Hacker News Reader

Comment by btrettel | Hacker News Reader

> There are arguably too many people being trained as graduate students and post-docs compared to the number of academic positions available.

Is there anything actually being done to solve this problem? Note that I'd include stable research positions in government and industry in addition to stable academic positions.

Don't get me wrong. It's nice to see more people talking about this problem, but talking about it alone won't solve it.

View on HN

The problem is that those in charge disagree with that. When I brought this up after a recent policy change at my department to not allow hiring own PhDs as postdocs (because they should go to another lab, as this is what your CV is expected to look like), I was told that a Phd programme should not be seen as a path towards an academic research career. In contrast, I was told that it is very important to train as many PhD students as possible, that all don't stay in academia, so they can bring scientific thinking to all areas of society. Unfortunately, starting PhD students, of which 99% do this explicitly to do research, are not aware of this, and neither do PhD programmes offer any specific training for a non-academic career.

One solution would be to push more people towards MS degrees, which should be no more than 2-3 years in duration and focused on gaining skills and experience valuable in the private sector.

But then you also need to make MS degrees more consistently good. Some are really good, but others are more like condensed undergrad programs.

They seem to be taking issue with the "up or out" mentality of academia, and it's hard to fix academic mentality without talking about it and trying to change people's minds.

I don't know how effective it will be, but it is a problem: Imagine a police department that fires everyone after 8 years total work experience, unless they are promoted to chief. It sounds ridiculous, but we typically hold on to researchers for a 5 year PhD + a 3-5 year postdoc. After that the expectation is that they should run their own group.

> Imagine a police department that fires everyone after 8 years total work experience, unless they are promoted to chief. It sounds ridiculous, but we typically hold on to researchers for a 5 year PhD + a 3-5 year postdoc. After that the expectation is that they should run their own group.

I love this analogy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com