How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)
blogs.lse.ac.uk
blogs.lse.ac.uk
Subsequently, many people have written silly articles like this one saying that some conventional organization is like a drug gangs because it has these totally normal features. But we knew that already -- that grad students get paid less than full professors is hardly news. The inclusion of drug gangs just produces a snappy headline and reduces understanding.
But in academia, and I suppose in a criminal gang, everyone has the same skillset. PhDs are notionally being trained with the specific abilities necessary to become a professor. Those at the very bottom have the capability to move to the very top, and likewise are hoping to do so.
That's if you wanted the ability to sign your name on government projects, otherwise, you had to just find and pay someone willing to write their name on your project.
If we consider non-lawyers employed by a law firm, then we should do the same with a university, which would distinguish both from the drug gang/McDonald's type where the bottom run has more promotion opportunity. Of course, this isn't even really right about academia -- a large university employs lots of people at many levels and it's perfectly possible to be promoted from administrative assistant to a management role.
It is true that some professions, such as university faculty, law, and medicine, have specific credential requirements that limit advancement into those professions from other parts of the organizations that employ such professionals. But this is a way that academia etc is _different from_ a drug gang, not similar to it.
They really aren't. First of all, scientifically speaking each PhD is unique as it focuses on specific venues of research. Thus within the same research group you often have an extremely diverse crowd doing independent research on multiple projects at the same time.
Then there's the fact that the assertion about "being trained (...) to become a professor" makes no sense. PhD students are trained to conduct independent research on a specific subject, and rarely also on how to apply to research grants. Being a professor, which is more of a supervisor/administrator role, is not factored into the equation, and the teaching component is a very small and tangential aspect of being a professor.
The truth of the matter is that graduate schools are effectively diploma mills to entice prospective workers to work long hours for low wages in exchange for a qualification and shot at a research career. Their work is focused on learning how to do research while focusing on a specialized topic, which arguably has no parallel with what a professor does.
Moral of the story, unless you are born wealthy you have to make your own luck.
There isn't much to say to respond to that, apart that it seems to me that, in a parallel universe, you might have had a more fulfilling experience, or you might have cut your losses and walked away sooner.
That's the cruel aspect of the PhD. It really seems like a lot of important things are outside of one's control, especially when it comes to important factors in mental health. Nobody's starting a PhD with the goal of sinking hours into Reddit and Buffy because they feel awful about their PhD experience.
What, from the post you are replying to, leads you to this? If it was not an intentional misrepresentation, I am curious about the line of thought leading to this.
Rumour has it doing a PhD might actually be a rewarding experience in its own right, and not derive its value solely from the possibility of remaining in academia.
Coupled to that, PhD slots are generally funded, so university at PhD level is normally less 'expensive' and more 'opportunity costs'.
Perhaps it allows you to work closely with other researchers in your field. Also note that PhD students usually don't pay tuition.
> Most people can perform perfectly valid research from their bedroom or garage.
This seems pretty unfunded. Unless you mean most people who have already done a PhD.
You do not have to be member of academia to interact with other researches.
》This seems pretty unfunded. Unless you mean most people who have already done a PhD.
My experience is from astronomy and cryptography. You can make good contribution without being part of academia. Data are freely available on internet. Also code.
First I talked about data analysis and software development.
Secondly, even in observational astronomy, anyone can make proposal and get observing time on large instrument. Or rent 20" in Chile and use it remotely.
I’m taking you at your word that you have experience with astronomy research. But that makes it impossible to take you at your word when you appear to lack the imagination to come up with observational astronomy you can’t do without institutional support.
Privately founded research instruments are different topic.
LIGO data are here: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/ligo-data
Xray data are also publicly available, I would suggest skyview https://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/current/cgi/query.pl
Requests for Arecibo telescope are here: https://www.naic.edu/ao/scientist-user-portal/proposal-submi...
And his/her point is that hobbyists aren't a replacement for a class of professional scientists.
It's great that it's your hobby, but to made consistent advances there needs to be a credentialed class of scientists who spend their lives funding and creating the tools and techniques you use for your hobby.
I saw enough of it to make me question ethics and morality in that space which is more akin to investment banking than the sort of ideal young students are led to believe in.
It's not all for the lofty goal of broadening knowledge. That's merely a side effect. It's really about grants and impact scores because that's how scientists make a living.
E.g. the mental gymnastics I have seen to make data fit enough for that Cell publication are possible because the enormous complexities of microbiology allow for it and these possibilities are actively exploited because that's how you make money and talent flow. Otherwise, impact scores would also benefit from science that finds out how thing's don't work. That's important knowledge too - but none that collects grants.
Science really isn't a more ethical field than any given industry and one shouldn't build their career on such idealisms.
I agree with you about grants and impact scores, though.
You can't assume all fields like that. I know that some people here on HN have described PhD programs in lab-based STEM fields as killer hours, low pay, and lots of carrying water for their supervisors. But in my own discipline at least (a subbranch of linguistics), a PhD is typically paid with an ordinary European middle class salary, and the topic is chosen by the student and only agreed to by the supervisor, so you aren’t being slave labour for the supervisor’s own ends.
I did a pure mathematics PhD and was given a general area to look at and a problem to solve but that was really just a starting point, I had the flexibility to solve something related so long as it was interesting. The papers I published had my sole authorship; not even my supervisor's name was on them (except in the acknowledgements). I spent much of my time, for several years, in a room on my own with nothing more than a pencil and paper (except occasionally a book). All I did was sit there and think hard. It was glorious, and definitely not slave labour.
Postscript: I did not go into academia. The PhD helped me get (and do) my job afterwards, possibly not as much as if I had worked in industry that whole time, but it was a fulfilling life experience.
The work is also more independent and not connected to anything outside of mathematics in principle (though the work might evolve to something interesting to huge backers, think Number Theory or Control Theory/Finance/etc)
I'm sorry this was your experience. My PhD in philosophy was very rewarding, as have been my academic jobs since---with the inevitable ups and downs.
As a graduate student there is some level of protection from a supervisor punishing you if you have differences in opinion but as a post-doc those kinds of protections are tossed out the window. I have a friend who was 3 years into their post-doc and had an argument with their principle investigator about the interpretation of their results and how their work would be published only to have their contract cancelled the next day. In the end keeping quiet probably would have got them at least a first author paper but they ended up with 3rd authorship on their own project.
The general impression I got from the higher-ups was that the speaker was right.
There is at best a tacit approval of treating your studies as "pretend research". At worst, depending on how the grants/scholarships are doled out and the personality of the supervisor, there is active pressure to go down a certain path that both you and your supervisor know will not produce impactful research but instead maximise your probability of publishing a "passable" thesis.
This is not in Lesbian Dance Theory, this is in the Faculty of Engineering at a top-ranked university in Australia.
I think you misspelled 'human'. Of course people do that. And of course there are places to 'practice pretend research' - we've just spent multiple generations flipping universities into something much closer to businesses. Business caters to customers, what do you expect them to do?
Yes, choose a school with a good name, but Dave yourself some pain and arrange an advisor before you start your program!
> The upgrade path to the most powerful and satisfying computer:
> * Pocket calculator
> * Commodore Pet / Apple II / TRS 80 / Commodore 64 / Timex Sinclair
> (Choose any of the above)
> * IBM PC
> * Apple Macintosh
> * Fastest workstation of the time (HP, DEC, IBM, SGI: your choice)
> * Minicomputer (HP, DEC, IBM, SGI: your choice)
> * Mainframe (IBM, Cray, DEC: your choice)
> And then you reach the pinnacle of modern computing facilities:
> xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> xxxxxxxxxxG R A D U A T E xxxxxxxxx S T U D E N T S xxxxxxxxxx
> xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The pursuit of knowledge is great and all, but it doesn't pay the rent.
Have you ever met a single person that said so? Because I haven’t.
Now you have.
Granted, it was a quarter century ago. And while I think it was rewarding, I'd never say that it's without risk, or that doctoral education isn't in need of substantial reform.
I have a stipend from my scholarship which is about half of the money I was making as a software developer before I started my PhD. So I took a big salary cut. It was (is) totally worth it. Not for any prospect of securing tenure but for the freedom to follow my intellectual curiosity.
(yeah, like dang keeps saying :P)
I only know people that got burned out by it, had terrible advisors, consider it a waste of time in retrospect and so on. Good to know this is not universal.
It can't be great to be pitted against people who can forgo money altogether.
If so, then would the numbers filling up the outer ring go up or down?
The economic pattern is both interesting and explanatory, even if it does not fully explain every agent's motivation to participate within the system examined.
It will be different across industries, but I work in a pharma R&D company of around 120 people. At a guess, around 40% of the entire staff (admin, management, scientists, technicians) are PhD graduates. They're working in industry and reasonably well paid.
The point is that a desire to secure senior academic positions, such as tenured professor, are not the only reasons people decide to pursue a PhD.
My parents are both PHDs in physics and professors etc, but I knew 15 years ago how hard it would be get a decent job in the field and didn’t pursue sciences.
So I don’t really have much sympathy for grad students who complain about having lack of opportunities.
Also, the assumption is faulty that brains are like computers and processing identical information using a non-diseased fully functioning brain should obviously give the same result regardless of age.
I'm not sure that academia is any worse than a lot of other fields and it does, potentially, have a lot of advantages.
[e.g. I co-founded a startup with someone I met in academia]
I would argue people in academics are on average harder workers than other fields, so overall they have it a bit tougher given all the work they put in. There are successes in every field, I am just making some vast generalizations for our discussion :-)
I suppose my point is that people know what the job market is like in abstract from the beginning, appreciating the actuality of it is something which requires more maturity than is present in many (most?) PhD applicants.
If you go into a drug gang, you also know going in that conditions for the lower-rung "associates" are poor.
To be less flippant: While it's better that you at least know you're getting screwed, that doesn't make fair. It is justified and worthwhile to struggle to change the conditions of employment, even if you agreed to them and knew them going in.
Maybe I am just jaded :-)
Kind of.
Even most mature academics don't really have an idea of how industry really works, let alone 22 year olds.
Yes, on some crude level, but the materiality of what that means is hard to fathom.
I'd be interested in the number who think they want to work in academia at the start of their PhD and compare this with the number at the end - I certainly went completely off the idea, not so much because I thought getting a job would be difficult but that I really didn't like what academic research encourages.
Mind you a pyramidal "up or out" structure can be found in areas like law - relatively few lawyers will make partner or even want to take on what that involves.
We actually talked about it recently and she mentioned there's a significant percentage of PhDs that don't continue into academia (something like a quarter or a half,can't remember the actual figure).
It's a serious enough issue that it's been nicknamed the "PhD brain drain".
Essentially, people burn out during the PhD and don't want to go back. Which is fair enough.
So you’re not only saying you’ve seen scientists take bribes, but that you’ve seen it on enough occasions to find patterns?!
How many briberies have you observed? Didn’t you feel compelled to report them to the ethics committee?
A bribe would be, "you just published x - we'll pay you y to publish a retraction" or if OP had said: "We pay you X if you publish Z", omitting any pretense of an actual study.
Or if OP included scare quotes: We pay you X if your study about Y "finds" Z.
To use an example not based on science, if Intel said, "we'll donate $1 billion to your university if you find a room temperature superconductor" nobody would interpret that as a bribe for you to publish fake results. Some financial incentive might be there to be corrupt, but a bribe it is not. The whole world isn't a corrupt wall street bank, and academia certainly isn't.
Companies can give explicit or implicit incentives but that doesn't make those bribes. Plus, academics list the sources of their funding.
To think it through even more. If Intel did communicate the above incentive to universities, then surely all research universities would devote very significant funds to researching room temperature superconductors. But would they publish other results, or even theoretical impossibility results (We show that under the standard model, it is impossible to ...) If it were a bribe, they would not, but clearly in practice they would. Likewise, if a cigarette company gives a similar incentive to show that cigarettes are good appetite suppresants and make you thinner, and somebody did the research and found that cigarettes reduce your inhibition and make you fatter on average, would they publish their results even though they'd get grants for the opposite results? I think they surely would still publish them. They wouldn't just put them in their drawer like a null result.
So I think it is really unfair to call it a bribe, and your comment goes too far.
On the other hand, someone can offer research funding every year and people can notice they happen to fund people who, in previous years, found results they were happy with. No-one ever has to publicly say anything.
What I can say is that there was an unspoken pressure to avoid lines of research we suspected may result in outcomes the industry sponsoring us may not be too happy about. So ultimately, outside of some safety applications, we had a huge selection bias in research we would accept so as not to upset the gravy train of funding that kept pouring in.
? The pro cannabis industry is huge, and there are billions pouring into schemes and ideas for 'proving' the otherwise.
The University of Saskatchewan had an entire lab (semi private, wing of the school), formerly used to research making oils etc. from what, transformed into a 100% cannabis research lab.
The academic departments increasingly play important roles in immigration. They probably benefit from closer integration with government’s immigration organizations.
If anything, the immigration equation is far more relevant to the US than it is to other countries. A top PhD used to be able to fetch you an eb1 Green Card which is a lot faster than the eb2. However, 'eb' GCs have to be filed by your employer, which means leaving Academia or having a decent enough post-graduation industry outlook. With eb-1 requirements only getting more stringent, this perk is also becoming less relevant.
There are lots of great positives about doing a PhD in USA- salary/stipend is definitely not one of them.
A poor country PhD student/grad in the US/EU still has to live under minimum wage conditions. The fact that the stipend might be considerable more money in their home country, does not necessarily mean that in PPP terms - phd grads are better off than say, a 'developed country' individual.
If you moved to a developed country with higher living standard costs with higher salary than your home country. Even though, you earned considerably more than your home country; the money might be nothing more than minimum wage in your new place of residence.
Comparing developed country humans to developing country humans's expectations just adds more fuel to the assumption that people from poor countries are happy to work for less. It applies the same for developed country humans moving from place to place and even states here in the US.
By the way, the article is from 2013.
The complaints about the lower degrees are usually about value for cost, remote learning, etc. This is easily compatible with the fact that employers want employees to have degrees. It’s even one of the primary reasons the prices have been able to go up so much for a degree (economic value).
The PhD programs, research, and tenure track academia in general is an entirely different beast with some pretty fundamental flaws. Very few companies require PhDs so the job opportunities for a PhD student who wants a position that requires one are scarce.
I got my PhD from a top 10 CS research university and it was shocking how much competition the graduates had to get a tenure track position at some third rate university when they graduated. Publications in top journals and even a solid post doc just got you the opportunity to fight 8 other equally qualified candidates for a single slot.
The professors do not emphasize enough that tenure track research faculty is nothing more than a fantasy for 90% of the graduates, and that’s ignoring the 50% of PhD students who dropped out before finishing.
Counterpoint: assuming a stable size of universities, the average number per professor of supervised doctoral students who receive tenure is 1.
How many doctoral students does a professor have on average over the course of their career?
By that point, the situation really shouldn't be surprising. It only seems that way because the 20th century saw a period of extremely fast growth of universities, and societal expectations have a lot of inertia.
There is also the problem of people conflating "Academia" with "Academia in the US".
I love most of my work.
I also think academia sucks (I don't love those parts).
Life ain't binary.
That is to say, the number of people able to get degrees has sky rocketed, and the classification of their degrees has also sky rocketed over the past 30 years.
So we're left with the obvious question: Do we suddenly have 20x as many students capable of getting a first class degree when nothing in the rest of our data suggests a sudden rise in education standards or economic improvement?
Because your first class degree at a UK university is worht 1/20th of what a first class degree at a UK university was in 1990.
I don't disagree that it's a dual economy however. Academia is supposed to be sort of a self-governing effort (note all the committees faculty members are a part of) and core members decide much of their own fate; it's no surprise that they make sure they get their lion's share first and the rest are distributed meagerly to the non-core members.
Mind you - I knew other people who had terrible problems with contract renewals, getting mortgages etc. Fortunately, I never had those problems but I'm pretty sure that was sheer luck.
Now, the question of why a drug gang pays low-level members less than (say) McDonald's, is more interesting. Is it because gang members have a higher expectation of future wealth than McDonald's staff, i.e. McDonald's has worse career mobility than drug trading?
Your chance of rising from a burger flipper to McDonald's board or C-suite is effectively zero, whereas you might rise high in a drug gang (promotions might be faster if your bosses have a tendency to get shot or imprisoned!) So you could say that McDonald's has to pay its workers more to offset the smaller future wealth expectations.
One could just as easily show a strong resemblance between drug gangs and modern corporate industry, or between medieval European feudalism and modern corporate industry.
This argument is supposed by around 50% increase in PhD graduates in last 10 years
It's a weak argument.
I see many students joining a PhD program with strong inclination to get industry research jobs. Only a tiny fraction actually wants and aligns their work toward a long term academic position.