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Comment by cassowary37 | Hacker News Reader

What makes you think 'most' faculty appreciate the pyramid scheme? Many of us spend a lot of time worrying about our postdocs' future, in no small part because we recognize that the struggle for funding never actually ends. Tenure is not the end of the rainbow, it's reassurance that your salary can't go all the way to zero - but your lab, your team, even your office space absolutely can go to zero. At least in CS there's a career path to success that skips indentured servitude. In biology, unless you want to be a lifelong lab tech, good luck trying to get somewhere in biotech without toiling in the academic trenches. I promise, even those of us a bit closer to the top of the pyramid wish it were otherwise.

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Unless you're amazingly talented at nurturing your postdocs, something like half of them will not have lasting careers in academia. I applaud your attention to their futures. It would help others in your position to understand what you envision for these non-academic-future postdocs and how you prepare them for their futures. What are you doing for them?

This is the right question to ask - not what NSF or NIH can do. I'm afraid I don't have a very satisfying answer, I'm still trying to figure it out myself. The first thing I tell my postdocs is that they can't put their life on hold and wait for adulthood to start after they finish this training (or more training). We need to be discussing career paths now, not 18 months from now. The second thing I tell them is that in my field (medicine) it's likely they can make a greater contribution on the industry side than in academia, because as important as fundamental (basic) research can be, industry is where most new treatments come from. For some I encourage entrepreneurship - harder in bio than CS but do-able for the right person. And some /can/ stay in academia as staff scientists - not responsible for running their own labs or generating their own funding, but acting mostly autonomously.

It's great to think about what you can do personally, but actually the NSF/congress did create this problem by choosing the financial structure for science in the US in the 40s-50s. That was done centrally and was not an organic extension of how science was previously funded. Many possible alternatives such as direct student funding like they do in Canada (advisors who are advisors not feudal lords), are imaginable. The best fit depends a lot on field. For example I'd say medical research is some of the most-marketable, and most medicine faculty choose academia for the right reasons.

Unfortunately in my benighted corner of science things are going the wrong way. The NSF actually just created a master's program for managing a sort of scientific software development for which there is no market. It did this because saying scientists care about education and commercialization "sounds good" on a grant proposal. This will do nothing but waste 50million, and 40 highly skilled human years of time. It's laughable to anyone in the field, but such are the incentives at NSF.

Very satisfying, I think. By all means, keep working at it! And this is great already.

It's also worth noting how the educational industrial complex plays into this. In my college, the university takes a whopping 50% of grant money in administrative fees, leaving so much less for actual hiring of postdocs and graduate students.

> In my college, the university takes a whopping 50% of grant money in administrative fees, leaving so much less for actual hiring of postdocs and graduate students.

OMG

This is effectively your research team's rent and taxes -- it goes to pay for things like the accountants, the heating bills, building repairs, instructional support, upgrading the building's electrical grid to support your new equipment, all of the library (books, journals, computers, librarians), campus security, student health, interest on debt taken out to build the building research takes place in, deprication of buildings and equipment etc. 50 percent is maybe on the high end, but the low end would be maybe 30 percent.

Many grants come with a stipulation that no more than X percent be allocated to administrative fee rate. Which basically means the non-stipulated grants have to pay an even higher rate. I believe I've seen some people argue that the ivy league's rather high indirect cost rate with the NSF, which was negotiated / grandfathered in, is an unfair advantage.

a) I'm a faculty member :P b) I meant you no personal affront, there are good an bad actors, but indisputably the career incentives are firmly directed at irresponsible ruinous growth in student/postdoc populations. At the very least professors should be removed from papers in which they contributed less than 10% of the effort.

Look at what someone does. Not what they say.

You say you worry. But you cash your cheques and continue acting in your capacity as if university degrees mean something.

University is where all the shiny tech is created that people like Peter Thiel use to make enough money to be able to tell people not to go to university.

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