The future of the postdoc
nature.com
nature.com
The only two solutions I see are either funding for NIH and basic sciences drastically increases (my preferred solution), or there is some breakthrough which makes biotech and life sciences industry more profitable and able to hire all the entry level PhDs.
Notice how the engineering and physics PhDs make up only a small fraction of the donut chart? That's because those folks graduate with skills that are desirable to industry because they can translate into profit. The biotech industry does not need smart and inexperienced idea people. The biotech industry prefers very senior level scientists with proven track records of profitability, and worker drones who have bachelors or masters degrees who are not on the scientist track.
She's fallen off the face of the earth I guess. I've tried contacting her a few times over the last month or two and never get a response. Maybe she's busy doing just that. Hopefully, the way she was talking finding an Industry job with her PhD is hard.
I had essentially zero chance of landing a biotech position, similarly because my niche was not in demand by any local company. Even the positions I did see were not very desirable and the competition from other PhDs and postdocs was fierce.
I was lucky to have some extra time toward the end of grad school to pick up some coding skills. The labor market for software developers is ridiculous in Seattle, and it took me under 2 weeks to find a full time position. I considered bootcamps also, but decided to give it a shot trying to get hired with just my existing experience. The though of starting a bootcamp where my 6 years of research experience was all for naught was pretty depressing, so I really feel for your sister. I have another PhD friend who is in the exact same boat.
My conclusion was to not fight the tide of the labor market. I think in the future biotech will be really profitable and there will be a lot more jobs, but right now all of the jobs are in software, at least around here.
>From my point of view, research science was becoming a luxury/hobby profession of people whose spouses make a lot of money or who are independently wealthy.
Up through the 19th century, this was primarily the case. Of course back then there was a lot of low hanging fruit as compared to now.
- Get really good at doing science as a graduate student and postdoc.
- Become a junior PI, spend most of your time selling your science, and train your graduate students and postdocs for a few years. You need to keep up with the literature to know what to do next, but you rarely have time to perform experiments yourself.
- Become a senior PI. Now your lab is established, and you can hire half a dozen knowledgeable postdocs to teach the others in your lab. As your field advances, you need to keep up enough to sell the discoveries your lab has made to grant review panels, but you don't actually have to know how to do the science. That's for those below you.
There are some clear exceptions. Some PIs really do know how to do everything. Some PIs even keep running experiments while also writing grants and running a lab, although that's not necessarily an easy task. But for most PIs, the arc above seems to be the way it goes. You take the brightest, most talented scientists, and once they reach they become really knowledgeable, you turn them into professional grantwriters.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but I feel like there has to be a better way. To start, maybe we should think about limiting lab size, so that your lab seeks to maximize the productivity per employed scientist rather than the total amount of funding that you can obtain. Without so much pressure to accumulate funds to grow their labs, perhaps PIs could spend less time writing grants and more time running labs. Also, with smaller labs you can afford to hire more PIs and give a career path to more of the postdocs that you are "training."
Also, with smaller labs you can afford to hire more PIs and give a career path to more of the postdocs that you are "training."
That would probably be better for the postdocs, but I think it would have a negative impact on the overall production of new science. A PI who runs a big lab with a proven track record of success is going to be a better investment most of the time. Splitting the labs up also means that even more people are exposed to the type of grantwriting inefficiencies that you describe above.
What I like about the superdoc idea is that right now (modulo some pretty rare positions) science feels like "PI or bust." I think there are lots of people who can make useful scientific contributions but probably shouldn't be PIs. Figuring out something for these people would be good for them and (IMO) good for the system.
Oh, you worked as a lab assistant while studying to get a food in the door / gain some experience / pimp your CV? Tough luck: if you did that for more than 10 hours per week, this time is counted toward your 6 (or 12) years.
This beautiful regulation comes by the beautiful name of the Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz.
a) become professors and suddenly (have to) care about other things than teaching
and/or
b) they have to leave (either because they become professor somewhere else or because they didn't at all)
If postdocs are so prized, then one obvious solution is to reward them. Both the 2014 National Academies report and earlier reports urged US lab heads to consider creating senior staff scientist, or ‘superdoc’, positions. These would be higher-paid, permanent jobs for talented postdocs who have no desire to start their own labs.
This type of thing becoming more common would fix a lot of academic career problems. I think it would also be a very good first step in actually reducing the number of incoming PhD students, since the productivity of such a researcher will usually exceed the amount of graduate student you could replace them with.
Sure, but the argument is that we're training many more people for those sorts of careers than can realistically have them. Having the filter come at the beginning rather than the end is way better for people who are going to get screened out one way or the other.
I also "won", in that I have a full-time position in an industry research lab. But I hesitate to conclude that the current system is tenable, just because it worked out for me.
Obviously, you can claim sour grapes in my case, but - I finished up my PhD which was somewhat middling but I did accomplish some important things - and had two very productive postdocs in disparate fields. What I observed was, consistently, PhDs getting degrees that probably shouldn't have. About half of the PhD thesis defenses I went to at The Scripps Research Institute (consistenly ranked in top 5) were, in my opinion, undeserved, possibly including mine. The situation was somewhat worse at the University of Maryland where I did a postdoc. My second postdoc was at the Venter Insitute, where there were no PhDs; we had a grad student intern in my lab that my boss selected that couldn't get a simple molecular biology procedure to work. The undergrad with no lab experience that I trained did it 50 times in 1.5 months. The grad student got his PhD, and is now a postdoc at LBNL.
Opinion aside, fact of the matter is that the academic system is broken for a simple, mathematical reason. There is an 'exponential growth' mechanism where you have professors with labs with, say, three postdocs, and four grad students (note that the grad students stay for longer than the postdocs). You can't expect to 'copy/paste' this tree indefinitely, even with a modest attrition rate, because ultimately this growth is unsustainable.
You have to be willing to cull, and cull hard. Confounding factors include: an unwillingness to cull because it makes the program look bad; sometimes you have to grant the PhD because you're afraid the grad program will be sued (insert anecdotal story of a student who nabbed a nice severance including a trip to Albert Hofmann's 100th birthday party); PhDs being sold as 'the next step' for listless students who don't know what to do with their life next because all they know is schooling; PhDs having a 'social status' cachet; nationalistic measuring contests where countries try to project greatness as measured by how many PhDs they produce - aka race to the bottom.
The 'jobs outside of academia' for PhDs has basically come about as a relief valve for this exponential process and now that relief valve has likely been saturated.
That postdocs appear to be underpaid is a symptom of the market failure; there are too many of them around and so you can pay them less. Moreover, because so many crappy PhDs are produced, it becomes difficult to differentiate between them. This basically creates frustration for genuinely smart PhDs, and so they go into finance on wall street and cause stock market crashes by making the assumption that markets are normally distributed when they're actually levy distibuted.
Yet there's the persistent decline in NIH funding, money going to "safe" research topics (as in, no room to grow the field, just backing winners), and the looming shadow of arrangements where publicly funded research is channelled into private or otherwise "protected" areas. The glut of post docs is basically the symptom of this disease that is ruining a professional, highly skilled field. According to the article, the recommendations put forward recently are similar to the ones mentioned 15 years ago - so, the problem was ignored then / kicked down the road - and now we're on the cusp of a gigantic pile of non-performing student loans because there's no work to be had to earn an income and repay the loans that were taken out in pursuit of work.
It's really too bad. This is no easy conundrum, not at all. What's the best advice? If you're looking into bench science as a career, DON'T. Become a veterenarian. Go into geriatric nursing. Basically do anything but try to make a living in science, because it's simply not worth trying anymore.
Most graduate STEM students have tuition reimbursed and are paid a stipend.
There is still a glut of post-docs though, and 42K isn't a living wage for a 30 year old person with that kind of skill.
I understand that there is a stipend to working in a lab while as a student (akin to being a TA), but while obtaining a PhD in a top program, I highly doubt tuition is reimbursed, and that still doesn't cover living expenses in a major metropolitan area. I mean, if you can name a Top 25 university from each San Fran, Boston, New York, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Dallas that consistently provide PhD students tuition reimbursement and a stipend that enables a modestly reasonable quality of life, I'd really be interested. I'm a little tongue in cheek here but bear with my skepticism.
I'm with the GP here, your experience sounds very weird to me. Tuition remission is a pretty standard benefit, often handled by the department at the beginning, and then eventually by your advisor (but often by that point you're not taking much in the way of classes anyway.)
I went to a top school. Never paid a dime in tuition, and was paid 28K a year.
> I mean, if you can name a Top 25 university from each San Fran, Boston, New York, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Dallas that consistently provide PhD students tuition reimbursement and a stipend that enables a modestly reasonable quality of life, I'd really be interested.
All of them.
You don't have a good program unless you do.
note: I have PhD from a top tier university and will soon be a professor at another top tier university. And yes, I badly want things to change and to be to able to hire high school kids or soccer moms but won't be able to under the current system.
I am now working with a pretty new institution in a first world country and will be starting a Postdoc soon. Taking a look at the salary for the Postdoc, it's like I am back to the same rat race as a PhD student years ago. And I now have a family! The new job, though a permanent position, isn't a full-time; so, all employees are advised to look elsewhere. All effort to get into the industry proved abortive; and I saw that a number of my folks in the industry are earning 10-20k more than me (i.e. senior dev. vs senior faculty). Yet they don't have those fanciful postgraduate degrees.
The postdoc opportunity, as for now, seems to be an avenue to get into a top-tier or well-established institution in the first world country though. The long and the short of it is that academics don't get rewarded like their peers in the industry. In addition, postdoc offers are just another way of being a student - call it a professional student. But I will console myself be calling it a consultant. The postdoc offer isn't that bad compared to others that I had. It includes travelling to another first world country for a year or more to complete the other part of my research.
Ignoring that, as someone involved in a group with 4 open positions that have been open for the better part of a year, the shortage is there. It's not so much that there is a shortage of people capable of applying who "kind of" meet the requirements, but truly capable engineers in this field who could pick up the work required are definitely in short supply, PhDs or no.
If the need for these positions to be filled is sufficiently low that your group can be that picky for almost a year, it would seem demand is pretty low, thus poor evidence for a shortage.
I appreciate that the ability to pay people enough to attract them is a problem that is very difficult for institutions and organizations to solve, but living on a sub-standard salary with no job security and few career prospects (how many tenure-track opportunities are expected to open up in the next five years for the people who would fill those positions?) is a difficult problem for highly skilled post-doctoral candidates to solve, too.
As to the price point, I'm not convinced. Raising the potential salaries for these positions would attract people, obviously, but the price point would attract them away from their current jobs, leaving a vacancy at another company. If this is the situation, raising the salary doesn't suddenly generate new engineers with the necessary skills. The problem is the existing engineers with the necessary skills are already hired and fulfilled leaving only the option of headhunting.
At a more practical level, yes, if we hired these positions, our capabilities would be extended greatly. Hell, hiring one would be enough. However, there is not enough value in that new hire to justify raising the salary above it's current position.
And lastly, no one has been offered the position and then rejected it because of the pay. The last 3 offers given out were immediately accepted. We just haven't found anyone worth giving an offer for these remaining 4.
Why would they when there's no meaningful difference in pay between postdoc positions? What would happen if they tried to negotiate for something approaching an industry equivalent salary/benefits?
I'm unconvinced by this argument. Sure, it's true on the level of individual labs/companies; but if every lab paid postdocs something closer to industry, then probably more people would be drawn towards that whole vague sector of "technical work".
Edit: Or phrase it another way. The shortage of skilled postdocs, you'd presumably agree, is bigger than the shortage of skilled engineers in industry. If you offered higher postdoc salaries, the shortage would be spread more evenly across academia and business.
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but you're saying that you're failing to find people who are ready to work on day one without additional training?
These people are often described in the press as "business leaders".
Technology, Engineering, Math--- yes, there's a shortage.
Sciences like physics and chemistry (especially petrochemistry!) are definitely still needed.
Sciences like biology and life sciences have far too many graduates. Graduates like me (B.S. in Biochem) and I'm now doing webdev!!!
It's good that they have fallbacks. But it's still not clear that we as a society really value or want mathematicians or physicists, as opposed to coders and quants.
The "STEM shortage" meme is pushed by capitalists who want a cheap and compliant workforce.