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Comment by cousin_it | Hacker News Reader

> Of course, the more candidates there are, the more competition for the jobs. But it doesn't follow that the jobs' terms will become increasingly exploitative, such as being offered in shorter term, with less pay, lower status and fewer benefits. That requires a separate decision to degrade the offering. [...] Anyone who tries to explain it purely as supply and demand, or even “nature”, is either ignorant or is trying to sell you something.

Higher supply does lead to lower price, though.

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The author is in the UK where nearly all universities are public, and due in no small part to the efforts of the University and College Union (UCU), most Higher Education staff (including "postdocs") are paid according to a national (published) salary system:

https://www.ucu.org.uk/payscales

Universities of course have maneuverability in the specific spine point they pay people for different positions based on experience or demand, but in the grand sceheme of things specific roles are paid specific amounts of money.

At the author's current university, for example, the national pay scale is split up into different pay grades (each of which includes a contiguous range of spine points) for different roles, e.g. Research Assistant, Research Associate, Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, etc.

Even when you have fixed salaries for job titles, employers can't escape market forces - just instead of raising the salary until they fill the post, they have to increase the title too.

That's why you can be a 'senior software engineer' 2 years out of college :)

Yes, and by removing the ability of university to set a lower price in monetary terms, this system simply encourages them to extract more value per pound in other ways, such as the lower status and fewer benefits mentioned in the post. This seems unlikely to benefit academics overall.

... in a free market, but research funding is dominated by governments, where this does not automatically apply.

There is no such thing as a "free market", especially when it comes to working for a living.

Maybe the oversupply could be addressed by encouraging students to wait until their 50s to pursue PhDs and research work, i.e. shrinking the supply by reducing the number of years between getting a degree and retirement. With more students coming from a position of financial stability after decades of work, more of them would be able to decline exploitative opportunities as well.

Moreover a later start would also mitigate the tension between starting a family and pursuing academic interests, since the offspring would be out of the house (or well on the way) by the time the academic career begins.

Cognitive abilities, energy, stamina, singular focus on something (or someone) tend to decline with age. Apart from being unenforceable, "encouraging students to wait until their 50s to pursue PhDs and research work" makes as much sense as encouraging people to wait until they are in their 50s to start playing sports professionally.

It can do, but it's not a given. Universities can decide not to race to the bottom, but instead choose the best candidates and keep remuneration reasonable.

> choose the best candidates

In lot of places (and companies too) there is increasingly policies to avoid that.

Sadly, they don’t have to. There are too many PhDs, and universities prefer to hire administrators.

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