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Traditional universities were structured like guilds. After you completed your studies in liberal arts, you got the rank of master and the license to teach at any university. The members (masters) of the university made decisions by vote. The idea that universities should have bosses and that the faculty are employees is rather new.

These days, the weirdness of academic job markets is mostly limited to research universities. That's because universities don't do research, but they still hire researchers. They provide office/lab space, equipment, and administrative services to researchers in exchange for a large fraction of the funding the researchers are able to obtain. Senior researchers are employees only in a technical sense. If one of them quits, the university most likely won't try to hire another person to continue the research. Instead, the researcher probably takes their job to another university and continues there.

Research universities hire people who teach, mentor, and serve in administrative duties. They don't hire people to do research, because they don't do research and have no need for researchers. They hire active researchers and give them the opportunity to do research primarily for the prestige value. Because most universities are funded by taxes and/or tuition fees, they can't pay competitive salaries. In order to attract top researchers (and thus prestige), they have to offer something else. In most cases, that "something else" is a promise of a permanent position with the option to spend a large fraction of their time on whatever they are interested in.

While I don't dispute the accuracy of your description, there are some conclusions that I wish we as a society would revisit. By your logic that the researchers only work for the university in a very technical sense (and often retain the commercial rights to their work), I honestly don't see how they're underpaid. If anything I question what value they bring to universities at all, and question how much of the inflation of college tuition is driven by this operating model (I know administration is a large part of the increase, but many administrative jobs are tied to the procurement and management of grants).

It depends on the grant. Most grants do not let you take ownership of the research. Nearly all publicly funded research contracts require the results to be public domain.

researchers do not retain commercial rights to their work, the university does. Sometimes the university allows the researcher a pittance of the license royalties, or make it easier for the researcher to start a company that licenses the technology.

Bringing value to the university does not really make sense as a concept.

A university is fundamentally a community of scholars. The services the wider society expects from the community vary from generation to generation, but some things remain constant. The university as an organization does not have any goals apart from survival and prestige. It's the least important part of the university. The assumption is that the scholars deal with such highly specialized matters that generalist administrators have no competence in setting the actual goals.

Universities educate a lot of people these days, because the society believes that learning specialized topics from scholars and researchers is more prestigious than learning them from teachers or industry professionals. The society also gives plenty of research funding to the scholars, even though it's questionable whether the results actually benefit the society providing the funds, especially in smaller countries. It's just that you need research to have a community of scholars these days, and such communities tend to generate a lot of activity around them, with clear cultural and economic benefits in the long term.

Whether a person is underpaid or whether their salary is competitive does not depend on the job they do but on the other jobs they could do. If you want to hire a person who could make $500k somewhere else, the competitive salary is $500k. If you can't pay that (maybe the job only creates $300k of value), you have to offer something else if you want to hire them. Universities have traditionally offered stable positions in a community of independent professionals.

> I don't understand why hiring in academia is so weird.

Well do the math. In a steady-state where the number of academic positions is static, each professor needs to train a single academia-focused PhD student in his entire career. OK, maybe make that 2 to account for attrition. But most professors are churning out far more PhDs looking to enter academia than there can possibly ever be jobs for. Then these highly-skilled and disciplined individuals end up working for peanuts for decades in the hopes of landing a "tenure" job.

I have two close friends, one in their 40's, one around 50, who are in this situation, and I think it's absolutely shameful. Post-doc positions are fixed terms, so every two to three years they have to worry about getting more funding or being without a job. There's no reason someone as highly skilled and disciplined as these two should be 1) paid so low, and 2) worrying how they're going to support their families every few years. It's really like some kind of a cult.

At this point I would honestly never advise anyone to enter academia, unless you're in a field like Computer Science, where industry does a good job competing with universities for PhDs. If you have the chops to get tenure in STEM, you have the chops to be paid more, with better job security, better work/life balance, better career trajectory, better everything, somewhere else.

Why are highly qualified folks like your friends not going into industry instead?

Well, the post was written by someone who clearly doesn't understand their friends motives, yeah? Perhaps they don't want to work in ad-tech because that would not give them satisfaction.

I specifically said that the situation in CS was better, because industry does such a good job competing for PhDs. When I was finishing my PhD in CS 15 years ago, doing a post-doc before applying for a tenure-track position was pretty rare, and only done if you felt that you'd benefit from it in some way.

My friends are in the sciences, which has far fewer opportunities in industry. They're not going to end up in ad-tech either way.

I think there's a mix of reasons.

One is that they see it as a kind of failure -- like, for them to pursue a job in industry is to admit that they just weren't good enough for academia. This is part of the "cult" aspect I was talking about.

Another is the unknown -- they feel like they have a reasonable amount of freedom to choose what to do when they're in academia, and fear that when moving to industry they'll just have to do whatever they're told; not knowing that at their level, they'd have more freedom in industry (and they have more restrictions in academia) than they realize.

Another I think is the "almost there" aspect: a combination of the sunk costs fallacy and optimism. If you'd told my friend at the age of 30 that he'd still be on 2-year contracts at the age of 50, he probably would have chosen a different career path. But at each stage, it always seems like getting something permanent might be 3-5 years away.

Related to this is the known: one friend genuinely likes and respects his PE, and feels a loyalty to him. How can I tell him that in my opinion, if his PE actually cared about him, he would be shoving him out the door and telling him to go into industry, rather than making noises about possibly finding money for him to keep working for him for another 2-3 years (at which point he'll again have the prospect of losing his job)? I mean, I'm sure his PE actually is a good person and just hasn't thought seriously about the situation; but that doesn't really excuse him.

I do try to hint at these things, but how do you tell someone that you think this thing that they are passionate about and in love with -- something they've invested decades of their life in -- is actually toxic and abusive?

I took the attitude that moving to industry was just a phase in my academic career; in my case it opened up many new doors for my research. But this is not common.

Also, the real reason to move it industry is better work life balance. If you choose your employer wisely you can work about 20% of a day and make 50% above market, then retire 5-10 years earlier.

Industry tends to have differing ideologies than academia. Generally academia is about open knowledge while industry is about closed knowledge driven by profits and greed.

Not saying there aren't some greedy administrators in universities, it's definitely a growing problem, but in industry it's the defining characteristic.

yes, but my experince was precisely the opposite. at least partly because of the company I chose, the time at which I chose, and the prep work I did.

wonder if you’d be willing to share what company that you joined was? I gather an academic would readily give away the name of the institution that looked after them, hopefully the same would be true for those who make it in industry?

I worked at Google and ran the Exacycle project, see https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2014/02/stanford-and-...

At the time, google was very open to its software engineers doing interesting 20% projects that led to scientific papers, but I wasn't ever able to join the research org fulltime and be a researcher.

Because industry runs on profits. The dream is to have resources given to you to push forward human intellect without having to answer to short term profits.

The most useful math today had limited applications when it was invented. Society doesn't highly value these highly valuable contributions, so there is a scarcity in research resources while having the most alluring work. The result? Highly talented people living in apartments with no prospect of affording a family.

In support of my point:

https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20201/figure/18

Academia spends 13% of society's overall basic research money yet produces 48% of the overall performance.

I don't think tripling public research funding should triple public research output. I think it would give some breathing room for the fantastical "meritocracy" belief to be closer to reality in one sector of society. Also, academia needs to cut the g&a chuff.

The real actual answer might be around the idea of Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right when it comes to Left and Right cultural elites.

https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014

Basically going into industry would be removing themselves from the Brahmin caste and trying to go into the Merchant caste and that just wont do.

I haven’t heard that way of saying it but this is exactly what I was going to say only better :)

That math applies to literally every other profession.

What one would need to do is to train less PhD students and have more scientific staff instead. Maybe one should even get rid of the current structure altogether, and just hire people as "scientists" and/or "lecturers" after their master's.

> That math applies to literally every other profession.

Um, not really? A single mechanical engineering prof trains thousands of mechanical engineering grads in his career because there are thousands more ME jobs than tenured professorships.

> What one would need to do is to train less PhD students and have more scientific staff instead. Maybe one should even get rid of the current structure altogether, and just hire people as "scientists" and/or "lecturers" after their master's.

As long as those jobs were proper jobs, with appropriate pay, job security, and genuine opportunities for advancement, yes. I wouldn't even mind if they all got PhDs if people were honest ahead of time about typical career progressions.

Plus the vast majority of engineers formally train (and certify) zero pupils. They may teach on the job, but they don't hand out diplomas

As the sibling comment says, the 999 mechanical engineers will not train anybody. So it is still: one person trained replaces one person working.

People with PhDs can already work on more than just scientific positions, so it is not a huge problem that we are producing too many. As you say, we should be more honest about career changes. I don't think we need hugely many professorships either. But we should open up the hiring pool. If professors do more and more admin work anyway as their career progresses, why do you need 15+ years experience and personal connections to do that job? In industry, you have the other extreme: MBAs with no knowledge about the subject matter get hired as managers.

And if most of the labor is done by master and PhD students, why not open up the scientific hiring pool to people from other specializations or from outside academia? I would say my postdoc and research time was maximally 10% thinking about physics, 30% coding, 30% writing papers, 30% data analysis (and 20 bonus % meetings and people skill). You could easily train a good developer or engineer in a year to do this, about the same time I needed to get up to speed with the topic.

So yeah, there is a shortage of positions. But to fix that, you need a lot more funding (and honestly I'm not sure it makes sense if society allocates too much more resources to research. A bit, certainly, but I'd allocate more to health care, primary education, etc. first.)

But the second problem is the baroque way to get a career in science. To fix that, you'd need to start hiring like a tech company. And this could actually make the competition worse, but you would be selecting for the best, and not for the people who make the most personal concessions for their career.

Academia is extremely competitive (in terms of applicants per post), which probably explains most of it. Show business, or generally arts and performance, which are similar (not great working conditions but huge supply of labour relative to demand) seem similarly pathological.

What keeps “normal” jobs in check is that people can leave and join elsewhere, but that’s not really the case with academia - jobs are scarce.

Also, in any workplace, ruthless or narcissistic people are better at navigating career progression - and in academia they are harder to fire once they become senior.

I think once you correct for these factors, it’s not qualitatively different from other “industries”.

It's worth noting that other countries do things differently. Tenure for life is far from universal.

I’m sure this is true, but I’m curious if you have any experience with this in another country? The one European country in which I’ve been in a university setting seemed to have similar tenure-pressure dynamics as in the US.

The UK doesn't have Tenure. I think it's true that the academic pressures are similar, there's still not enough secure jobs for those who want them. But it does at least mean that professors have to continue performing to a reasonable standard if they expect to keep their jobs, and this frees up space for new people if they don't.

Yes - formal tenure was abolished under Thatcher's government in the 80s. The academic job market here is also brutal, but it's brutal on admission to lectureships (tenure-track assistant professorships in the US). Once appointed on a 'permanent' contract there's no race for tenure: it's like an ordinary public-sector job where you can have a reasonable expectation of continuing employment but aren't immune from redundancy (==layoff) or dismissal for poor performance (which is quite rare).

It's a better system for early-mid career academics than the US, IMO, and I'm glad I'm here. Other systems are better for other career stages: some European countries give PhD students actual employment protections and a salary, while life as a tenured full prof in Germany or the US is sweeter than the British equivalent.

Doesn't stop the other grim employment aspects of modern academia, either: exploitation of hourly-paid PhD students for most of the teaching, far fewer posts than qualified applicants, eternal postdocry etc.

Most universities in The Netherlands do not have a tenure-track system (no automatic promotion). It is not uncommon for faculty to retain the rank of assistant or associate professor until retirement, without ever becoming full professor.

It's also common in the U.S. to have such faculty positions. Non-tenure-track positions that teach and keep up with their field but don't have "publish or perish" pressures.

At least in the US, an "associate professor" is already tenured -- you don't have to be a full professor to be tenured -- you just have to get out of the assistant professor stage. There are of course non-tenure track positions such as "adjunct professors" which are generally hired on a year to year (or even semester to semester) basis.

The twitterer in question who was denied tenure was an associate professor at MIT according to his webpage:

https://cesarhidalgo.com/

It depends on the university. Even in the same university (eg Stanford) it is possible to have associate professors with and without tenure, depending on department/school.

> but instead hire everybody on regular open-ended contracts

Ah, the eternal post-doc. That surely will shake things up for the better.

Sure, why not. I'd rather be eternal post-doc than eternal "individual contributor" at some ad company (although the latter sure pays more).

And I'd rather be eternal post-doc, than time-limited post-doc and suddenly 40 years old and having to find a new career.

A lot of good answers have dealt with various individual problems.

I want to address the meta-problem:

Academia, as an institution, does not have a close connection between the factors that make it money (students paying $$$) and high quality university administration.

To put it another way, there are systemic economic or market based forces driving institutional change in academia's leadership model.

Individual deans and department heads may or may not run their faculties well. But there is no external enforcement mechanism that pushes said deans and department heads to do a good job. Much less the mushrooming number of non-academic staff in most universities. Where increasingly lay administration is absorbing 20-40% of the overall institutional budget or more, with excuses of various kinds.

The students keep coming, and keep paying. Change only happens when political will accumulates to the point that top down governance is imposed on the academic department.

Usually however, this only occurs (in an academic department) when the research output causes a drop in the university's rankings. And the time between bad leadership, and it impacting research output, is enormous.

If you can't get a tenure at MIT, you can try at a second tier university. If that fails, you can try at t third tier university. You will get a lower pay and less money for research projects and travel, and the students will be not as brilliant. Also, you may have to teach more courses and have less research time.

Or try for a university in the wealthier parts of Asia and possibly get paid more?

Yeah this guy moved on to Toulouse in France it seems. He obviously had/has options, but I cant blame him for feeling betrayed.

Hiring in academia is weired because of freedom and essentially a life-time paychecks without any real commitment you have to make. So they need to make sure the person have an internal drive aka intrinsic motivation and has energy to go for long time rather than one-hit wonders.

Ok, so that's what should happen in ideal world. In real world, things are very political and one would be lucky to have even quater of these ideals materialize.

That is because academia have access to government loan aka free money. There isn't any real competition to their students. If we make 1. Penalizing failed students, 2. Easily retransferable any students to different college, 3. Warranty as in stuff they teach must allow the students to get relevant jobs within 4 years of graduating, all their prices are fixed and non inflationable and displayed in comparisons to other schoola like newegg, you will see them behave differently. Right now they are just a protected racket that can do what they want even racism and biasism on "corporate scale".

> I don't understand why hiring in academia is so weird.

You were "discriminated" against too? Oh wow, we have something in common.

As a bonus researchers, we can discuss the hidden costs the bitterness this breeds on those around us. Neat!

Or everytime a topic like this comes up, we make a conscious effort not to engage. We put in real cognitive time to search for alternative discussion avenues. Dang, each of those precious minutes adds up. It's a real cost. Because these issues come up every fucking day, and some don't have to put in that real time. There could have been an alternate world where this wasn't needed.

What's today's hot topic?