I’m leaving academia
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Academia in its modern, McKinseyfied, perverse form doesn't do much good for anyone/anything besides endowments. It's really hard to admit that after you've sunk a decade into it (and are supposedly lucky enough to be faculty).
For my own sake, I wish there had been a faster way to look behind the curtain... C'est la vie!
It's worth noting that the core aspects of academia have been either pushed out or dramatically altered. Universities might be flush with cash, but they do not pay their teachers (it's no coincidence that adjunctification of the system begins with the management theory era). Professors are left to fight for resources that are being spent elsewhere: on sustaining a much larger bureaucracy (this or that "provost"), or on ancillary services like college sports or other customer-focussed amenities.
Here's an academic account: https://www.aaup.org/article/rise-and-coming-demise-corporat...
For easier digestion Scott Galloway is spot on (Prof at nyu) https://youtu.be/d8kwzSTITP0
The reason we have too many PhDs, and too many students is the same: our dumb parents generation thought that "education" was important and demanded government support for all their children.
Without the state artificially funding this no one in their right mind would do it. Our parents demanded it, and we got it. Turns out its a scam.
Hardly anything to "McKinsey"ificaiton
At prestigious institutions this is literally a revolving door with mckinsey which can be followed through key appointments but I was using the word to make a more abstract illusion.
The average IQ of an undergrad 30 years ago was over 120, now it is 105.
University doesn't "educate" you. At best it trains you in a discipline that you have to, on arrival, have an aptitude for. The (pseudo-)educational experience isnt transformative, it doesn't take a person who cannot learn complex topics independently and turn them into a person who can. It facilitates.
That means c. 10% of the current population of students are actually suitable for university. Everything else is a bubble created by "aspirational" parents demanding $100k loans for their children.
If there was no demand, there would be no market.. and what the demand is for is not education but a diploma. And the larger markets insist of college degrees for the most mediocre of jobs, and have off-loaded training to be subsidized, ultimately by the students getting a degree (and then complain because they are not being 'taught' skills necessary for the workplace).
In what sense do we have too many PhDs? The market for PhDs is pretty competitive.
Even ignoring arts and humanities PhDs which are obvious cases, in fields like biology a newly minted average PhD has roughly zero people competing for them. They’ll be lucky to find a job even close to their field. You have biology PhDs working as Clinical Research Associates, for heaven’s sake.
You can be a high-school teacher in your subject for example.- I don't think we have a shortage of teachers! Or you can work in industry.
Not everyone does a PhD in order to get onto a tenure track at a college, which is what I think you meant.
There is a massive, massive oversupply of PhDs. We can argue about the magnitude of the oversupply, but the reasonable range of discussion is between “huge” and “gigantic”.
There clearly isn't - since there's such huge competition to hire them. If there was a massive oversupply they'd be unemployed.
Maybe top-flight CS PhDs from Stanford, I’d believe that. But your average biology or chemistry PhD? Every single one of them that I know struggled mightily in the job market.
You may ask, isn't it a waste of time going through this rigamole? Of course, it is a waste of time for the super brilliant people; however, majority of them are like average you and me.
100% wrong. The vast majority of STEM PhDs are foreign born. The reason we have a ton of PhDs in certain fields is because of how our immigration system works.
TBH we probably shouldn't be importing PhD students in the humanities or over-saturated STEM fields (looking at you, Pure Math).
> The reason we have too many PhDs
We really don't, at least in certain fields. We might have too many PhDs who want to be faculty at top 10 universities. But, at least in CS, we have a pretty significant shortage of PhDs. My first post-PhD job offers were in the 300K - 500K range. I had zero days of work experience outside phd school. That indicates a significant labor shortage; I'm not that special, I promise, but I was the only person in my particular niche on the market they year, and there were 5 companies with deep pockets who wanted my expertise.
Hedge funds and tech monopolies over-paying for talent is, I guess, not the worst thing in the world. But good luck hiring a PhD to be a professor at your small cash-strapped branch campus when you can pay $60K/yr, your governor is constantly shit-talking lazy academics who in fact work 80 hour weeks, and the competing offers in industry are well into the mid six figures with better work/life balance and better job security.
Sure, in some research-driven and high-complexity industrial areas there's a very severe shortage of talent in general. You don't get programmers being paid 200k without a real-terms shortage, let alone programmers with PhDs in, eg., algorithmic research.
My point was about the university system, as a closed system. That is what the OP comment is talking about.
The only use of a cultural criticsm PhD is a job teaching that subject. There aren't any.
Last time I checked there were TWO job openings in the entirety of the united kingdom for a postdoc job requiring a philosophy PhD.
The university is, at this point, just a scam. For almost all students. The 1-5% who get some use out of it, and who always got some use out of it, should continue to go.
>> TBH we probably shouldn't be importing PhD students in the humanities or over-saturated STEM fields (looking at you, Pure Math).
But, tbh, this isn't even about fields, it's about spending 5 years developing hard-to-find research skills vs. spending 5 years indulging one's curiosity/taste.
CS has its own version of "useless phd in Great Books/crit theory", and I've worked with philosophy PhDs who wrote more code for their dissertation than the average CS phd student.
We can take the "rational preference" of the postgrad student as perfectly well informed of this, or we can admit it's a scam.
It's a scam. There is no job for them. They'd be happier elsewhere, being independent.
They're being played around with for years of their life, being missold a future, and having their passion exploited.
The "rot" isnt in the marketization of the university where (heaven forfend) students demand things of their professors.
The rot is in their professors themselves (who know the game and lie about it), the government which supplies their marks (ie. satisifies their voters) and the aspirational middle class parents who demand their special little ones get $100k+ loans against their future for nonesense and bullshit.
PhDs come with a living wage stipend and 100% tuition. I've never heard of anyone going in to debt to get a phd. If you're paying for your phd with borrowed money, you made a really huge wrong turn.
As for the rest... sorry you had a bad experience. To all future readers: don't do a phd for the money, and during your phd, make sure you develop marketable skills. By your mid 20s, you should have realized that you are responsible for your own career.
> The rot is in their professors themselves
yeah, those evil professors, working 2x the hours I work for 1/5th of the money /s
No one owes you anything. University -- especially phd school -- is a place where you can draw on experts and resources to develop marketable skills. Or you can not. You're paying for access, not for guaranteed outcomes.
I have friends who have. And even a college professor who told me he was still paying it back
This is an absurd take for other reasons too, though. "Past generations = dumb" is silly wishful thinking, as is "bad results indicate malice or a scam". The world changes faster than people update their priors, so this sort of wrongful optimization is a common failing that we should really introspect about more deeply. Education level alone was more important in the past, and then everyone realized this and "competed" themselves into a new, overall-worse, equilibrium.
That happens EVERYWHERE so if you're upset about it you need to both push for flexible, adaptable systems, and continuous rapid feedback loops.
Also, bumping up your own earnings by a significant multiplier is probably easier if you bypass getting a Masters Degree and just start doing interview prep. Whats even better is hitting multiple multipliers. I was in a Computer lab where someone got an offer letter from Facebook which was extremely high and they IPOed. Now I think he is doing some kind of javascript style hosting stuff but I think he is independently wealthy.
I'm actually not so sure it's that common relative to the number of people who actually leave. After I left my position I started learning about other tenured faculty who left their positions also, some of whom I respected quite a bit and who I never imagined would have any reason to leave their position. One place interviewed me for a faculty position later, the primary problem being that they had multiple tenured faculty leave and had holes to fill. None of these individuals who left their positions wrote about it.
I do think you're right in the sense that it's this thing that no one knows what to do with. You've built up these relationships, your colleagues are all in academics, and many of them are happy. So they don't understand. You're kind of a glitch in the matrix, and no one knows how to approach it because it's not supposed to happen. I've been told everything from that I'm a total badass to crazy and insane. I myself haven't figured out which is more accurate yet. Maybe both.
The fact that these experiences compel some kind of cathartic explanation speaks volumes about the problems in academics though. It's like there's the commonly agreed-upon story in academics, the face being presented, and then there's reality, and they don't line up, so people just kind of pretend the glitches don't exist.
Not too long ago on HN there was a blog piece going through one person's (an economist?) exploration of whether or not biomedical research was in crisis. (I've tried to find it but can't.) It was frustrating to me because so much of what they detailed was true, but in the end they just decided something like "oh well, it's obvious this field is in crisis, but research is getting done in the end so it doesn't matter." It's like this ship in flames, where people are burning and there's emergency sirens going off, and as long as the individuals in power are happy, and there's a good narrative being presented to the public, with results in the media to talk about, no one cares.
I just can't tell where this is headed: if the ship is going to finally sink so far that it becomes something you can't hide, or if it's just going to keep on like this indefinitely, or if it's going to get fixed, or what. Universities have survived much worse than current circumstances, so it seems implausible to me anything will fundamentally change.
The reason that doesn't happen, though, is that academia is a lot like professional athletics. Whether most of the participants know it or not, they're doing it for some combination of love-of-the-field and a lottery ticket. We're all willing to tolerate sub-standard working conditions precisely because we absolutely love our field and are willing to do almost anything to stay in.
I've left lots of money on the table in order to remain in physics as long as I have because the work is, when it is good, so very fulfilling. Unfortunately, I'm about to leave because some of the structure, built for good-hearted reasons but presently suffering colliding dependencies, now substantially impedes my colleagues and me from getting good science done. I know that when I leave, I essentially cannot come back. There will be another younger, smarter ISL waiting to fill my position the moment I'm gone.
On a different note, the grass is always greener on the other side.
1 meeting a week here .. Management is super against wasting everyone's time in endless useless meetings.
Definitely though you don’t have anybody over your neck dictating you what you should be doing day-in, day-out.
It includes all tenure-track professors.
> which doesn't include adjunct professors
Yeah, those are called "temp teachers". Don't get distracted by the fact that they teach courses at a university instead of a high school. The job is functionally the same.
> teacher assistants, research assistants
That's not a job. That's a thing a student can do to receive funding for their studies. It's up to the student to make sure that they use the time they invest in their phd program wisely. Good professors will help.
We also have "universal" voting rights as well that are not accessible till you become a citizen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t...
I have learned that this is not because they have some objectively better life (or prestige) in academia, but rather because most people within the field don't know what the real world is outside and subject themselves to a hostage-like mentality.
The sad thing is that everyone leaves academia at some point (practically speaking, except for the few lifelong people who get to the very top -- and that is like hitting the lottery, so why bet on it). If you're sure to leave, why contribute to giving people angst about leaving? Why feel guilt over something that is an unavoidable part of the path?
These fields should more actively show students and researchers that there is life / jobs outside of the field and what you can do with your degree and education. The field I am pretty sure will only become better because of it. It will not be like you turned traitor to it and are worthy of only being talked about in hushed tones as "someone who left".
For example, a PhD prepares you for a life of research, not one of teaching. At my institution, advisors strongly prefer their PhD students are RAs and not TAs (research assistants who do no teaching, vs teaching assistants who might be responsible for an entire class).
If you look at a professor's job description, it's often 16 hours teaching duties per week, with the rest for research. Most professors I know rarely work less than 60 hours a week, so the majority of that time is on research related work.
Perhaps I'm old-school, but IMHO (as someone with a PhD), the obligation to teach comes with the advanced degree/advanced knowledge. You were trained to know more about this subject than most other people in the world, therefore part of your job (whether paid or not) is to teach others in some way.
Universities should be bifurcated into research organizations and public education organizations. Research organizations should still teach, but to an audience of trainee researchers. Public education organizations can focus their time teaching the majority of students using polished pedagogical skills and collating key results from research organizations into more accessible formats.
So you're saying the purpose of getting a PhD is to be an eternal post-doc, or work in a national lab?
Because the moment you become a faculty, you stop doing exactly what you were trained for.
That's indeed unfortunate. Maybe the two should not be as tightly coupled as they are.
That being said, even if James loved teaching, that wouldn't really change his thesis in the least.
Step 0 in getting a tenure-track position at an R1 research school is to have an excellent research track record.
Step 1 is having a plan that is likely to yield at least a decade of reliable research success and grant funding.
A strong desire to teach undergraduates is somewhere between Step 3 and Step 10, depending upon the school.
There are a number of reasons why I haven't pursued a faculty position. Among them is that I love working closely with graduate students, but am not fired up about teaching large classes of undergraduates. Another is that doing a reasonable job of research and running a research group is already more than a full-time job. To layer teaching on top is, for me, a guaranteed path to burnout and sadness. So, I've ridden the research/postdoc train about as far as it will go -- I'm leaving my postdoc position in mid/late summer.
Isnt that what I said? People like you (nothing wrong with that, we need you too) are in the wrong place if the go into teaching.
I'm not sure this is true - at these people's level the focus is 99% on research.
I have a PhD but ended up working in "The Industry" and it's been awesome - good salary, interesting problems, smart co-workers, real-world impact.
If so, why/how did it get this way?
Have you had any experience of it?
I'm kinda horrified that all the comments so far are about academic careers and no-one's mentioned one of the fascinating parts of the article: that science is being done badly and the task of spotting that and clearing it up is not considered valuable.
He sounds like a condescending prick. He even admits as much. Why did he apply to work somewhere where he would be surrounded by people he considers so infinitely inferior to himself? One can say "I don't want to live there" without insulting everyone who does live there.
His work sounds immensely valuable, it's sad he hasn't internalized the fact that working with other people & in institutions requires patience and personal compromise. Or perhaps he has and that's why he's quitting. I'm sorry to say I predict he'll have a rude awakening when he learns that most of these compromises are neccesary in the private sector as well.
I understand his complaints & they seem legitimate, but buddy... "if you walk around running into assholes all day, perhaps you're the asshole." And his considering his condescending, archly superior tone towards those he considers beneath him, I'd wager you could lose the "perhaps."
EDIT: If you just read the bits between "Resistance / lack of options for the work I want to do" and "Conclusion" it's quite an interesting and informative blog post!
I also would not move away from where I like to live for a job.
I was working in a field that wasn't super hot or trendy, but for which there was a lot of low hanging fruit that a ... lesser physicist could actually work on to move the needle. It was gratifying, but the "system" for granting PhDs, and granting funding isn't designed for "B" players, and it's a bummer.
My age and experience in other fields helped me contribute to the rest of my team's goals in ways that I think wouldn't have otherwise happened if someone from a more traditional path had been on the team instead. Oh well :)
It seems there must always be a balanced tension between those that cooperate and those that pressure against cancerous cooperation within any system.
I think as the world becomes more complex and interconnect, as people become more specialized and interdependent, there's a trend that is skewing our reward system toward cooperation to the detriment of the balance needed between the two forces.
I think this is happening at multiple social levels including the business level, but it's most visible in academia since academia lacks a clear success metric.
I find that most people who hold these prejudices against "flyover country" have the privilege of never having their worldview tested.