If you pay much lower than the industry and only give people temporary positions, it's not surprising people go elsewhere when they can. The solution is also quite obvious...
At least in my areas of science (chemistry), most of this money comes from grants, which comes from the NIH, DOE, or NSF depending on the project. Ultimately it comes from taxpayers, and portioned out by Congress.
So the solution is either to get Congress to really care about this (ha!) or re-architecture funding of all of higher education.
Neither of these is simple.
You have a chemistry phd. You don't have to build your career on other people's crushed financial futures. Either find a job where you can pay people well or find a job where you don't need to manage other people's labor to stay employed.
I have A LOT of dubious pet projects I could convince NSF to fund and would love to work on if I had the moral stomach requires to convince highly educated broke 30 year olds to give me hundreds of thousands of dollars in free labor. But I don't.
So instead I turned down TT offers and went to industry where I spend a lot of time convincing people with the money to actually pay living wages with good benefits to people who can work on slightly different things. I don't have a lab with my name on it. I don't have an office. I will never have tenure. No on calls me Professor or even Doctor. But I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds. My post-docs are paid $100k-$200k.
Stop relying on broke kids to fund your dreams. Leave academia and find a company who will fund your work. Or stay in academia and don't hire people to help you unless you can pay them even close to what they're worth.
This is the weakness in your argument. Not all of science is interesting to the private sector.
I worked for a large company once that in the past had large labs for researching charge transfer and other fundamental physics. When I toured those labs, they were all empty, with broken and unused machines.
I know this site focuses on computers and tech. But there is a large world of scientific disciplines out there that just aren’t useful to business. But useful to society as a whole.
Lastly, postdocs typically make ~50-55kk in my neck of the woods. Underpaid, maybe depending on the field. But far from “broke”. Thats around the starting salary of school teachers and many other professions.
More helplessness.
My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing. I still do the most important bits of pushing advances in my field, but there's a lot of auxiliary work that has immediate value as well.
It's less fun, it's CERTAINLY more humbling, and it's a lot more labor. But it provides both short-term and long-term value.
BTW: if you want to do work no one will fund, that's fine. Just at least acknowledge that your largest funding source is the massively under-paid labor of 20-35 year olds.
> Thats around the starting salary of school teachers and many other professions.
Your post-docs are >= 28, have graduate degrees, and have several years of research experience. Also, "teachers and many other professions" almost NEVER sign fixed term contracts that require them to move all over the country/world.
BTW, what is your university's pension plan like? Many teachers have great pension plans (that actually make sense to use since they have jobs that last more than 2-3 years). If comparing to industry, what's your 401K match and stock purchase program?
You can't even beat the working conditions and wages that mediocre 22 year olds can get right out of college in a famously under-compensated field. "My PhD employees would be substantially better off as secondary school teachers" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
> BTW, what is your university's pension plan like?
Postdocs get the same pension plan/401k plan as any other faculty (postdocs are indeed research faculty). You are also an employee of the state government, with reasonably good health insurance and other benefits. It can't compare to private sector (especially tech sector), but compared to a lot of other businesses, it's fairly good. (Also a downside - lots of bureaucracy from the state legislature).
EDIT: 401k is 5% mandatory contribution, with 8.5% match by the university.
My comment about school teachers was mostly about the salary making them "broke". Lots of people live just fine on that ($50k is about $25/hour full time. Median earnings in the us is around $42k last I looked). Tech is an anomaly.
Now, again, don't get me wrong. I'm not a fan of postdocs, academia is a mess, and I want it change. But I really just wanted to point out that the "simple" solutions are not "simple". They require coordinated action among many stakeholders, and lots of dealing with squishy humans and their emotions.
That's fair. I do think managers have responsibility to their direct reports. The postdoc situation in th US isn't going to change as long as faculty and post-docs continue producing. So, quite seriously, the solution is for faculty and post-docs to collectively say "we can't get work done under these conditions". Otherwise things will just get worse.
> EDIT: 401k is 5% mandatory contribution, with 8.5% match by the university.
This is generous (but also fairly uncommon for post-docs). Good to hear that your uni provides retirement benefits.
> My comment about school teachers was mostly about the salary making them "broke". Lots of people live just fine on that ($50k is about $25/hour full time. Median earnings in the us is around $42k last I looked). Tech is an anomaly.
The huge difference is that post-docs are transitory and require uprooting one's life. $50K with the knowledge that you can buy a starter home is very different from $50K and knowing that you cannot buy anything because you will likely move in 2 years. This also has real human cost. See articles like this: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/postdocs-dilemma-when-g...
> My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing.
I don't see the private sector funding ethnomusicology, philosophy, ecology, social history, ...
sseagull mentioned NSF, NIH and DOE. None of those funds ethnomusicology, philosophy, or social history.
The NSF also gets somewhat close to the others via Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, which includes anthropology/archaeology and linguistics.
Ecology is a probably a field where the world would be better off if we re-appropriated post-doc funding to USFS and hired people with bs or even no degrees to do important work on the ground.
Thanks.
That's actually a really bad analysis and entirely misses the point.
Fundamentally (in the US) too many postdocs are being funded from a fixed grant pool NIH/NSF/etc. has to offer. Too many professors think their research is so much more important than anything else they hire postdocs for peanuts. Too few postdocs have a career path because so few faculty positions are available after completing their postdoc.
Yes, not all science is interesting to the private sector. But that doesn't mean that publicly-funded science has to proceed at its current rate with its unsustainable model of employing postdoctoral slaves.
Thanks. This is my point. If you want to manage a team of PhDs, especially in STEM, figure out a research agenda that allows you to do that in a fair and reasonable way.
If you want to do things that are uninteresting to anyone outside of one tiny (likely incestual) sphere of grant-committee-political-influence, then do those things with your own time. Don't drag others into it.
BTW: if no one wants to fund this work then what jobs are the post-docs being trained to do?! And if post-docs aren't being trained for useful jobs then why are we taxpayers funding these ostensibly trainee positions?
> I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds.
... I've got to say, you probably work for someone who is. It sounds like you're a decent human being and that's great--we need more of those--but the entire point of corporate capitalism (although this behavior exists in ostensibly noncapitalist organizations, too) is exploitation. Do you think CEOs care about whether they destroy the careers of people under them?
There's no ethical consumption under capitalism, and there's no ethical production either, but ultimately, we have to survive.
This is actually a very fair point, so I'm not sure why you are downvoted (perhaps the last sentence comes across as inviting trolling). But I take my responsibility for not doing so to people under me seriously.
Cut the number of postdoc positions in half, double the salaries of the remaining positions, and make it much more competitive to get a postdoc. The purpose of a postdoc is a final training step for someone to become faculty. Only people who are clearly faculty material after finishing their PhD should even attempt a postdoc. Unfortunately, many professors take on postdocs who have no shot of becoming faculty because their lab runs on the cheap, experienced labor they bring.
Remember, the replacement rate for academia is exactly 1 postdoc with faculty aspirations per lifetime of each professor. Anything >1 and academia must grow exponentially to accommodate every single postdoc who desires a faculty position. Most professors have >>1 postdoc over the course of their careers, which means there are way too many postdoc positions in the world.
The current structure is a holding pattern for absorbing the large population of PhDs who can't get jobs.
Indeed. When I originally wrote my parent comment [0], it was about overproduction of PhDs.
That’s a great point that I neglected to consider. Regardless, the overall point still holds—the production rate of postdocs is much greater than the replacement rate of professors (at all institutions).
Show me a single politic saying that science must grow, so we allocated more resources for it.
For most people, an academic career is a dead end. So, reduce the number of PhD and post-doc positions and increase the wages.
Universities have been doing the opposite. E.g. some Dutch universities stopped offering relatively well-compensated employee PhD positions and replaced them by bursary positions with far lower compensations. The primary motivation was that they could hire more PhDs for the same money. That maybe works when there is a recession, but when there is an ample supply of jobs, many good candidates will just choose an industry position instead.
Besides that, universities have gained a lot of administrative staff over the past decades. Plus some universities spend hundreds of millions of Euros on fancy buildings. Sure, it looks nice in PR material, but they could've also built something functional and use the remaining money for better salaries.
My perception was that phd students in Netherlands live quite comfortably.
There's no excuse for the academic job market being this lousy when universities have so much money coming in from so many different sources.
The problem is that they spend it all on administration. Paying a "Dean of Multiple-Choice Quantum Intersectionality" $600,000/year is a way for rich white elitists to pretend they care about things they actually don't.
Although one part of this is regulatory burden by the state. This adds lots of overhead which the university would probably rather not have.
I've recently finished four years as a postdoc (and now have a permanent academic job and am applying for grants). It's the precarity of it which is a bigger killer than just the crappy salary. Fighting huge numbers of applicants for the chance to uproot your life (again) and move around the country for a contract that may be as short as 9 months, with every move having a good chance of being the end of your career (which you've invested years in training for). It's a grim position to put people into.
From defunding shit research. And don't give me that crap, you know exactly what kind of research you could cut without anything of value being lost. Start there.
Treat postdocs with respect, give them plenty of autonomy and freedom to focus on their research, don't make them work long hours or use them as servants, and you'll no doubt find many people willing to take the job without raising the pay.