the stars in the eyes of graduate students? There may be vast amounts of self-serving denial of the pyramid scheme aspect of much of academia.

Like George Orwell wrote in 1946: "The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. ..."

I'd guess the outcome will continue to be mainly gradually increasing pain for all involved. Human systems seem to be able to tolerate a large amount of needless suffering when there is no obvious credible alternative and there are still some positive aspects of the current system. Related: https://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_freshst...

Likely things will keep going on a downward trend until some significant shock causes a massive reorientation of resources. Alternatively, the shock may just be the crossing of various trend lines like increasing student debt versus decreasing graduate opportunities to the point where no one could justify the cost as an investment.

See also a few different theories of social collapse which could be applied to understanding possibilities for academia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse#Theories

And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Age_Ahead "Dark Age Ahead is a 2004 book by Jane Jacobs describing what she sees as the decay of five key "pillars" in "North America": community and family, higher education, science and technology, taxes and government responsiveness to citizen's needs, and self-regulation by the learned professions. She argues that this decay threatens to create a dark age unless the trends are reversed. Jacobs characterizes a dark age as a "mass amnesia" where even the memory of what was lost is lost."

And we are seeing that sort of amnesia in the USA in academia and other places -- where fewer people remember what academia used to be like decades ago.

Just like there is a growing amnesia where fewer people remember what it was like to go to school in the USA back in the 1960s when kids were taught how awful the USSR was because it kept its citizens under constant surveillance...

But we still might hope for a gradual transition to other ways of organizing research and discussion like via the internet (such as Hacker News) -- but people still need to somehow get enough available time to participate in productive ways.

And the original Nature article is an example of an attempt at self-correction.

Here are a couple recent satires on academia both from 2013:

From Amazon: "Option Three: A Novel about the University by Joel Shatzky -- When Acting Visiting Assistant Professor L. Circassian is fired and rehired in the same week (with a 35 percent pay cut), he is only at the beginning of a cycle of abuse and professional debasement at the university. Joel Shatzky has created an hilarious novel about the corporatization of higher education - a book filled with blowhard deans, corrupt politicians, grasping CEOs, inept union officials, inappropriately dressed students, and scholars in donkey ears."

https://www.lawrenceswittner.com/books/whats-going-uaardvark "What’s Going On at UAardvark? by Lawrence S. Wittner -- What’s Going On at UAardvark? is a faced-paced political satire about how an increasingly corporatized, modern American university becomes the site of a rambunctious rebellion that turns the nation’s campus life upside down."

Both relate to this Atlantic essay from 2000: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/03/the-kep... "The Kept University: Commercially sponsored research is putting at risk the paramount value of higher education—disinterested inquiry. Even more alarming, the authors argue, universities themselves are behaving more and more like for-profit companies."

Here is an essay I wrote mostly around 2001 on one way to fix one negative aspect of much of modern academia and other not-for-profits supposedly dedicated to working in the public interest: http://pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-... "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."

And here is a book-length essay be me from 2008 on how to rethink Princeton University as a mental-health-promoting post-scarcity institution: "Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease" http://pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html "The fundamental issue considered in this essay is how an emerging post-scarcity society affects the mythology by which Princeton University defines its "brand", both as an educational institution and as an alumni community. ... We can, and should, ask how we can create institutions that help everyone in them become healthier, more loving, more charitable, more hopeful, more caring..."

So essentially, if we want the better parts of old academia from the US 1950s-1970s back, there will need to be some radical changes. As G.K. Chesteron wrote in 1908: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.x.html "We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. But this which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and terrible sense true of all human things. An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old. It is the custom in passing romance and journalism to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies. But, as a fact, men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies; under tyrannies that had been public liberties hardly twenty years before. Thus England went mad with joy over the patriotic monarchy of Elizabeth; and then (almost immediately afterwards) went mad with rage in the trap of the tyranny of Charles the First. So, again, in France the monarchy became intolerable, not just after it had been tolerated, but just after it had been adored. The son of Louis the well-beloved was Louis the guillotined. So in the same way in England in the nineteenth century the Radical manufacturer was entirely trusted as a mere tribune of the people, until suddenly we heard the cry of the Socialist that he was a tyrant eating the people like bread. So again, we have almost up to the last instant trusted the newspapers as organs of public opinion. Just recently some of us have seen (not slowly, but with a start) that they are obviously nothing of the kind. They are, by the nature of the case, the hobbies of a few rich men. We have not any need to rebel against antiquity; we have to rebel against novelty. ..."

Or for a more modern take on that, from 1963, as John W. Gardner said in "Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society", every generation needs to relearn for itself what the words carved into the stone monuments mean. He says essentially that fundamental values are not some long-ago-filled-but-now-running-out reservoir from previous generations but a reservoir that must be refilled anew by each generation in its own way.

Without necessarily approving of their specific actions, value re-creation is something that people like the late Aaron Swartz (taking on JSTOR and MIT with his efforts) and Alexandra Elbakyan (taking on Elsevier with Sci-Hub) were and are trying to do. Richard Stallman with the GPL and GNU Manifesto from 1985 as a response to proprietary software agreements in academia is another less-controversial example because he worked within the existing copyright laws. So are -- also less controversially -- Wikipedia, Hacker News, Reddit (Swartz again), Slashdot, Archive.org, GitHub, and many other internet-mediated venues -- which are creating ways to have discussions and learn about sci/tech/humanities topics outside of formal academia. They are all essentially treating formal academic systems as-we-know-them-in-practice as damage and routing around them.

Too many have come to believe a degree is the magic. In some cases it is. In plenty of others it's a curse. The time and money could have been better spent elsewhere.

as someone who keeps thinking if i should go back to finish my ph.d., i can’t help but think of how dogmatic most graduate programs are in addition to being logistical nightmares. there’s basically no time or space for one to explore one’s own thoughts and program unless it specifically matches up with what someone else (namely an advisor) wants to do. there’s so much hand holding through required coursework (and homework) that one can’t hardly think deeply about anything actually original.

the book disciplined minds touches upon this. that those born in institutions will carry that institutional conservatism with them. i have felt this. i went to talk about some of my ideas to a well known and respected researcher. before i could even finish my sentence that began with “i’m interested in...” he cut me off shaking his head and, literally, said “i don’t believe in it...”. goddamnit.

Oh and your assumption that education somewhat prevents wars is completely false. Societies like pre ww2 Germany and Japan were full of well educated folks.

This specific system has very little to do with war or piece - it's only causal link with the society at large is it's funding - how much, by whom and by witch terms.

This is not to say all academia is problematic - but too large areas, as claimed by this article, clearly are.

The US was / is involved in 5 to 7 "conflicts." Edu isn't helping to stop that. In fact, anecdotally, I see educated people part of the problem. They have become less open minded, less willing to change position because their info was incomplete.

We need thought, and people willing and able to use it. Not education.

Problem with this is, in the list of degrees, useless degrees far outnumber useful degrees.

On one hand, I agree.

On the other, you hit the nail on the head. This is a socialization issue. As much of the USA gives a nod to individualism, the fact is we are taught to not take that too far.

The status quo feeds the higher edu beast. But there are too many blindly chasing the promise, and only piling up tons of debt. The wrath of Higher Edu Industrial Complex continues. No questions asked.

Yes. We can fix the tuition issue. But that also means saying "Sorry Charlie, you don't qualify." This latter bit, no one wants to discuss.

In addition, the truth is, cost is a function of demand. Edu prices - like housing prices - were driven up by demand; demand that was increase with cheap loans and easy availability.

Edu's charge more? Because. They. Can.

But everyone gets to go. Some use the opportunity wisely. Some do not.

But if the pay model changes so must the who gets to go where model.

All that said, edu is not a gateway to success. And the edu model is broken. It's going to implode. When AI replaces the vast majority of jobs (including white collar) then there will be an excess of edu'ed people with too much free time on their hands (and too much debt with no viable way to pay).

Perhaps higher edu isn't the only thing headed for a reckoning?

It is not always free, but at least at public universities it is really cheap compared to US universities.

I’d be okay with publicly funded education (all levels) if the admissions requirements were a lot stricter.

The missing part of the equation is that Germany also has high-quality, well-regarded vocational education. In the US, university is widely regarded as the only reasonable route to a secure middle-class lifestyle. In Germany, about half of school-leavers go into the Duale Ausbildung system, spending part of their time working as a paid apprentice and part of their time studying at college. The role of universities in society is completely different when there's a good alternative.

The same is true for most of the EU, except, notably, the UK, which is the other developed country, besides the US, where higher education is a proper industry and where students often get some serious debt to go to university.

I did all of my studies in the UK, though I'm from Greece. From the start I was struck with how much the public discussion around education is focused on money. It's not so much that university studies are aimed at getting you a (better) job, it's more like the UK society has lost its ability to measure the need for education with any other metric than how much more money you're making afterwards.

With the debate focusing on money like that, I think it will be pretty hard for the US or the UK to do anything about their "crazy fees" like you say. They now see those fees as a kind of investment: you pay some money up front to get a return to your investment later.

That is certainly a broken way to do education, higher or otherwise, but the solution is not to tear down higher education altogether. The obvious (to me) solution is to make it publicly funded again, as it used to be in both countries in the past, so that younger generations can benefit as their parents and grandparents did, without taking on extravagant debt.

We could debate how much subsidy should be allocated for arts vs. science, but I'd prefer that the wealthiest countries didn't restrict arts. They/we can afford it.

Even your peers in study might create pressure that having phd is something cool. I dropped my masters because I had job opportunity, some of my friends assume that I finished masters and that is why I have good job. Then I clarify, I did not finish it and they are somewhat disappointed.

OMG

Information is massively more knowable now and bad behavior isnt hiding very well anymore. I’m putting my money on a-holes not winning like they use to.

This is true for superstar programmers, lawyers, basketball players, managers, machinists, and just about everyone.

It's difficult to rank anyone for almost anything, the best aren't always chosen, and people often win for talents unrelated to their core competency.

To sum it up... life isn't fair.

Thus, in the US there is more pressure on a PhD, because they need to take care of their pay.

Academia is so dysfunctional right now. It's parasitic off the drive of young people who just want to make the world a little better. It's very unfortunate it's ended up this way.

This is one of the reasons why I often ask myself why the suicide rate is so low in society.

I personally don't think it is the case.

I think the rate of people dropping out of academia is a good indicator that something is not quite right. Especially as these postgrads are dropping out well short of "making a difference".

That so many people continue to go into the system despite this shows a clear lack of judgement.