Glut of postdoc researchers stirs quiet crisis in science | Hacker News Reader

Glut of postdoc researchers stirs quiet crisis in science

bostonglobe.com

99 pointsjmnicholson70 comments

I have wondered for awhile whether the problem of post doc glut / suffering couldn't be alleviated by creating an alternative, more attractive avenue to the university science model. Universities charge massive overhead on grants which they use to support non-research related endeavors, place low ceilings on salaries, force investigators to do ancillary tasks like teaching, and don't promise tenure track positions.

There is no reason why someone couldn't create a for profit center which charged half the standard overhead on NIH grants making them very appealing, uncapped salaries, allowed investigators to own IP / arrange for favorable splits in a TLO model, and offered PI status to post docs if they could bring their own grants / industry money. Post docs would have a harder time staffing labs with grad students in this model, but they could get an affiliation with another university or simply hire students with BS's and pay them competitive rates.

To me, this sounds deeply similar to Germany's Max Planck Society. I wonder if that model in something to be emulated in the US as well.

Except MPIs are national labs and not for profit. The U.S. has Los Alamos, Brookhaven, Argonne, Lawrence Livermore, Lawrence Berkeley, Sandia, Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, Oakridge...

Large research universities offer things that I think you would have a hard time replicating with this model. For instance, a research-grade fMRI facility costs millions of dollars to run and requires a large number of dedicated staff to maintain it. I can think of a lot of other resources like this -- primate facilities, certain kinds of DNA sequencing equipment, etc. Universities absorb this kind of cost with their endowment. I'm skeptical you could get a critical mass of scientists in a certain sub-speciality to be able to fund those things profitably, especially if they were doing basic science research (not pharmaceutical kinds of stuff that can make a profit on their own)

At my university most infrastructure in core labs is actually purchased by individual labs and then placed in a core with the understanding that the core will pay for the service contracts and run the machines in exchange for sharing. The major costs are personel and service contracts. Moreover, many cores are able to be self sufficient by charging users for services.

A similar system could be established here, or investigators could contract work out to 3rd party companies or even other university core labs which frequently allow unaffiliated investigators access, albeit at a higher price.

To echo Thriptic comment: you would be surprised to know how little top US research universities actually provide for their, well, research labs!

The way it works today, mutatis mutandis, is more like a "hacker space" than anything else: you get, if lucky, some shared shoebox as an office; a parked website domain maybe; and some rather vague and guarded promise of institutional support... But other than that you run your lab essentially like a startup: you are responsible for securing funding for equipment, salaries --yes, including your own!-- and workspaces. And if you can't, you close down: as simple as that.

So the oft-cited 'advantage' of having a steady supply of quasi-indentured post-docs and grad students to horribly exploit is only half the story: if you just don't have the funding, you can't hire them. Note that in this (restricted) sense, throwing more money at the problem would indeed help towards the solution.

It's quite grueling and ridiculous when you think of it, especially in this era of billions and billions of dollars in endowment at your typical RU/VH...

I actually would not be surprised -- I did neuroscience research at two major research universities, and I handled the lab finances as part of my RA duties.

Our grants and the university-provided lab startup funds bought the smaller stuff -- EEGs, eye-trackers, etc -- which ran in the thousands of dollars. The university financed the building and some of the maintenance of the larger stuff like the fMRI facilities we used, and we paid hourly to use them.

This is an interesting model:

http://www.theissresearch.org/

There are many ways of looking at this, most disturbing. I imagine that my own experience working to support PhD candidates and post-docs a decade ago is instructive. The TL-DR: failed start-up.

I went back to school during the post-2001 recession and found myself with a job writing signal processing software to make sense of the data coming off an experimental mass spectrometer. I was offered a job by our lead researcher (a post-doc) upon graduation who saw an opportunity to turn a grant into a private lab. There were some political and University-inspired patent spin-off aspects, too.

The lab was built to create a product that used, but had little to do with, his research. I got a rag mag and a poster session publication credit from the early company efforts to build an in-house mass spectrometry device before he left and returned to being a post-doc (he is now a tenured professor). The people left steering the company ballooned the corporate efforts using off-the-shelf tech to rush a product to market just as the 2008 crash impacted and the targeted customer base (people wanting spa-like boutique medical tests to determine which vitamins they should take) evaporated. I was dismissed in the first wave of the toilet spiral and the company ceased to exist 18 months later.

The point behind my story is that as the pool of post-docs increases, we are more likely to see more adventures like the one I went through. Some of these start-ups will succeed, leading to a survivor-bias feedback loop at the policy level that we need even more STEM students to feed the start-up machine, leading to growth.

I have no doubt that this will, in fact, work as a growth engine. My question is whether this can be made more efficient by providing a few more prestigious fellowships and other funding to keep the most brilliant in the game before they kick off into business.

This is exactly why I started my startup nonprofit (details in info). Not too many of my peers are equally as crazy as I am though... I quit my postdoc and started driving for Lyft to make bills while waiting for 501(c)(3) status - it resulted in a net 20% pay increase, although since prices have gone down it's not nearly as good.

Your story is similar to mine. I am a current PhD student (finishing this semester) and founder of a new startup, The Winnower (thewinnower.com), that aims to centralize academic blogs and make scientific publishing more transparent.

This article makes it sound like this is a new problem, e.g., "But in recent years, the postdoc position has become less a stepping stone and more of a holding tank." As was pointed out in the comments of the article, the grey-haired postdoc problem in biology has persisted for decades. It's difficult to sustain sympathy for people trapped in a endless postdoc when the problem is not a secret.

Also, have to say, the article picture showcases a great pet peeve of mine with media pictures of scientists in the lab: where is the rest of this guy's PPE? One of the nice things about industry is that safety is far more likely to be taken seriously.

I got my PhD in 1993, and the postdoc position was recognized as a holding pattern, already by that time. The other well known effect was known as the "birth control problem," which was that a professor only had to produce one PhD during her career, to replace themselves. Anything more than that was surplus.

But to be fair, nobody ever told us that becoming a professor was supposed to be our only option, and it would have been silly to expect such a thing because of the "birth control problem." Yet, silly is exactly how we managed our careers. Myself included. I intended to work in industry with my PhD, but didn't exactly do anything intelligent about making it happen.

It's been my observation, visiting lots of labs, that the "culture" of always wearing safety glasses doesn't extend into biology labs. My spouse, a chemist now working in a bio lab, is aghast. "And the kids wear flip flops too." Yes, industry takes safety more seriously.

Yeah, I hate to stereotype biologists but it's true, there is a serious safety culture deficiency.

I learned cell culture from a guy that didn't wear gloves while working under BSL-2 conditions. Back then, I thought he was so cool. Now, what a moron.

A lot of that comes from who their mentors were and the conditions of their lab. They're often missing vital safety materials and the senior scientists have already given in to apathy. I've heard plenty of horror stories but it always comes back to "that's just how we do things in our lab, oh well"

My sister is a biologist, she was invited to work in a lab in her first year of university already, and her lab professor left her in charge of running the lab in general, even above PhD students because she was the only one that used all equipment correctly, safely and in an organized manner.... My sister even berates her professor when he is disorganized or forget stuff

I'm reminded of the UCLA lab death in 2008.

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/03/30/a_young_lab_wor...

I believe UCLA is taking safety more seriously now, although I've heard some grumbling about the new layers of bureaucracy, too.

Wait, why is it difficult to sustain sympathy for people dealing with non-secret problems?

In this case because participating in the system by playing the tenure-track lottery helps to sustain the system, among other things.

The academic system is badly broken. Personally, I think that the only winning move is not to play.

>The academic system is badly broken. Personally, I think that the only winning move is not to play.

Well, problem is, if you want to do basic scientific research (rather than engineering based on a preexisting base of scientific research), that system is the only game in town.

For most people it's not, but some people subscribe to the notion that choice implies consent/endorsement/approval regardless of mutual inclusions, mutual exclusions, or tradeoffs inherent in the structure of the choice. I do not sympathize with this point of view. My best guess is that people accept it primarily as a means to rationalize away blatant and immediate inequities for a number of reasons:

1. To comfort themselves (X would never happen to me because I would just Y)

2. To justify past decisions by framing the decision as a positive difference in street smarts rather than as a negative difference in selflessness/drive/dedication (I'm such a smart guy for leaving / never entering science!)

3. To reconcile evidence with strongly ingrained just-world or libertarian philosophy (it's ok to abuse people on the wrong side of a supply/demand asymmetry because it forcibly drives people towards the market-determined equilibrium point (assumed to be a net positive for society) while maintaining individual freedom in the sense of "you are completely free to do anything but you will be punished for disobedience")

My usual counterargument strategy is to call attention to the fact that it's actually an extreme point of view by applying it in more extreme circumstances:

"It's difficult to sustain sympathy for <coal miners dying from black lung> when the problem is not a secret."

"It's difficult to sustain sympathy for <trapped firefighters> when <the fact that firefighters occasionally get trapped in fires> is not a secret."

"It's difficult to sustain sympathy for <a soldier who jumped on a grenade to save his buddies> when <the fact that this would certainly kill him> is not a secret."

I agree, and thank you for succinctly explaining a subtle concept.

The shift has been rapid. When I entered grad school (2003) a single postdoc was expected, 2 years. By the time I left the expectation was 4 years, and by the time I completed my second postdoc, it had bloated to two postdocs and 6-8 years. This sort of rapid shift can be expected by exponential growth which might be the short term outcome of a pyramided organizational structure replicated over and over... For years other outlets like industry and nontraditional courses (law, journalism, etc) could keep up but then there was a hockey stick catastrophe.

"where is the rest of this guy's PPE?"

Pictures of a lab I worked in were taken, we were marched out because we were almost all fat middle aged white guys, then a team of Very attractive college students of politically correct gender and race were marched in and pictures were taken for the PR brochure.

Also the photography crew had a team of makeup artists making last minute corrections, and PPE is going to mess that up. More important to get the hair and makeup correct than proper wearing of gear.

Responses were highly variable, ranging from don't care to absolutely incensed. The people who were incensed got pretty mercilessly teased about it later on, all in good fun.

I suspect this is not an isolated incident when lab pix are taken.

Also comically on NANOG mailing list a long time ago I remember a legendary thread about one particular male model that somehow appeared in multiple competing long distance company ads and a couple competing telecom gear ads, before merger mania. Someone screwed up and ran two ads with him in the same industry trade rag leading to someone on NANOG noticing he's in the Cisco ad and the AT&T ad or whatever it was.

i think you're over-estimating the 'situational awareness' of many grads (myself included back in the day). while it's great that lots of first timers are entering the tertiary system and gaining degrees, they don't have the family or professional networks that can help them spot 'risky' decisions. i was the first in my family to go to uni let alone get a PhD - looking back i had NFI what was going on. getting a phd is neccessary (i knew that) but not sufficient (i did not know that) to be a pro-scientist. with the benefit of hindsight, i probably zigged instead of zagged in my MSc and from there the odds were totally stacked against me - just took me another 10 years to realise... further - is suspect the 'long september' effect in science to continue for a lot longer - there will always be a surplus of young and eager proto-scientists who will drive the cost down and the competition up.

This is a problem we really shouldn't have. So many smart, dedicated people that we can't fund them all? After they survive how many years of schooling?

The fundamental research these people do is exactly the kind of research that our corporate sponsors won't do.

Where did the government funding go? Please, don't tell me to start a Kickstarter campaign.

  Where did the government funding go?

Could be government funding is constant (or even increasing), just due to the perverse incentives involved, we're producing PhDs faster than we're producing funded positions for them.

According to [1] "Since 1982, [...] The number of [science and engineering] PhDs awarded annually has also increased [...] from ~19,000 in 1982 to ~36,000 in 2011. The number of faculty positions created each year, however, has not changed, with roughly 3,000 new positions created annually"

[1] http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/fig_tab/nbt.2706_F...

The article mentions a leveling off and "even contract(ing) over the last decade" of federal funding. I take the statement at face value, someone else might substantiate it.

Your point is taken. As we're producing more of these PhDs, we should be taking advantage of them; Not solely as cheap labor but as the scientific minds they were trained to be.

It's the price you pay for idiotic "privatize everything" policies. Without contracts and public works, there's no way for Ph D's to get exposure and contacts in industries where they can actually demonstrate their skills.

Australia right now is in the grips of horrifically bad government policy in this regard (the CSIRO pretty much fired 2000 post-docs, so the market is now completely glutted with people with more experience then anyone graduating recently).

And when you get right down to it, this is all a huge stupid waste. We sink the cost of educating these people, then proceed to toss them into menial jobs which don't use those skills at all, don't provide opportunities to maintain them or anything like that?

what does privatization have to do with this? One of the worst abuses of the system (in my opinion) is the IRTA program. This is uncynically called the "post-bac" program among the IRTAs of the NIH, to the cynic it's exactly what it sounds like - it's a postdoc, except even less paid - its unintended consequence is as a dumping ground for undergrads unsure of what they want to do and spending a few years in lab purgatory before committing to grad school, because they have sunk the sunk cost of a couple of years in 'academic' research. The lucky ones go to med school instead.

This program is run by the NIH (not privatized in any way), almost assuredly created with the best of intentions (let's give students a chance to try out science so they can learn to love it, choose it, and increase our national stature!).

I only recently learned about the Post-Bac program, and I wish I had known about it when I was just out of school- I went to a university that wasn't research oriented, and such a program would have been fantastic for picking up the research mindset before going to graduate school I ended up in a lab staff instead, and learned about real research in sort of a trial by fire manner that's been much more stressful than the postbac probably would have been. So it's got it's possible advantages- let alone working for the NIH looks pretty good on a CV.

I would argue that being a lab staff is better, because you know what you're getting into. You were probably paid better, too. "cushy" is not a good thing to "prepare you for grad school", especially not for students who are noncommital (not saying that you are, but a lot of IRTAs are). OTOH, I knew a postbac whose job was to counsel macaques that had pieces of their brains gouged out (and therefore wound up with severe behavioral problems). So her job was pretty stressful.

Upshot: You made the right "choice".

Privatization gets used as a cudgel to force through funding cuts for all sorts of things. What it actually does is cut the legs out of the very private industries which would hire science graduates, because they're usually involved with providing various public services to the government in the first place.

One does not exist without the other, and a steadfast refusal to actually stimulate public works means everyone suffers.

> The fundamental research these people do is exactly the kind of research that our corporate sponsors won't do. Where did the government funding go?

One thing I have observed in the States is that people in the corporate world are extremely shy about discussing politics, or anything related to government – preferring to repeat the "all politicians are assholes" cliché, rather than actually have some kind of coherent position that can be discussed or challenged.

If you want the government to fund things, you have to elect the correct sort of government; and get involved in talking about it, discussing it, and trying to influence it. Currently, what I see is that most people have just enough to get by without being involved in government in any shape or form, which works out well for maintaining the status quo.

Currently, your real government is often the corporate world, which is 100% motivated by how much cash you can earn. They will fund the sort of things that will earn them that cash the quickest. Currently, that seems to be "games where you play with virtual candy", and not "research into the fundamental sciences".

How to change this? I'm not sure (not an American), but I hear about PACs being led by people like Larry Lessig that are very pro-reform, so perhaps talking to them might be a way.

>Where did the government funding go?

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1144

Where did the government funding go?

Here: http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/

Government funding goes to incumbent researchers, e.g. professors who have already made it. They're deeply incentivised to replicate the destructive system that they evolved themselves to thrive in. Peter Thiel quipped in his reddit AmA: "we have a Gresham's law in science", or briefly, "bad science drives out good"... I don't often find myself agreeing with Thiel but this perspective resonated with me.

Disclaimer: I am running a science kickstarter of sorts (pledge.indysci.org). Why do you think this is bad? Do you think that paternalistically people don't value science as much as they should? And why should we expect our elected officials that squabble over stupid partisan issues be any more enlightened in allocating science funding?

Would love your opinion on The Winnower (thewinnower.com), a new science publishing platform I launched this year (I am also cancer researcher at Virgina Tech). We'd be happy to publish any of your blogs or writings on your experiences with Indysci.

We are training too many people in areas that are not in high demand. Biologists in particular have a hard time getting work and complain about it loudly, quite understandably.

Meanwhile, the US runs out of H1B visas every year importing CS and EE talent from overseas.

What programmes should be cut to fund them?

The NSA, CIA, TSA, DOD, DEA, the drug war, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the 'war' on terror. Also, taxation is at multi-decade lows.

The system of incentives is all screwed up. The glut of postdocs is a boon for everyone involved, except the postdocs themselves.

Postdocs are very highly qualified and underpaid scientists, who can on a project without almost any supervision, and who are very motivated so will work really hard with little pay. For a group leader, it's a no brainer to hire as many of them as he can.

Imagine how much the cost of science would increase if instead of being able to hire 3 or 4 postdocs at 50k each, you actually had to hire someone with a similar skillset at market pay.

>> Imagine how much the cost of science would increase if instead of being able to hire 3 or 4 postdocs at 50k each

Doesn't that just mean that 50k is the market rate?

Only in that the suppressed wages of engineers at Apple, Google, Adobe, etc., were the "market rate" through collusion. Or that $0 is the market rate of NCAA athletes who earn billions for corporate profiteers.

That particular market is incredibly distorted.

Available funding is constrained complicated ways, and the whole incentive system is a mess.

Departments/PI's can't hire for the positions they would choose, so they hire postdocs for very short terms (often 2 years or less) because they can. Candidates can't get the positions they want (e.g. TT positions) so they take post-docs until they age out or find/settle on something. Everyone understands that there may not be a classic TT position for everyone interested, but the system has so far mostly failed to come up with any sort of viable alternative for long term employment. Not that TT is what it used to be, either.

As a result, continuity in labs is very difficult to maintain as the senior people rotate out too often. Couple this with the growing tendency for PI's to spend more time fund raising than doing research and you have a lot of lost and wasted effort.

That depends on the field. At least in my field, doing identical work in industry starts at 100k, while a postdoc salary would be 35-40k.

Which one is the "market" rate?

Both. You have a choice between:

A. $100k in cash compensation, or

B. $40k cash + a shot at becoming a tenure-track professor.

The market is saying that opportunity to possibly become a professor is worth $60k.

Since the private sector/industry work is competitive, it is considered market rate. The reason that post-docs are not considered market rate is that the institutions do not compete with each other, and the rate is determined without concern of the applicants.

Honestly, it matters more whether their skills are being put to good use. 50k is adequate salary for anyone on the planet, and nobody complaining about that salary deserves that much sympathy. Complaining about grunt work when you could be better used is fine. Complaining about inequity in the system because others get paid much more is fine.

Maybe things have changed in the year since I left academia, but I don't know any postdocs making 50k. 35-40 is more like it.

50k is the norm at Berkley due to the high cost of living (minimum wage is $10/hour)

Stanford is 43-55k, but the cost to the lab is higher due to benefits, etc.

http://www.jobs-salary.com/berkeley-postdoctoral-scholar-emp...

An intro postdoc makes 30k.

BA/BS researchers have a higher pay distribution (this accords with my personal experience):

http://www.jobs-salary.com/university-of-california-berkeley...

Current postdoc at NYU. 55K intro salary.

Agree. Our friend of mine makes 35k at UCLA!

It is simple: science does not pay off.

I have a friend, respected marine researcher. He is 50-something and he finally got permanent job, only problem is that he has to move across Europe and learn new language. He was very upset, when I told him I already quit 6 permanent jobs before I was 30.

Yes, I think one culprit is misperceptions that the term "STEM" encourages (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). It's become a widespread marketing term, especially towards young people choosing education and careers. People are told that there's big demand in "STEM careers" so they should get a "STEM degree". But there isn't really a shortage of people in this cluster of fields across the board, mostly just of programmers and some kinds of engineers. For the most part, not of natural scientists, or of most kinds of mathematicians.

I think it's retained because it is a good marketing term, and lets technology (where the jobs are) benefit from an association with "hard" areas like pure math and astrophysics (where much of the prestige is). But that's a bit of sleight of hand: we get kids excited about "STEM" with documentaries about marine biology and astronomy, but then oops, that's not where the jobs labeled STEM actually are.

There are two reasons policymakers promote STEM, beyond the shortage of programmers and engineers.

1) STEM graduates learn how to think critically and mathematically, two skills that will serve them well in almost any business pursuit. For example Jack Welch, the famous CEO of GE, held a Ph.D. in chemical engineering. I don't know of evidence that STEM degrees hold people back, even working outside the sciences.

2) We don't know, in advance, who the next Einstein is going to be. Giving as many children as possible the chance to make great discoveries is just good odds.

The chances are that most STEM graduates will not even be a full professor, let alone the next Einstein. But that is largely true of any degree we can imagine. Most English majors will not be a successful novelist or critic. Most business graduates will not run a company. Most history graduates will not become a full professor. Etc.

There is a shortage of leadership positions in any field, and a full professor with research funding is a leadership position. I think the most important question is whether the absolute best STEM graduates achieve these positions; that's best for society overall. If the postdoc crisis keeps the most promising new researchers from pursuing new knowledge, that's bad.

But it's not a volume problem. For the volume of STEM grads, the question is whether they can achieve at least a middle-class career and lifestyle. That might be in the sciences, but it might not. That doesn't mean that STEM education is pointless.

>2) We don't know, in advance, who the next Einstein is going to be. Giving as many children as possible the chance to make great discoveries is just good odds.

Problem is, an opportunity to make discoveries is not a degree, it's a stable job as a researcher after the degree.

The jobs may not be doing those things, but those skills are appreciated. The best programmers I've worked with were the ex-pure-mathematicians.

Some kinds of science. It's currently very hard to find an excellent robotics, vision, machine learning, data mining or NLP postdoc, despite large growth in the number of PhDs graduating. They get jobs at Google (etc) instead.

If you choose marine biology, maybe not so much.

I was under the impression that a marine biology degree got you a job making Age of Empires. ;)

> It is simple: science does not pay off.

I'd take it a step further: The problem is that our economy does not allocate resources well, either to people who need the resources (e.g., people who can't get health care or obtain decent education for their kids), or to people who will provide good return on investment to the rest of society.

The 'free' market, the invisible god that so many worship as an arbiter of value, doesn't do a good job. (It's also not free in many senses.)

"or to people who will provide good return on investment to the rest of society"

It's a tricky one. While I am certain that science moves society forward (though the rate is decreasing), I am not convinced the median scientist contributes in the positive direction.

I wrote about this here five and a half years ago, before it went "sour so quickly": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470181

As a grad student back then, I saw a pyramid scheme. Training programs were (and are) funding way more students than there is room at the top. If funding at the top level stops expanding, the current scenario unfolds.

If I have undergrads in my lab who want to go on to graduate school, I give them sufficient information on these numbers that they can provide "informed consent". If they still want to go ahead, they receive my full support.

Postdocs – The Middleman of Academia

http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1744

Can someone shed light on why it takes 6-7 years in the US? My European friends tend to manage in 3-4 years. The opportunity costs look quite different at that stage in life. Much better to find out you need a new direction at 25 than 29.

Lack of unions might have something to do with it. Was in Copenhagen recently and was surprised that even as a PhD student, your salary is negotiated based on your experience- and the negotiation is done by the union representative. When unions aren't abused it sounds like they can be quite useful. But yeah, in the US, PhDs and post docs are used as cheap but knowledgeable labor, and kept around as long as possible by constantly giving them other things to do that aren't directly related to their project.

Most EU PhDs have an MSc (1-2 years) already. Many US PhD programs admit directly from undergrad.

Aha, it is postdoctoral treadmill: http://physics.wustl.edu/katz/scientist.html

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