This is only surprising if you expect that every postdoc should stay in academia, or would want to. Being in academia is not the only way to do research, and is not a prerequisite to using your degree. The private sector is a thing, and postdocs leaving academia can do perfectly good work in their field while actually making a grown up salary.
These are good arguments about phd's not going into academia. But a postdoc at a university is an underpaid training position for the most part. Not a worthwhile sacrifice if you want to work in the private sector in my field. Maybe it's more important for industry jobs in biology or something.
Personally I think it's a warped system that takes advantage of cheap labor from developing countries. And it feeds itself. The more temporary research staff professors can hire, the less permanent research staff universities need.
That's mostly reasonable. But for some people at least, the PhD doesn't give them all the skills they are looking for, so they might do another post-doc (2-3 years at slightly better than PhD lifestyle), before jumping ship.
They should have stayed rare, but they’re a way for universities to get free money from the government as well as a temporary (but sadly permanent) fix for academia’s deep structural problems.
So Yale's PhD count grew a bit, but nowhere near as much as the rest of the country's.
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But mostly, PhDs used to be way rarer in the back in the 50s (along with college degrees in general). If you look at Figure 1 in this NSF report (https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf25300/figure/1#), it shows the number of PhDs tripling in just 15 years from 1958 to 1973. After 1973 it slows down to merely doubling over the next 50 years.
Admin growth might be a factor, although I'd want to look at national data first. Your own article says "... Yale had the highest manager-to-student ratio of any Ivy League university, and the fifth highest in the nation among four-year private colleges" so maybe it's an outlier.
63 years ago, they were rare, but my father was able have his professor and department secure funding within a few months. ( yes, Engineering has a lot of money available from the defense department ).
50 years later, the Molecular Biology postdocs were not so lucky. Not even an honorarium. "Maybe in a few years..."
Just to raise the number from 0, I did exactly that. The post-doc was in a research institute, a department that focused on usability. It seemed worthwhile to learn how to really do user tests and usability evaluations in practice, in the best way possible academically (or so I thought) but with real enterprise projects. Contrasted a lot with the quite theoretical PhD.
We can always argue about whether it was worthwhile ofc. Moneywise, definitely not (though the pay wasn't all that bad compared to industry compensation in my countries). But I learned what I wanted to learn, and the issues the position had were speficic to the place, not the concept of the position, if that makes sense.
A postdoc can also act as temporary employment when one can't immediately find a position outside academia. They tend to be very low commitment as a result of the laughable compensation.
Nope. All it takes is the first tenured professor to say "Well, yes, this was all good work you did for the last year... but we are not going to put your name on the paper... wait... where are you going? Are you leaving?"
"The door will not hit me in the *ss on the way out."
generally you are somewhat right, but it's complicated by country. for example it would be less surprising that a UK-style 3 year PhD might want a couple more years training after.
> But a postdoc at a university is an underpaid training position for the most part.
That's not really true or fair. You're talking about a person who's done likely 4 years of undergraduate and between 4 and 8 (median 5?) years of graduate studies and gained a Ph.D. This person is without a doubt "an expert" in their field. Does that person still need training? Sure. But who doesn't?
You're also talking about someone who is probably in their early to mid 30's. Eventually people want to start having a life. And you're expecting them to make pennies? I'm not joking. Here's a list of CS Post Doc stipends[0]. Go to Berkeley or Stanford and make $66k-$80k? I've gotten more money as a PhD Intern! You're going to get more than double that in industry before we talk about RSUs.
I think this is something we need to take quite seriously here. There aren't really good reasons for people to choose this path, especially considering how disruptive it is to your life (have fun moving again in a few years :). Maybe we can hope that those who go are just really dedicated to research and following their passions. So dedicated that they are willing to put off normal human things like starting a family, maintaining relationships[1], or even just building one's net worth (or paying off student debt). Some people want to become a professor[2] so will do that.
But the big thing I see is that there's nothing to attract the best people. (We can extend this to even just professorships[3]). So who are becoming the postdocs and professors? Who are becoming the people that educate the next wave of people? If you are at the top, you likely aren't going the professor route, you're likely going to industry where you'll likely get 2x-3x the pay AND more freedom in your research. Even if you're pretty mid you can get 2x-3x the pay in industry with an honestly less stressful life (but you may not be doing research or likely have more restriction of what research you can pursue). This, seems pretty disastrous. At best, unstable. There's not a lot of professor spots but I think we need to have some incentive system such that people at the top are encouraged to carry on their research for the public as well as educate future researchers. As a business you want to be greedy and capture top talent, but that's also because you should be thinking much shorter term. At social levels, we have to think generations.
TLDR:
So are we confident we are getting "cream of the crop" (even if shared with industry) in academic positions? Are we sure that's even true at highly prestigious institutions?
I think the answer is "no", we should not be confident in that outcome.
[1] Good chance you met your partner while doing a PhD and yay now you both need to find post docs but they are competitive and so good luck finding one in the same place? Hope you like long distance relationships or are willing to let one partner make a bigger sacrifice.
[2] Which weird thing that we train someone to become an expert researcher and then as a professor we give them such high and diverse workloads that they will often have little time for research and instead will more be managers. The research skill degrades with time and only keeping up at a high level is not sufficient.
[3] In CS a post doc is also often a way to elevate your status. Like you got your PhD from a lower tier university and so doing a Post Doc at a much higher tier can make you employable at a more prestigious university. Because prestige still matters a lot, especially since it is tightly coupled with things like equipment access.
[side note]: I think with the competitiveness that it is a bit odd we still have these strong notions of prestige. Just to put things in perspective, if every graduating PhD at the number 1 school, they likely graduate enough people that you could fill all available faculty positions available. Given how prestige matters, it should be clear how high prestige graduates permeate into lower prestige positions. More clear when you start to consider things like how many top universities are in not the greatest living locations. https://drafty.cs.brown.edu/csopenrankings/placement-rank.ht...https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/
Training is how the low pay is justified. I certainly agree it's not a good deal, more of a supply and demand effect. Are you saying I'm wrong about the definition? It's pretty universal: https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf21327
I do agree it probably gets used more as an easy way to get experience, the usual thing organizations crave in their new hires. But it isn't the only way. Top graduates can get temporary research faculty positions or even go directly to tenure track. Or in STEM fields, a few years in industry is seen as positive. Industry and Government research labs also have their own "postdoc" positions which can be pretty much normal pay.
It’s not universal. Nsf is a narrow view of academia. There are other countries that pay postdocs properly (ie comfortable own place with kids) with benefits and pension.
> Are you saying I'm wrong about the definition? It's pretty universal: https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf21327
Yes, I would say it is inaccurate to say that a post doc position is about training. Unless you're referring to them training undergrads and grads.
I think there are 2 key things we need to note about your source
>> Which items or job requirements are most commonly used by institutions to define postdocs?
This is in the context of __hiring__. So they are looking at listings. I don't think just because you are saying that this job will provide training means the job is a training position. Or what we'd commonly associate with a training program, a junior, or anything like that.
>> Is intended to provide training in research?
The wording here is important. Personally, if you asked if a postdoc was __intended__ for training, I would agree. But if you asked if I thought you should expect to be trained during a postdoc I'd be more hesitant. Certainly that depends. If I hired you as an L4 at Google, and said there would be training, what would that mean to you? Do you think it would be fair to say? What about at an L5 (senior)? L6? L7? L8? Certainly not at L9 or L10, right?
There's lots of things that have an __intended__ outcome but don't have the outcome. Momentum is a bitch and when we're talking about institutions, well momentum is a really powerful force. So I wouldn't take that source as a cout de eta for concluding that a post doc is about training the post doc. Honestly, I feel like a postdoc is closer to taking a L5 and saying we're training you to become an L6 or eventually L7. And certainly that's not a "training position" in the context of paying someone as if they are inexperienced. You can always gain more experience.
> Government research labs also have their own "postdoc" positions which can be pretty much normal pay.
FWIW, if you work at a government lab like LBNL or LLNL and take a __staff__ position then your compensation is going to be much closer to the base pay of a big tech. It's quite common to see these people jump ship and triple their salaries (sometimes they return. Often because it is nice to work at labs). I've seen people do this fresh out of PhDs, no postdoc involved. The postdoc positions pay lower.
It isn't just job ads. For half the schools there was a formal definition. Also it has this part: "In 2001, NSF and NIH established a formal postdoc definition as “an individual who has received a doctoral degree (or equivalent) and is engaged in a temporary and defined period of mentored advanced training to enhance the professional skills and research independence needed to pursue his or her chosen career path.”
And yes you should expect to receive training. In the sense that you have a right to it and the supervisor has an obligation to provide it. You seem to be mistaking my criticisms of these jobs for defenses of them.
> “an individual who has received a doctoral degree (or equivalent) and is engaged in a temporary and defined period of performing independent research.”
Would be just as accurate.
Btw
> “an individual who has received an undergraduate degree (or equivalent) and is engaged in a temporary and defined period of mentored advanced training to enhance the professional skills and research independence needed to pursue his or her chosen career path.”
Would be an accurate description of a PhD student too.
The official definition could also be accurate if describing an Assistant Professor (professor before tenure is granted)
So this is why I'm pushing back on the definition. Calling it a "training position" is just an excuse to have cheap labor and be exploitative.
Let me give an anecdote:
I was a PhD 1995-2001 at UCSF. I made $25K/year plus UC benefits.
Then I was a postdoc at Berkeley 2001-2004. I made $76K/year plus UC benefits plus the service clock for the pension started.
Then I was a staff scientist at LBL 2004-2007. I made $100K/year plus UC benefits and the service clock for the pension continued (I have enough service credit to get some thousands of dollars a month after I retire). It was an exhausting job and I did not enjoy having to simulateously publish, travel, and get grants to hire people to do research for me. I concluded this was not enough to buy a house and raise a family, so I left for industry.
I worked at Genentech 2007-2008 and made $120K ("Senior Architect") plus full benefits (which were pretty good).
I then moved to Google as an L5 (I had wanted to work there for ~10 years before I got hired) and started around $140K plus stock options, benefits, and retirement. Over the decade I worked there (2008-2019) my pay was increased signficantly every year, ending around $250K (including the year that Eric Schmidt gave everybody a 10% raise. thanks eric) along with ever-increasing options and then RSUs, worth millions (about $200K/year), excellent benefits, and saving a ton for retirement. There were a lot of side benefits- on the job training, free phones, etc. I really lucked out getting hired and promoted and being there during a growth period; I don't ever expect to have a role like that again.
This was the first time I truly felt like I could have kids and a home in the Bay Area without going deeply in debt.
The first few years at Google were stressful, I worked about as hard as I did at LBL, but every bit of hard work was compensated in some way or another- additional pay, access to resources (I basically could use all of the idle cycles in prod at Google- 1-3M cores- to do protein design, and publish). Every bit of research work that led to publications had far more impact (mainly due to the employer's position in research) than before, and I felt supported by the infrastructure to do ambitious things.
I spent a year at a Startup, making $250K and similar benefits to Google. I was employee #11 and have (worthless) equity- if they IPO I might get somewhere around $1M depending on how diluted my shares are and how big the IPO is. I am not allowed to sell the shares on secondary market.
Now I am back at Genentech and make more than I ever have in terms of base pay, while the stock (Roche stock) isn't nearly as valuable as what I got from Google. Fortunately, all those previous years helped build up a big buffer that will help pay for my kids to go to college (hopefully, some of my payment will go to help somebody else's kid get financial aid).
I'd actually love to return to LBL because if I do, my career will actually form a correctly nested path: LBL -> Genentech -> Google -> Startup -> Google -> Genentech (I am here) -> LBL. I'm sure I could get rehired there but at this point, why would I want to work harder for less money and publication credibility?
Looking back at my postdocs, while I learned a lot, I did not like the power dynamic with my PI, and really only persisted for 3 years with the goal of getting a much higher paying job.
>You're also talking about someone who is probably in their early to mid 30's. Eventually people want to start having a life. And you're expecting them to make pennies? I'm not joking. Here's a list of CS Post Doc stipends[0]. Go to Berkeley or Stanford and make $66k-$80k? I've gotten more money as a PhD Intern! You're going to get more than double that in industry before we talk about RSUs.
Now maybe I'm out of touch, being a postdoc and all, but hasn't the tech industry been suffering mass layoffs this past year or so that really make it a bit unrealistic to label salaries above the American median as "pennies"?
Prison labor = Slavery.
PostDoc research with no publication acknowledgement? = Slavery.
( U.C. Berkeley score is -2 Post Docs. )
Play music for free at Music festival? = Slavery.
I don't think the person you are replying to was expecting this. Rather, I read their comment as agreeing with you that the benefits and compensation were low enough that few people would be interested in the position except as a stepping stone into a better faculty position.
As a grad student, for the duration of your thesis work, you're locked into a specialty at a specific institute that isn't necessarily first-tier, may need to work at a level of intensity that prevents you from attending to a proper job search, and may end up under a professor who doesn't adequately support your career (e.g., with reputation and favorable recommendations).
In short, many things can go wrong, but you're focused on finishing. Under those conditions, if you do go straight into an industry job, it may be a shitty job that's not much better than a post-doc.
A brief stint as a post-doc gives you an income while you repair your career. This may involve changing specialties, developing your own research idea, working in a more prestigious institute or under a famous professor, or searching for industry jobs. Whatever it is, my own advice would be to only consider doing a post doc if it serves a credible purpose, otherwise, getting paid to get older isn't worth it.
In my field (physics), it was customary for grad students to work for their PhD advisor as a post-doc if they didn't already have a job lined up. I know lots of people who did that. It may inflate the number of "postdocs who leave academia" if it's not really a new job and their intention was to leave academia all along.
It's not as if there is a surplus of academic job slots that are going unfilled. The pyramid where one professor trains multiple grad students quickly becomes unsustainable.
Indeed, and in my field, it even had a name: The "Birth Control Problem." In fact, the problem extends to post-docs. Professors were even training multiple post-docs. I saw that quite clearly.
I was lucky to have role models: My parents were both industrial scientists, so the idea wasn't foreign to me. And I figured that I could always become a coder if things didn't work out. ;-)
Re-reading, I may have been unclear: I meant that some people take temporary post-docs with no intention of staying in academia.
You should absolutely only do a postdoc on the supposition that you will get a tenure track faculty position afterwards. It makes no sense financially or emotionally to do one if your goal is to go into industry.
But how can we know that we picked the right person for the job if we aren't at the very least absolutely sure the alternatives were worse?
The human mind resists accepting decisions made without a proportional amount of effort put into those decisions. If we only get one candidate for the job, we will either hire them and deal with constant nagging doubt, or we will lower our standards to get more options we can reject to feel good, but at which point we've now created false hope in the remaining candidates and an illusion of more opportunities existing than actually do.
Humans are messy, and so everything is always fucked. Even when it's not, we find a way to make it so.
This is not how industry works, at least not in the US. Hire a good person, they sink or swim, life goes on. It’s only the harsh narrow bubble of academia that pits smart people against each other this way.
Maybe you haven’t been privy to conversations about whether certain people are sinking or swimming.
I would rather keep a consistently mediocre individual than an inconsistent one because I know what I can and can’t trust the former with. I have to keep
checking in on the latter. But I’ve met more than a couple loudmouths who disagree. Who think they can raise their stock by pushing someone else’s down.
Whether you see actions or not, I assure you that time and energy are being wasted on regrets.
I absolutely am in those conversations and see the time and energy, and some of it is mine, across a sizable organization. I am absolutely not saying that industry is a friction-free meritocracy, and of course there are politics everywhere.
What is unique to academia is the static supply of jobs. When people don't leave, new people face a huge uphill battle to join, and that battle is largely against their competition, not the institution that they seek to join.
If you can afford it, and that's your passion, great. But (at least in the states) you are instead a student with a doctorate degree now in play and saddled with a lot of student debt (150k average), I'm not sure it makes sense. That unfortunately is roughly 77% of folks out there (at least as of 2020).
I don't think I ever remember a time when the walls of the pyramid were shallow enough that the base could support all of the people at the top.
2 out of 5 people getting all the way to the end and discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.
A lot of people convince themselves that what they aren't feeling now will finally come to them after one more milestone, and as long as there enough milestones ahead of them they can play for time until it happens. Or they hit Sunk Cost and feel like they can't tap out now because they'll look like idiots, ignoring how much bigger an idiot you look like for wasting X more years of your youth and saddling yourself with even more debt. Or existential crisis with much the same outcomes. "Who am I even if I'm not..."
* discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.*
It’s not the research or teaching that drive people out of academia. It’s the endless and humiliating scrambling for money. Everyone who’s not a psychopath hates that part of the job, and the people who are any good at it have options outside of academia.
>2 out of 5 people getting all the way to the end and discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.
Research and teaching can take place outside of academia.
>A lot of people convince themselves that what they aren't feeling now will finally come to them after one more milestone, and as long as there enough milestones ahead of them they can play for time until it happens. Or they hit Sunk Cost and feel like they can't tap out now because they'll look like idiots, ignoring how much bigger an idiot you look like for wasting X more years of your youth and saddling yourself with even more debt. Or existential crisis with much the same outcomes. "Who am I even if I'm not..."
Learning can exist for the sake of learning and doesn't necessarily need to be reflected in career choice or identity.
For many it’s not easy to accept that "who you are" doesn't have to depend on the prestige of a title or a position, and that's often where people get stuck.
I think that all postdocs should stay in academia, why else would you do a postdoc? I assume (maybe wrong?) that most of the postdocs had intended to stay when starting the postdoc.
You can do research during your postdoc with chill timelines and pretty much 100% autonomy on your topic and then bootstrap a company with the ideas you've developed during said postdoc? In many countries the postdoc owns the IP of the research they're doing
Sunk cost? Selection bias? I don't think you can get a PhD by accident, you have to really want to work in academia (or a specific industry). And I doubt getting a second post doc position is all that hard (as long as you're willing to travel), given they're capable of getting the first one. My understanding is that universities quite like being able to hire cheap, hard working, disposable researchers.
People who go into academia are probably willing to live the life of an underpaid researcher. The fact that they have the post-doc title instead of the professor title probably is that big a deal, nor is the salary going to change their decision. The lack of autonomy is probably annoying, as is the lack of stability. Having to worry that they might change labs and maybe cities every 3 years, and not knowing for sure if they'll get a job is probably the only thing actually making them quit.
Seconded. Ex post doc here. Any post docs reading this, I would say - academia is a sort of gravy train for the middle class (in the UK). If you want a comfortable life without doing much of worth, you’re not really driven in your work, stick with it. You’ll have to fight for your lectureship but once you’ve done that you can live an easy life with the only difficulties stupid bureaucracy, politics, and cynicism.
However, if you have a bit more energy in you than that, have some ambition, leave asap. Startups are a great alternative. Big co research labs are another. Or just get a day job that you love and do research in the evenings. You could even get paid to do real research via patron etc if you do well.
I think academia in the uk is part of the social structure designed to maintain the status quo. The academics get good pensions and don’t do much, and in return they don’t challenge the ruling classes. Part of the class system.
There are some exceptions to this rule, some good places doing good research, but they are a tiny minority.
> Being in academia is not the only way to do research,
No, but (and I'm not in this space, so totally ignorant), is it not the case that if you're not associated with a Uni in some form that _PUBLISHING_ your research is all but impossible?
You can definitely publish outside academia. I assume you mean in scholarly journals specifically, and are questioning whether or not you need the backing or credentials of an educational institution to get past the gatekeepers—you can. It's just that, outside academia, where publishing is kind of a job requirement, there's not as much incentive to do so, and you may not always be allowed to do so by your employer.
Indeed. In other news, the overall pass rates for my (translated into US terms for the first three) middle school, high school, university and post-graduate degree were all approximately 50%. So this doesn't seem particularly bad.
Not surprising. I quit after about a year. I could have stayed on but I realized that it just wasn't right for me. By then I had figured out that most research is done by post docs and phd students and it doesn't pay very well. Not that I cared about the money but I started thinking about what is next and did not like the perspective.
Professors are basically there to manage the process and haggle for funding. They tend to not be very hands-on with research for the simple reason that that's not their main job. They mostly delegate that to people in their team.
And you can only become a professor by doing post docs, landing some tenured position and then maybe they'll make you a professor somewhere. It's a long, uncertain process and the failure modes are basically ending up with a teaching position or being otherwise stuck in some faculty mostly not doing research. Nothing wrong with that. But not what I was after. And a lot of teachers in university are basically people that dropped out of the process somehow.
Anyway, the whole management thing had no appeal to me: I did not want to be a manager managing other people doing all the fun stuff (research) while basically dealing with a lot of bureaucratic shit. Not my idea of fun, at least.
So, I left. It was the only logical thing to do. I worked for Nokia Research for a while after that. But the career paths there weren't a whole lot different there. And the whole thing started imploding a bit after the iphone launch.
These days I do startups and a bit of consulting. Mostly as a CTO, and I'm very hands on which is just how I like it. Inevitably, there's a bit of management involved as well. But I like what I do.
sometimes I read posts like this and am awed. it feels like something out of a book to me
never had a chance to go to college, no family, no friends, no social skills, mostly dumb except for basic computer skills
my life except for like 1-2 years has been fighting to survive in horribly abusive situations currently unable to work with my own SSN being messed with by a bunch of human traffickers
but I love computers my dream in life is to learn about them and built an integrated app kind of like the M1 but for software and I probably will die or be killed way before that happens but its cool to see there are people way smarter that care about building as much out there and computers will get better
Almost by definition, if you're doing a Postdoc in a STEM field, you're probably qualified for a relatively well-paying job in industry [1].
And it's not like universities don't know this, people have been complaining about it for forever. They know if they were to just hire a person with a relevant PhD to do work, they'd ask for a good wage, so instead they dangle this "maybe you'll qualify for a tenured professor job eventually if you do underpaid labor for us for N years..."
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My relationship with academia is...complicated. I dropped out of college in 2012, worked as an engineer for awhile, did a brief stint as a researchey-person at NYU, got laid-off from there, worked in industry for another several years, tried school again in 2018 and dropped out again in 2019, finally finished my degree in 2021, and started a PhD in 2022, and did an adjunct lecturer thing from second-half of 2022 to first-half 2023.
Since I was working full time (and couldn't pay my mortgage on academic wages), I was doing a PhD at University of York part-time remotely. It was fun, but I wasn't just paid poorly, I had to pay them! About $15,000-$16,000/year American [2]! Even though I was doing work for the school, writing code for them that's not categorically different than the code I got paid yuppie engineer salary for, I was losing money in this prospect (and not just the normal opportunity cost kind).
I did it for two years, but I dropped it in November of last year because it was an expensive thing that I wasn't convinced was actually going to pay off for me. The PhD was already pretty self-guided, I could still research the topics I was interested in for free, academia's pace is glacial-at-best, and I didn't burn any bridges so I could go back later if I really wanted.
I might still publish a paper with my advisor in this next year (that's still pending), but of course since I'm not enrolled-in and paying-money-to the school, it won't count towards any credential. I think I'm ok with that.
[1] There might be exception to this but I can't think of many.
> Almost by definition, if you're doing a Postdoc in a STEM field, you're probably qualified for a relatively well-paying job in industry
Be careful: many people who are great postdocs are rather overqualified (and thus rather not suitable) for many jobs in industry.
Getting well-payed in industry requires in my opinion skills that are opposite to those that make you a great postdoc:
In industry you must not be a truth-seeker who can deeply absorb himself in problems. Being a truth-seeker makes you an insanely fit in the brutal office politics.
Also, while I do insist that in graduate school you actually learn a lot about leadership (in the sense of being able to push people to do great things), the abrasive and highly demanding leadership style in graduate school and academia is commonly very undesired in industry (but in my opinion not bad: a very particular kind of people (who will love graduate school) flourishes in such an environment).
It’s not exactly overqualification, more misqualification. If all you have to say for yourself is “I have completed 23rd grade, look at all these papers I wrote,” your skills and experience, no matter how deep, have diverged from the needs of almost any conceivable employer. I strongly encourage anybody thinking of doing a PhD to get a job in industry first, even if just for a year.
I've found STEM research to be different than that. Lots of opportunities to build and design whilst growing understandimg. Work with diverse teams and students of multiple levels. Communicate, work with, and network with industry individuals.
That depends entirely on the company. Where I am, what you say is mostly nonsense. Postdocs usually end up being the people leading (head down focused design or management) new projects that are directly or indirectly related to their research.
At least in computer science, postdocs have other benefits:
1) they can be well paid, like high five to very low six figures;
2) they can be an extra year or two to figure out your own research direction with some help but not much oversight;
3) they can be much easier to get than industry positions -- sometimes requiring little more than a solid publication record and advisor recommendation;
4) if you've been in a university environment for ~a decades and liked it, it might strike you as an easy path to keep doing that (this is probably the worst reason, though).
This is skewed by computer science postdocs at highly ranked schools, though. Yes, people taking these positions face opportunity costs, but the actual experience can be pretty nice.
Hmm this doesn't sound like what I experienced a professor doing... But this probably depends on the location and the discipline... Or well at least here in Germany you can more or less pick what you want to do: more being a people / project manager or more own research, or a mix of that... The uncertainty/low chances of getting a tenured position are not different though... And though it might suck, this is something you know, at the latest, after your PhD.
This shift from hands on research to project management is pretty similar in industry from what I have seen. All of our principal applied scientists basically do the same thing. They don't really spend any time actually getting their hands dirty. Maybe other companies are different?
My spouse is a molecular biologist pursuing her PhD in RNA therapy. She works ~2x longer and 10x harder than I do, with only a third of the yield. You can only sustain that for so long. She's in academia solely because she's good at it. However, there are a few things I've observed from the sidelines:
- PIs can make your life absolutely miserable for no reason, and it's difficult to switch labs if you're otherwise making good progress.
- The pay is poor, and professors often joke about how cheap PhD students and postdocs are.
- A significant amount of time is wasted on internal politics, such as deciding whose name appears on a paper and in what order.
- Pursuing irrelevant papers just to secure tenure is common.
- Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.
- PIs often treat their subordinates like high school students, expecting them to work weekends for "research" and forgo vacations.
- It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.
It's exhausting, and there are better ways to make a living. She plans to leave academia as soon as possible.
With the exception of poor pay, I experienced all of those things while working as a software dev for a major company. And with the exception of irrelevant papers, a friend of mine went through all of those at a startup she joined after her PhD.
I am doing a postdoc now - the pay sucks (still good compared to non-tech salaries) but I like what I do, I can choose my own tools, and I'm not longer contractually obligated to put my name in papers I don't like.
The instability of the postdoc life sucks if and when you want to have a family, but it can also be very rewarding.
> With the exception of poor pay, I experienced all of those things while working as a software dev for a major company.
Same here. I've worked at grindy startups that made me want to leave the profession altogether—everything from gaslighting by small shop CEOs to firing threats, and even firing a colleague just to show "who's in charge."
But switching companies is always an option, as is switching domains. I did that multiple times without much trouble.
> The instability of the postdoc life sucks if and when you want to have a family.
I thought stability was one of the reasons people choose academia. By stability, I mean a supervisor or program that guarantees a steady influx of cash for a certain period of time.
Yeah, but it comes down to what gives you fulfillment. For me, I need challenging work with a reward in pay that matches the effort and academia doesn't seem to fit that curve.
Is short term stability, really stability? I think it's pretty rare to get post-doc contracts longer than 3 years, renewal after that is unlikely especially for a long period of time. You can't really be a post-doc long term and it can easily have you bouncing across the country/countries following funding. It's more stable than freelancing perhaps or maybe a startup.
There's stability in academia as tenured professor but outside that, there really isn't.
Poor pay is an understatement. Back in 2010’s when I graduated, I was making USD$21K per year! If you calculate the hourly rate it is probably close to $3/hour given that PhDs work every day, and specially in the holidays that the advisor has more free time.
We were jokingly say that they don’t dare to call it a salary, that is why they call it a stipend.
That’s exactly how much I was making in 2010 when I graduated. It’s even much worse than that because the benefits sucked and the school took back about about 1/3rd in the form of outrageous parking fees and outrageous student fees that required us to pay for tickets to every sports game we couldn’t even attend. Add overpriced books to that too.
It took a PhD to figure out how not to accumulate any new debt for those 6 years. I would have been first in line for food stamps, if they were available to us. I literally couldn’t afford to stay in student housing.
are you in the US? that's surprisingly low as by the mid/late 2010's PhD students in stem fields were averaging 30k. for the many postdocs on nih-supported grants i seem to remember ~60k being standard at that time. eg https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/salary-cap-stipen... .
For readers still in a position to make a choice: interviewing and carefully selecting the lab / professor that you attach yourself to for the PhD is really a good idea!
Unfortunately, a lot of people enter the pipeline (in the US) not yet equipped to evaluate the possibilities.
If that’s you, get the masters degree that gives you enough knowledge to make an informed choice, then move if necessary.
I've worked in academia for almost all of my adult life, although in CS/LangSci not in molecular biology. Either I got lucky or it is some other reason, but I have not had the same experience.
> She works ~2x longer and 10x harder than I do
Now, I don't know how long you work but most academics I've met do it because they love it. Mind you, it's not like there is no pressure to stay on top of your game, and endless administration tasks do eat up a lot of your time that you would like to spend otherwise. But I know a lot of people who work at the weekends not to make up for lost time, but because their work is their passion.
> - PIs can make your life absolutely miserable for no reason, and it's difficult to switch labs if you're otherwise making good progress.
That is true, although you can also have awful superiors in a regular job. And it's not easy to just switch jobs for a lot of people when that happens. Also, I've personally never had any issues whatsoever with my PIs, so the opposite can also be true: PIs can be very supportive and interested.
> - The pay is poor, and professors often joke about how cheap PhD students and postdocs are.
Not true in my experience, the pay in academia has always been more than acceptable. But again, I was in CS/LangSci, and I know that for instance in the humanities, pay is lower for similar jobs.
> - A significant amount of time is wasted on internal politics, such as deciding whose name appears on a paper and in what order.
In all my many years, there was never any case where the author issue has ever come up. Also, perhaps I was lucky (again), but I've almost only experienced collegiality across groups in the places I worked. I wouldn't say that "internal politics" is a bigger issue in academia than in industry.
> - Pursuing irrelevant papers just to secure tenure is common.
The pressure to publish is real, but irrelevant papers do not really help you a lot. Your time is better spent doing work that can make an impact. That said, not all ideas that you pursue lead to amazing output, and you cannot afford to let half a year of work go to complete waste. So, yeah, if worst comes to worst, you might opt for a lower-tier conference and squeeze at least some insight out of your failed work, but it is not common to specifically try to create irrelevant papers.
Also, over the years, the acceptance rate for main conferences has become increasingly hard to get over, as competetion is ever increasing. So, you do want your work to be relevant, or else it's not much you'll get out of it.
> - Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.
I've read about this on the internet to the point where I believe it's real. However, I cannot personally attest this, as my work places have always been different.
> - PIs often treat their subordinates like high school students, expecting them to work weekends for "research" and forgo vacations.
Not true in my experience, I and my colleagues, including PI, have always tried treating students and other group members respectfully. There is, of course, a certain expectation regarding your work ethics, but for the most part, I've never heard of anyone demanding from subordinates to forego vacations.
The only thing I can think of is when the deadline for an important conference comes up and everyone's really trying to get some final experiments done in time. Then it could happen that you're asking someone if they could do it, but I've also been in situation where the answer was "no" and that was, of course, accepted.
> - It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.
Probably true.
> It's exhausting, and there are better ways to make a living.
"Better" is completely subjective. I loved working in academia but that doesn't mean that there were plenty of situations where I didn't like something and loudly complained.
The one thing that's missing on your list and which for me was the deal breaker in the end was that, depending on where you are, the prospect of getting tenure is very vague and insecure. When I was young and independent, I didn't care if I only had a two-year contract. But as you mature and eventually start a family and/or buy a house, your responsibilities and priorities shift.
So, in the end, I am one of the 40% or whatever that left academia, but it was not the work itself that I minded, it was the lack of a secure future. I mean, as secure as any future could ever be...
>> - Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.
> I've read about this on the internet to the point where I believe it's real.
My experience as a PhD student in France circa 2016: a professor comes into our office one morning, tells me "your work is completely stupid, irrelevant and useless anyways, you should just stop" and then leaves
Lmao when I was in a PhD program, my French advisor told me something pretty similar. I dropped out, but maybe that is a French thing instead of an academic thing.
A PhD is one thing, but doing it in Europe is a double whammy. People there, in general, love to use culture as an excuse to be rude for no reason. Germans and the French seem to take the crown in that regard.
> Not true in my experience, the pay in academia has always been more than acceptable. But again, I was in CS/LangSci, and I know that for instance in the humanities, pay is lower for similar jobs.
This could also depend on location, but from what I’ve seen, postdoc CS pay in most places is less than what you can earn as an entry-level frontend engineer at a medium-sized scale-up.
This may be true - and I wasn't trying to claim that you can make as much money in academia than in the industry, I'm arguing that you often get paid a quite decent salary that allows you to live very comfortably.
Could you make more somewhere else. Quite certainly! But ask any Humanities grad what they're making in their first job outside academia.
Hi - please don't assume that retirements become job postings. Tenure lines have to be granted in many cases; if a dean is told by the provost to trim, then tenure lines are not granted after a retirement. My department has not matched its attrition rate for some time now.
I thought the 40% number seemed lower than my experiences suggest. But this is a solid point that suggests that even 84% is too low. I guess it could be as high as 90%.
Many of them never wanted to be in academia in the first place, or at least shouldn't have wanted it. If you're in a class full of people who want to teach this same class, you might be questioning why you're there.
Perhaps too simplistic since tenure is not the only way to “make it” in academia. Many people have academic careers without making tenure. You’ve also excluded people who publish impactful work, spend time teaching, and leave before seeking tenure. It might be fair to say 84% of graduating PhDs don’t make tenure, it’s just jumping to conclusions to say they don’t make it in academia.
Also don’t forget there’s a large time lag between graduating PhDs and when they get tenure, so today’s 270k graduates might be shooting for the next decade’s 15k or 20k tenure spots. Or… who knows they might be shooting for the future 5k spots if the rumors about colleges trying to reduce their use of tenure are true.
“Non-tenure-track faculty account for about half of all faculty appointments in American higher education.” … “About 90 percent of all full-time lecturers and nearly 50 percent of all full-time instructors are nontenure track.” https://www.aaup.org/report/status-non-tenure-track-faculty
Sounds like a lot more than I'd expect, especially considering ~50% of those 57000 doctorates probably don't even want to continue in academia. It's starting to look like the odds of landing a tenured position are quite good.
Yes, I expected the 40% to be much higher too. I guess once you go from PhD to postdoc it changes a bit, but again just looking at the numbers the pipeline gets a lot narrower at each transition.
I would have expected a higher percentage. Few openings and a high bar for whatever there is. It was tough to get an assistant professor job 30 years ago and I can't imagine what it must be like now.
This. A 60% stay rate evokes scenarios of academic inbreeding and a total disconnect between the real world and the small bubble where research groups operate.
> A 60% stay rate evokes scenarios of academic inbreeding and a total disconnect between the real world and the small bubble where research groups operate
Academia's current structure rewards behaviors that don't necessarily create value. The "publish or perish" mentality encourages quantity over quality, leading to the replication crisis where many published findings can't be reproduced. The system tends to reward those who conform to existing academic paradigms while marginalizing innovative outsider perspectives that might bring valuable real-world insights.
When academics move directly from being students to faculty without external experience, it creates an echo chamber. This isolation from practical applications and market forces risks turning academic pursuit into a self-referential game - where success is measured by metrics like publication count and citation numbers rather than actual contribution to human knowledge or societal progress.
This separation from real-world feedback mechanisms means we may be investing significant human capital into activities that optimize for academic metrics rather than meaningful outcomes. The challenge isn't just about individual careers, but about ensuring our research institutions remain connected to the practical problems they're meant to help solve.
"Publish or perish" is fundamentally a wrong diagnosis. Publishing is generally the good part of the academia. If you are interested in your work, you obviously want to tell about it to other people in the field. Some specific publication venues are tedious and bureaucratic, but the pressure to publish is generally internal, not external.
Moving directly from being students to faculty is rare. It mostly happens in fields where the demand for PhDs is unusually high. Because universities can't compete with salaries, they have to offer positions people may not be ready for if they want to attract top candidates.
The norm is doing PhD, postdoc, and the first faculty position in different institutes – precisely to avoid the echo chamber effect. And unless you are from a particularly large country, you are expected to do at least one of them outside your home country.
Success measures are what they are for two reasons: competition and long-term focus. Academic research is fundamentally interesting, and there are far more competent people trying to do it than funding. And because people can't afford to wait for decades to measure the real-world impact, the academia must base career progression on something that can be determined quickly enough. If you are doing the kind of research where practical applications can be expected in a few years, the industry is a better place for you. They have a lot more resources for research than the academia.
I'm currently doing research on a topic I started working on ~15 years ago. In that time, the topic has progressed from something interesting and potentially valuable to a mainstream idea with plenty of research funding. If the work is successful, we may start seeing measurable real-world impact in 5-10 years.
ML papers by Western universities barely touch on the problems that practitioners face.
The only papers I see that are routinely useful have half the authors having a .in or .cn email at the end with the rest having Indian and Chinese names in US institutions.
The only western papers which aren't extended advertisements for their company are from people who are making something for themselves.
For example the best paper on image classification I've ever seen was posted on a private discord and was about better labeling the parts of a vagina as part of a stable diffusion training pipeline.
I used the methods without change and got better than state of the art for document segmentation.
Certainly, some countries have a more engineering-focused academic style. Western academia has always been more about advancing knowledge, which IMO is academia's mission.
> Western academia has always been more about advancing knowledge, which IMO is academia's mission.
You can advance knowledge in ways that are aligned with the nation's strategic needs. That would imply the career path of researchers would be oriented towards industry instead of pie in the sky projects.
I fail to see why universities should align on their country's strategic interests. Universities are not political nor military entities. Additionally, pie in the sky projects is what's needed to advance science, which is very distinct from advancing technology (industry).
> I fail to see why universities should align on their country's strategic interests.
In the UK, the industrial and military research labs have been closed, there is nothing being done except in universities. The university projects are really specific and don't join up in any way. There is no equivalent of DARPA guiding
research proposals to be useful but Governments still think that the universites will define the next generation of industrial products.
Source: my own area of trying to use computers for Materials Science.
Yeah. Practical working implementations of the latest in ML image classification technologies are a rapidly changing incremental improvement problem that industry is already all over, so not really surprising that this isn't a major focus for US university research: if PhDs or even potential PhDs want to do that they can get a much higher rate of pay at a private company.
All the foundational work that has lead up to the current practices in ML was done at universities. It's not like Google invented the transformer from scratch completely over night.
I couldn't read the whole article due to the paywall. I wonder (now that my knee has stopped jerking) whether they consider non-tenure-ladder professorial positions at universities as 'academia'. e.g. adjuncts, lecturers, staff or contract researchers, lab administrators, ...
Keep in mind that this is a postdoc. The thing you do after you complete a PhD, and for most of history, something you only did after you started working as a professor.
I'm not sure about the situation elsewhere, but in Lithuania, it feels like professors produce articles or tackle topics solely to check a box. Most of the content generated by universities here seems completely irrelevant and ends up being discarded after completion. The courses are very bland and uninformative too.
I sometimes just wonder, a lot of professors are bad at teaching because they don't have to be good at it. Is it the same for universities? It feels like reputation for universities are quite detached from the courses they have or teaching quality. Rankings focus a lot on quantitative measures, but teaching quality is hard to measure quantitatively. The output of universities, i.e. the quality of their students, depend on both the teaching quality and "IQ" of their students before admission, which is mostly a feedback loop because universities with good reputation get the best students... Optimizing for teaching quality also means that professors spend more time on teaching and less on research, which may reduce their research output and reduce the ranking, which has a more immediate effect on the reputation than teaching quality.
Teaching is not really relevant in the hiring process of professors.
I saw several committees for prof position and teaching is treated like a checkmark. You should done it and provide a small sample lecture (which you prepare much more than your average lecture) and don't have to suck at it. After this checkbox, the differentiating factors are about citations and how much grant money you can/could/do have... (Western Europe, maybe somewhere else it's different).
I would say teaching is not that relevant specifically for most tenure-track positions at big research universities. It is absolutely something you need to demonstrate some actual experience and proficiency with if you get a position at a small liberal arts college or a community college, where tuition is basically how they keep the lights on.
I’d also say that even at an R1, teaching volume at an acceptable quality is sometimes rewarded if your college within the university is very undergrad-heavy, because it can be part of how the university apportions funds to departments. So, it wouldn’t matter at a med school, but potentially a little in arts and sciences, though still in distant second to research.
There are also a small but increasing number of tenure track teaching-focused positions at big research universities. These folks typically help design and teach the biggest intro lectures and/or other very time- and labor-intensive courses. There are fewer of these positions than I’d like to see in an ideal world, but not zero.
Can confirm this. Teaching is a pass / fail grade for new professors to get tenure in most places. Your ability to get grant funding and publish highly cited papers are astronomically more important to the university than your teaching abilities.
I was told by a seminar speaker one time about a pre-tenure professor who was awarded his University's highest teaching award one day. The very next day he was denied tenure because he didn't publish enough.
I recommend reading the book "Tenure Hacks" [1] to anyone interested in pursuing a career as a tenured professor. I don't agree with all of the points in the book, but it is an important and eye-opening alternative perspective to the typical narrative surrounding academic positions.
I feel terrible for the idea of jugding academics based on the amount of grant money they can get... It feels like encouraging a lot of smart people to find ways to waste money, even when they know that they don't really need that much for their project.
It does distract from the process of actually doing research, but I will point out that funding agencies take past productivity into account, so you can’t do literally nothing with the money and expect a grant to get renewed.
I think it doesn't really enter the equation. The single worst lecturer I've had at university is now a professor. I don't enough about tenure tracks and we also call them differently (not adjunct, associate, etc) - but he's still there, 20y later, teaching (I think he just had gotten his PhD back then). I can only hope he has improved from "open script, read one page at a time, close script, dismiss".
> spend more time on teaching and less on research, which may reduce their research output
It's ironic that universities are primarily judged by their research output rather than their teaching, even though their original purpose was to share and preserve knowledge.
- Many people who did a PhD and didn't want to do research don't do a postdoc
- I would say, "40% have left so far'. Following the same cohort for a few years might yield even higher numbers (because as long you haven't made your mind about quitting research, you are still a postdoc and not accounted for leaving, even it's your 10th year...).
Academia is one of those realms where I just wish things would collapse. Working conditions are terrible for the educational level they expect, yet there are always more and more graduate students and post-docs to exploit, so the wheels keep turning.
A naive perspective is a glut of experts is a good thing because a society with more experts could produce more innovations and development but because of the pecularities of academia, you instead get extreme competition and little to no innovation really. You do get a lot of following and hyping trends for grant money. I'm not sure what the solution is.
I think maybe it suffers from the same problem of the video game industry, that being that there's a never ending supply of people trying to get into the industry that has only the slightest relationship to the demand for such roles.
In the videogame industry, this mostly led to a bunch of low paying, long hour, lousy jobs with high turnover. Why pay more for a low level employee if you can get a new hire for cheaper? In academia, money is a little less hierarchical, so it led to a madcap fight for grants with all of the related downsides.
As someone who has worked in academia for more than 20 years, in four countries, (and now is a professor in a top 3 world institution) I can tell you that it very much depends on where you work. Working conditions depend on the larger and smaller culture. It is a mistake to assume that everyone is living the same experience.
Kindly, given your credentials, it does sound like your situation is a bit biased. That said, of course let me know where you are so I too can enjoy your luck.
I am in London at the moment but I worked in Italy, Austria, USA before. I would never, for any kind of money, go back to academia to the USA for the reasons you listed.
Really interesting to think about what an ideal academia would look like. I think a lot of us have an idea of 'pure science' which has never really existed (by which I mean, since the industrial revolution science and academia has been tied to industry).
In terms of conditions, I think this issue is solved elsewhere by unions (there are always people wanting to be hollywood script writers, but the writers guild of America does a good job of maintaining decent conditions despite this). I don't know how that could even come close to applying in something like academia though.
Yet, the ideas that have thrown incredible amounts of money against them on the open market all have been developed in academia. The current AI craze, the internet, the physics required for chip production, encryption, etc.
Academia works on nearly everything, so it's no surprise that successes come out of it. Especially if you are willing to squint your eyes a little and describe something which has a few elements of the final useful innovation (but noticeably not the secret sauce) a precursor then anything can be traced back.
That does not mean academia, nonetheless academia in its current form, is the optimal system for producing innovations. How much effort is being wasted on things that will never pan out? How many great potential innovations are not being researched right now because the system does not prioritize them? How many needed to start in academia vs how many just happened to?
Paying people to leave academia does not seem like a major endorsement of the academic system. No one is arguing that intelligent people who have spent years working in a field aren't valuable, just that they might not be reaching their full potential under the current conditions.
Further, I would recommend very strongly against using big companies as the gold standard of innovation, especially not efficient innovation.
Then I wonder who you think does the most efficient innovations. Apparently it's not universities like MIT. It's not big companies with research institutes like Bell Labs. The military? Please don't say VC funded startups.
more experts would be a good thing, if there was money for them. no point in producing phds if they don't get the resources to do research (including a respectable salary)... as it stands now academia is almost a scam (phd+ level)
It depends on incentives. From what I can see in CS, a lot of young researchers are focused on short-term projects, disconnected from actual problems, and spend lots of effort to package the result to increase the chance of getting a paper in top conferences/journals, because they need this for their career. They will be forced to leave academia if they don't have enough results in time, from what I know. And even for established researchers, they have to do something similar, so their students can have enough results. And they need to try really hard to get funding, because institutions want researchers that can get lots of funding, so institutions can get money from that.
This is probably not the complete story, and probably a bit too pessimistic, but I think this is true...
In the end my take is that there is too much supply for research for the funding that exist. So lot of it focuses on wrong metrics and as thus is somewhat wasted. Or energy is spend on wrong things like chasing that funding.
I am not sure if we can afford more funding, so maybe amount of research should be cut in some way...
Up to certain point. Beyond that there is lot of waste.
Say you have 20 competing products that want to get noticed or know to sell. Obvious solution for them is to pour more and more resources in advertising. Eventually this advertising takes away from actual product as more time and money is spend on it instead on the product.
Advertising in academia is publications but also applications for funding.
No, only if you have a narrow definition of innovation. Producing something actually new and actionable isn't always aligned with doing something that gets citations.
The peacock is a product of competition. Of course the competition was for passing on genes, not survival, so the peacock developed a massive tail which is a huge waste of resources and attracts predators. But surviving with such a handicap is super sexy to other peacocks.
Competition is great at meeting the criteria of the competition. If the competition values anything other than innovation, like say grant money awarded or social standing, it is suboptimal for promoting innovation.
As a former postdoc in the physical sciences (who is now out of academia mostly for family reasons), I don't like the constant argument I hear about whether competition is good or bad in research and especially academic research. I think it is the wrong question. Competition is inherently good in that whatever researchers are competing over will be optimized in the long run.
We wish that we were optimizing for new/great ideas, but we aren't. In our current academic system, we are optimizing for number of papers and number of quick citations on papers (where quick = within 2-5 years). The reason these incentives are present is because they are largely deterministic in the outcomes of academic hiring, tenure decisions, and funding proposals. It seems to me that everyone discusses academic hiring and tenure ad infinitum, but less so for the details of the academic research funding system.
For most academic research, when a professor submits a proposal for funding, it is tied very closely to work on one particular idea or group of ideas. The funding cannot be used for research outside of the proposal area. Furthermore one must achieve results within the confines and time period (a few years) of that grant if one hopes to receive more funding in the future. So when a new idea comes along during the process of working on a grant, you either a) do your best to spin the new idea as related to the current grant in some unnatural way and proceed or b) wait until you can get funding for the new idea explicitly. This is the system within which the professors must work. They are laser-focused on achieving results within the constraints of their existing grant proposals. And some of these are great research ideas. But after a while, most people tend to stick with the same old ideas and pursue smaller and smaller ideas within the same area. This is why old professors are still pursuing the same overdone research they did when they were younger. You need new, young people to give an influx of new/bold/crazy ideas to pursue.
Now, the graduate student or postdoc must also work within this system, except that they have no say over the research directions. They must work on the professor's research ideas, not their own. There's fundamentally nothing wrong with that because it is the classic master/apprentice relationship which is generally a good thing. (After all, you can't have well-formed ideas until you know what you're doing, and that takes time. Without this type of system, you get outlandish crackpot ideas that are worse than wrong - they are useless.) But over the years of training, the grad student/post doc probably has a few good ideas. But what do they do with those ideas? Generally...statistically...the answer is nothing. These good ideas die with the grad student/post doc's unrealized academic career, since by far most have to leave academia before they can work on their own ideas (and there's simply no place outside of academia to work on your own ideas).
You would hope that there would be an outlet for good new ideas from grad students and post docs, but there isn't. People learn from mistakes quickly that graduate school and postdoc is no time to be putting your ideas out there. You won't get to work on them yourself and they will be taken from you, period. Let's say you, as a grad student, propose something new and great to your professor, and ask if you can work on it. Chances are that the prof will say no because it isn't funded, or because you're already busy with their currently funded ideas that they must execute on quickly in order to get more funding, or the worst one (which I have seen many many times) is when the professor says "well that's more of this other postdoc's specialty - I'll let them work on it." Sometimes you could propose something and the prof says no, but then 5 years later they are now funded for it. And none if this is caused by malicious intentions: the professor probably forgot that idea even came from you - after all, how many conversations do you remember precisely from 5-10 years ago? - its just an idea that came from the ether somewhere. But other students and postdocs see these occurrences, even if not caused by maliciousness, and just choose to never share their best ideas because they know they won't get any attribution or recognition for them.
As a result, the system is not optimized for new and good ideas, which is the lifeblood of research. If anyone came along on this journey with me that I originally intended to be only a few sentences, I'm sorry I have no solutions. If anything, I feel lucky because 15 years later, at least someone else did one of my big ideas and it made an impact, so at least I get to know that "back in my day," I had some good impactful ideas in my research field.
Thanks for sharing this. I basically agree, and have a lot to say about the neither-black-nor-white state of academia but have never managed to communicate my thoughts as well as you did here.
It all depends on the metric you are optimizing for. In academia, the metric would be grant money, directly influenced by number of published articles and citations.
From that perspective, the system works. We are making more articles, in more journals, there is also plenty of money thrown around. Unfortunately, there is no incentive for correctness, novelty or usefulness in this system.
Falsification of results, especially in the soft sciences, is relatively easy. Verification of results, doesn't give you any credit. So you can have people producing articles with blatantly misleading or false results for decades, all without any repercussion.
And it's not much better in the hard sciences either. Because verification of results there, is even more difficult and costly. And again, we are not incentivizing verification.
It has to be a combination of competition and opportunity. If you take away the opportunity then it's just a middle school field day all day, nobody making it to play college ball let alone the pros.
I would guess that if there are economies of scale, concentrating production lowers the average unit cost and thus lead to more profits and thus more capacity for investment into R&D.
If, say, all steel production was done by 1-employee companies competing against each other, I don't think any one would be able to afford any serious investement.
Competition leads to innovation when the definition of success and its metrics are set correctly. A big chunk of "success" in academia is the number of publications, and funding often depends on that exact metric. As a result, competition in academia is very good for innovation in the field of producing papers and winning grants. I'm not saying the respective scientific research is wrong or doesn't exist, I'm just saying the system is skewed towards this one metric in an unhealthy way.
It's similar to competition in tech products not leading to innovation. The important metric there is financial growth and stock value, and there are ways to increase those metrics without really focusing on true innovation in the core domain.
The whole empire of academia is broken, and although I have went through the whole things, and now in an assistant professor type position, it 1) took too long, 2) paid too little as a post-doc, and still pays too little for my level of expertise, 3) the grant process is a burden that doesn't enhance productivity; it doesn't leverage my expertise; it bogs me down and keeps me from using the scientific skills I've built in order to play grantsmanship to beg for money. Multiple tedious submissions and revisions. 4) professors increasingly just become managers, the least valuable activity of their training set.
There are a lot of issues in academia, but that number (40%) is not one of them. Not everyone is suited for an academic job, and doing the PhD is not enough to understand what it is to do independent research/find your niche what you are good at/enjoy.
I think in many universities now there are career development programs that help people transition to industry. Also now it is more openly discussed that many people will not get an permanent position, so postdocs are more prepared and that is healthy.
Hard work, poor pay, known perverse incentives, and awareness of the probably replication crisis in your field == burnout and tears.
Half my friends are postdocs or associate professors (including my wife) at top universities and none of them are happy with how it’s going. Most apply for jobs every now and then to imagine escaping. And they’re the ones doing well in the system!
Had a friend once who wanted to do research in an urgently necessary direction. Didn't get the money or academic support.
Couple years later she told me that happens a lot but one is so focused on their work and the illusion that "once I'm there ..." so strong, that one ignores the hard evidence and much debated proof, despite, well, one's own training.
As they should. More often then not, going into academia means horrible working conditions and horrible pay... and there's job satisfaction when your instead of doing things you like or ones enrich society, you spend most of your time in a never ending fight for grant money.
Leaving is completely logical for anyone that wants to actually do impactful research, or wants to make a living wage, and wants sane hours and sane management.
Sample of one: No regrets. It was a tough regimen and I got filtered out of academia. But, I grew immensely throughout the path and got to be around some exceptional minds. I shoulda/coulda have worked harder and been more daring.
I think that's generally true but I've noticed that there are a couple of people in every cohort who have the right stuff. They're good and everyone knows it, including themselves.
Glad this post was revived after being dead for some reason.
I'm shocked it's that low. I suppose, it's limited by the number and motivations of people who apply for postdocs, but the amount of soul crushing disappointment and borderline abuse of postdocs is legendary.
I’m surprised the number is as low as 40%. You can’t help but question your existence when you, always the top of your class growing up and graduated college with distinctions, are making $50k a year (that was the postdoc salary at my very prestigious department at Princeton less than a decade ago) at a ripe old age of almost 30 and eyeing yet another term of postdoc.
It might be a bit off-topic, but my friend, after receiving her PhD from the University of Leeds in England, decided to completely abandon the academic path and became an artist. And when asked why that happened, she can't give a clear answer...
Academia is done growing. For every full professor, there will be ONE spot for a full professor when he retires. That's a lot of grad students and postdocs who need to find something else to do with their education.
There is no longer any incentive to stay in academia. Professorships are rare and not as lucrative as they once were. Staying in academia means living like a 19 yearold student well into your 40's.
my postdoc advisor (a tenured professor at berkeley) made us clean the air vents in the office by standing on a tall ladder with a vacuum as well as clean the floors.
I didn't leave academia, but I did leave that lab. That's some sort of power-play I have no time for.
Please name and shame. This is atrocious. Considering the fact that most graduate students/postdocs are immigrants on specific visas, this is tantamount to fraud.
how many transfer into a tenure track position? There must be a large contribution from people becoming 'research scientists' who are not tenure track professors but remaining in academia, at a subservient position, permanently.
Postdocs are foremost a failure of the academic job market (supply of eager researchers much larger than available academic positions) that over time has become some sort of ingrained filtering mechanism.
Fellowships are generally the good ones. You get to explore research directions under the guidance of a more experienced researcher. Because you have independent funding, your mentor is not your boss, and you are relatively free to choose what to work on and how.
On the other end of the spectrum, some postdocs are just people a PI has hired to work on a well-defined project. Either because the institute does not have more appropriate job titles or because postdocs are cheaper than professional researchers. These are fundamentally ordinary jobs, and like any job, they can be good or bad.
> We want to train highly skilled people and then unleash them in the private sector to create new companies or help push existing companies forward.
Many of these people will become very frustrated in the private sector because they will very commonly talk to a brick wall with their ideas in the private sector. The private sector is commonly not the kind of environment where highly intelligent, novel, bright ideas are rewarded.
Of course. The number of professors in academia remains more or less constant. So each university professor should have, over the course of all their career, a single student that will end up in academia. All the other students have to quit at some point.
I am in the academic circus since 20 years, in my opinion everything more than a masters degree is an expression of ones interests and a way of life:
Its great and allows you to do things that only a few people on the planet are allowed to do and once you drop out you just get a normal job.
It takes a few years to bridge the income gap between you and the people that went towards an industry career immediately, but you got to climb around in the large hadron collector when it was not running and have lots of stories about strange British professors.
The question is: How many decide against doing a post doc, while considering it for some time during the PhD time. When you commit becoming a postdoc, you know how the game is played, you have a good network, you have a good topic to work on.
Not necessarily. A three or four year PhD in Europe is a short time to acquire a solid network (a lot of time is spent in training, unless the student is very proactive) and not all PhDs broaden their horizon to have a well differentiated topic to pursue after the degree. I would argue that true independence is actually acquired in the early postdoc years, but it requires a lot of work and a lot of luck.
TBH, 40% attrition rate is less I expected. Since each academic can train more than one PhD and postdoc every few years, which is the case, some attrition is required because the system cannot grow exponentially. The desired outcome in this context is that this talent incorporates to industry or other sectors where this expertise or problem solving skills are not wasted.
> When you commit becoming a postdoc, you know how the game is played, you have a good network
I wouldn't agree to those. I was perhaps overly supported during my PhD, not preparing me for the reality of being abandoned/expected to be totally independent in the postdoc
More anecdotal evidence: while writing my Master's thesis it became clear that my advisor (the dept. head) was quite interested in the subject matter, and repeatedly asked me to shelve it, do a quick-and-dirty thesis to graduate and return to working on my original draft during a PhD. I was very open to the idea, since I was in love with research ever since childhood.
We sat down and talked about what this meant in particular, the workload, compensation, options after graduating from the PhD program.
It broke my heart, but I had to turn him down. It felt like everybody who wanted to have a shot at having a career in academia needed to put an insane (read: literally destructive) amount of effort into it, all while accepting that it was extremely easy to get stuck for good. There is extreme pressure on postdocs to produce results, with institutions and labs becoming very cautious about working with people in their 2nd or 3rd postdocs if they hadn't published in high-impact journals until then. Also, good luck finding any sort of tenured positions, with more and more universities switching to freelance "collaborators".
I was not going to spend 80 hours a week investing in something where all odds are stacked against me. I was not going to put years of my life into a thing that can go 'poof' just because your stars didn't align, or because the faculty decided instead of hiring you on a professorship track, they would rather extort some more money and "let the contracts expire" when it was no longer convenient to have you there.
Obviously. And much more leave on the previous stages.
Because academic science doesn't have scientific proof of existance.
People shouldn't stay there, because there are no anthro-/psycho-/socio-/etc- reasoning that this way of organising people to seek new knowledge actually works, and it's efficient in any way.
Did you ever get asked why you came back to the academic world in the interviews? I'm curious how PhDs who've been in the industry are viewed from academia.
Oh yes. But given that I am in a software engineering department, they really value industry experience. I actually published way more in industry than I did in academia!
Does anyone have a link to the actual study? The linked DOI is a 404, and I'm confused by the phrasing of "more than 40%". Does the study not have a more exact number (with error)?
I think it is in a way, since postdocs are often bad preparation for industry. Postdocs usually learn skills that are useful in academia, not the skills that are useful in industry. And the knowledge they focus on is often hyperspecialised, and not necessarily valuable in industry (though that does vary by field).
Essentially, postdocs can be a good way to waste the most valuable years of highly intelligent people...
Comments like these make me want to vomit with how out of touch industry people are. No, fiddling with AWS or writing some simple Go code is not beyond the capabilities of a postdoc... You really are not doing anything that complicated. Switch the roles and you would be completely useless.
Hmm, I'm not a coder. In my field you do need some specialised knowledge you generally get through experience. And then you have the soft skills, like being able to work in a team, being able to run projects, understanding business needs vs doing what's technically interesting, etc. Postdocs do have some of those skills, but there is not much you get through a postdoc specifically vs doing a PhD or spending 7-10 years in an industry role. And, to be honest, your attitude is part of the problem - I sure wouldn't hire someone who will look down on the job or think they are too smart to do it, and neither should someone with 10 years experience be happy getting a job writing simple AWS code.
The point I'm trying to make is more about the opportunity cost, not the skills you get out at the end.
Sorry Sarcasm aside: considering the never ending list of unsolved problems, it should.
Sadly, more money seems to get spend on games, ads and stupid juice presses than anything really helpful.
my point is "it"s definition is harmful and exclusionary. "it" could be broader, more decentralized and we should consider acadamia as well beyond funded institions.
https://archive.ph/E5aqe
This is only surprising if you expect that every postdoc should stay in academia, or would want to. Being in academia is not the only way to do research, and is not a prerequisite to using your degree. The private sector is a thing, and postdocs leaving academia can do perfectly good work in their field while actually making a grown up salary.
These are good arguments about phd's not going into academia. But a postdoc at a university is an underpaid training position for the most part. Not a worthwhile sacrifice if you want to work in the private sector in my field. Maybe it's more important for industry jobs in biology or something.
Personally I think it's a warped system that takes advantage of cheap labor from developing countries. And it feeds itself. The more temporary research staff professors can hire, the less permanent research staff universities need.
That's mostly reasonable. But for some people at least, the PhD doesn't give them all the skills they are looking for, so they might do another post-doc (2-3 years at slightly better than PhD lifestyle), before jumping ship.
It's entirely anecdotal, but in my experience in academia (which consisted of 4 years of post-master's PhD), I've seen this happen exactly 0 times.
In a lot of fields, postdocs are required if you want a shot at a tenure-track position.
For the most part, it’s just another artificial rung the system uses to justify exploiting people.
Most of the pyramid's growth is at the bottom.
Crazy to think that 50 years ago, postdocs were rare.
They should have stayed rare, but they’re a way for universities to get free money from the government as well as a temporary (but sadly permanent) fix for academia’s deep structural problems.
Why pay for more of those expensive, unruly, hard-to-fire professors when you can hire cheap adjuncts and postdocs to do teaching and research?
The administrative organization continues to expand, and it must be paid for somehow.
Bureaucracy has gone up, sure, but not nearly as much as the number of people seeking PhDs.
That also used to be much less common back in the day.
Assuming I'm reading them correctly, these seem to be Yale's numbers:
2003: 2294 Arts & Sciences PhD students and 3500 administrators + managers
2021: 2895 Arts & Sciences PhD students and >5000 administrators + managers
So administrative growth seems to have outpaced PhD student growth by some margin over that time period.
Regardless, the secret to high research productivity (per dollar) at universities is cheap labor from grad students and postdocs.
Sources:
https://oir.yale.edu/data-browser/student-data/enrollments/g...
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/11/10/reluctance-on-the-...
I was thinking of a longer time frame, though. Also, Yale might not be representative overall.
According to the census, from 2000-2018, the percentage of the population holding PhDs doubled: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/02/number-of-peo...
So Yale's PhD count grew a bit, but nowhere near as much as the rest of the country's.
----
But mostly, PhDs used to be way rarer in the back in the 50s (along with college degrees in general). If you look at Figure 1 in this NSF report (https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf25300/figure/1#), it shows the number of PhDs tripling in just 15 years from 1958 to 1973. After 1973 it slows down to merely doubling over the next 50 years.
Admin growth might be a factor, although I'd want to look at national data first. Your own article says "... Yale had the highest manager-to-student ratio of any Ivy League university, and the fifth highest in the nation among four-year private colleges" so maybe it's an outlier.
63 years ago, they were rare, but my father was able have his professor and department secure funding within a few months. ( yes, Engineering has a lot of money available from the defense department ).
50 years later, the Molecular Biology postdocs were not so lucky. Not even an honorarium. "Maybe in a few years..."
Just to raise the number from 0, I did exactly that. The post-doc was in a research institute, a department that focused on usability. It seemed worthwhile to learn how to really do user tests and usability evaluations in practice, in the best way possible academically (or so I thought) but with real enterprise projects. Contrasted a lot with the quite theoretical PhD.
We can always argue about whether it was worthwhile ofc. Moneywise, definitely not (though the pay wasn't all that bad compared to industry compensation in my countries). But I learned what I wanted to learn, and the issues the position had were speficic to the place, not the concept of the position, if that makes sense.
That’s what happened to me: PhD in UK -> postdoc 1 -> postdoc 2 -> faculty -> industry.
A postdoc can also act as temporary employment when one can't immediately find a position outside academia. They tend to be very low commitment as a result of the laughable compensation.
Nope. All it takes is the first tenured professor to say "Well, yes, this was all good work you did for the last year... but we are not going to put your name on the paper... wait... where are you going? Are you leaving?"
"The door will not hit me in the *ss on the way out."
I have seen this TWICE. B.M. and M...
generally you are somewhat right, but it's complicated by country. for example it would be less surprising that a UK-style 3 year PhD might want a couple more years training after.
You're also talking about someone who is probably in their early to mid 30's. Eventually people want to start having a life. And you're expecting them to make pennies? I'm not joking. Here's a list of CS Post Doc stipends[0]. Go to Berkeley or Stanford and make $66k-$80k? I've gotten more money as a PhD Intern! You're going to get more than double that in industry before we talk about RSUs.
I think this is something we need to take quite seriously here. There aren't really good reasons for people to choose this path, especially considering how disruptive it is to your life (have fun moving again in a few years :). Maybe we can hope that those who go are just really dedicated to research and following their passions. So dedicated that they are willing to put off normal human things like starting a family, maintaining relationships[1], or even just building one's net worth (or paying off student debt). Some people want to become a professor[2] so will do that.
But the big thing I see is that there's nothing to attract the best people. (We can extend this to even just professorships[3]). So who are becoming the postdocs and professors? Who are becoming the people that educate the next wave of people? If you are at the top, you likely aren't going the professor route, you're likely going to industry where you'll likely get 2x-3x the pay AND more freedom in your research. Even if you're pretty mid you can get 2x-3x the pay in industry with an honestly less stressful life (but you may not be doing research or likely have more restriction of what research you can pursue). This, seems pretty disastrous. At best, unstable. There's not a lot of professor spots but I think we need to have some incentive system such that people at the top are encouraged to carry on their research for the public as well as educate future researchers. As a business you want to be greedy and capture top talent, but that's also because you should be thinking much shorter term. At social levels, we have to think generations.
TLDR:
So are we confident we are getting "cream of the crop" (even if shared with industry) in academic positions? Are we sure that's even true at highly prestigious institutions?
I think the answer is "no", we should not be confident in that outcome.
[0] https://vspa.berkeley.edu/faculty-staff/compensation/postdoc...
[1] Good chance you met your partner while doing a PhD and yay now you both need to find post docs but they are competitive and so good luck finding one in the same place? Hope you like long distance relationships or are willing to let one partner make a bigger sacrifice.
[2] Which weird thing that we train someone to become an expert researcher and then as a professor we give them such high and diverse workloads that they will often have little time for research and instead will more be managers. The research skill degrades with time and only keeping up at a high level is not sufficient.
[3] In CS a post doc is also often a way to elevate your status. Like you got your PhD from a lower tier university and so doing a Post Doc at a much higher tier can make you employable at a more prestigious university. Because prestige still matters a lot, especially since it is tightly coupled with things like equipment access.
[side note]: I think with the competitiveness that it is a bit odd we still have these strong notions of prestige. Just to put things in perspective, if every graduating PhD at the number 1 school, they likely graduate enough people that you could fill all available faculty positions available. Given how prestige matters, it should be clear how high prestige graduates permeate into lower prestige positions. More clear when you start to consider things like how many top universities are in not the greatest living locations. https://drafty.cs.brown.edu/csopenrankings/placement-rank.ht... https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/
Training is how the low pay is justified. I certainly agree it's not a good deal, more of a supply and demand effect. Are you saying I'm wrong about the definition? It's pretty universal: https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf21327
I do agree it probably gets used more as an easy way to get experience, the usual thing organizations crave in their new hires. But it isn't the only way. Top graduates can get temporary research faculty positions or even go directly to tenure track. Or in STEM fields, a few years in industry is seen as positive. Industry and Government research labs also have their own "postdoc" positions which can be pretty much normal pay.
It’s not universal. Nsf is a narrow view of academia. There are other countries that pay postdocs properly (ie comfortable own place with kids) with benefits and pension.
I think there are 2 key things we need to note about your source
This is in the context of __hiring__. So they are looking at listings. I don't think just because you are saying that this job will provide training means the job is a training position. Or what we'd commonly associate with a training program, a junior, or anything like that. The wording here is important. Personally, if you asked if a postdoc was __intended__ for training, I would agree. But if you asked if I thought you should expect to be trained during a postdoc I'd be more hesitant. Certainly that depends. If I hired you as an L4 at Google, and said there would be training, what would that mean to you? Do you think it would be fair to say? What about at an L5 (senior)? L6? L7? L8? Certainly not at L9 or L10, right?There's lots of things that have an __intended__ outcome but don't have the outcome. Momentum is a bitch and when we're talking about institutions, well momentum is a really powerful force. So I wouldn't take that source as a cout de eta for concluding that a post doc is about training the post doc. Honestly, I feel like a postdoc is closer to taking a L5 and saying we're training you to become an L6 or eventually L7. And certainly that's not a "training position" in the context of paying someone as if they are inexperienced. You can always gain more experience.
FWIW, if you work at a government lab like LBNL or LLNL and take a __staff__ position then your compensation is going to be much closer to the base pay of a big tech. It's quite common to see these people jump ship and triple their salaries (sometimes they return. Often because it is nice to work at labs). I've seen people do this fresh out of PhDs, no postdoc involved. The postdoc positions pay lower.It isn't just job ads. For half the schools there was a formal definition. Also it has this part: "In 2001, NSF and NIH established a formal postdoc definition as “an individual who has received a doctoral degree (or equivalent) and is engaged in a temporary and defined period of mentored advanced training to enhance the professional skills and research independence needed to pursue his or her chosen career path.”
And yes you should expect to receive training. In the sense that you have a right to it and the supervisor has an obligation to provide it. You seem to be mistaking my criticisms of these jobs for defenses of them.
Btw
Would be an accurate description of a PhD student too.The official definition could also be accurate if describing an Assistant Professor (professor before tenure is granted)
So this is why I'm pushing back on the definition. Calling it a "training position" is just an excuse to have cheap labor and be exploitative.
NSF and NIH want cheap labor as much as universities do. They realized that they could it past graduation.
Let me give an anecdote: I was a PhD 1995-2001 at UCSF. I made $25K/year plus UC benefits.
Then I was a postdoc at Berkeley 2001-2004. I made $76K/year plus UC benefits plus the service clock for the pension started.
Then I was a staff scientist at LBL 2004-2007. I made $100K/year plus UC benefits and the service clock for the pension continued (I have enough service credit to get some thousands of dollars a month after I retire). It was an exhausting job and I did not enjoy having to simulateously publish, travel, and get grants to hire people to do research for me. I concluded this was not enough to buy a house and raise a family, so I left for industry.
I worked at Genentech 2007-2008 and made $120K ("Senior Architect") plus full benefits (which were pretty good).
I then moved to Google as an L5 (I had wanted to work there for ~10 years before I got hired) and started around $140K plus stock options, benefits, and retirement. Over the decade I worked there (2008-2019) my pay was increased signficantly every year, ending around $250K (including the year that Eric Schmidt gave everybody a 10% raise. thanks eric) along with ever-increasing options and then RSUs, worth millions (about $200K/year), excellent benefits, and saving a ton for retirement. There were a lot of side benefits- on the job training, free phones, etc. I really lucked out getting hired and promoted and being there during a growth period; I don't ever expect to have a role like that again. This was the first time I truly felt like I could have kids and a home in the Bay Area without going deeply in debt.
The first few years at Google were stressful, I worked about as hard as I did at LBL, but every bit of hard work was compensated in some way or another- additional pay, access to resources (I basically could use all of the idle cycles in prod at Google- 1-3M cores- to do protein design, and publish). Every bit of research work that led to publications had far more impact (mainly due to the employer's position in research) than before, and I felt supported by the infrastructure to do ambitious things.
I spent a year at a Startup, making $250K and similar benefits to Google. I was employee #11 and have (worthless) equity- if they IPO I might get somewhere around $1M depending on how diluted my shares are and how big the IPO is. I am not allowed to sell the shares on secondary market.
Now I am back at Genentech and make more than I ever have in terms of base pay, while the stock (Roche stock) isn't nearly as valuable as what I got from Google. Fortunately, all those previous years helped build up a big buffer that will help pay for my kids to go to college (hopefully, some of my payment will go to help somebody else's kid get financial aid).
I'd actually love to return to LBL because if I do, my career will actually form a correctly nested path: LBL -> Genentech -> Google -> Startup -> Google -> Genentech (I am here) -> LBL. I'm sure I could get rehired there but at this point, why would I want to work harder for less money and publication credibility?
Looking back at my postdocs, while I learned a lot, I did not like the power dynamic with my PI, and really only persisted for 3 years with the goal of getting a much higher paying job.
> Training is how the low pay is justified
And it is mostly nonsense. The true justification is saving money.
See also: adjunct faculty.
>You're also talking about someone who is probably in their early to mid 30's. Eventually people want to start having a life. And you're expecting them to make pennies? I'm not joking. Here's a list of CS Post Doc stipends[0]. Go to Berkeley or Stanford and make $66k-$80k? I've gotten more money as a PhD Intern! You're going to get more than double that in industry before we talk about RSUs.
Now maybe I'm out of touch, being a postdoc and all, but hasn't the tech industry been suffering mass layoffs this past year or so that really make it a bit unrealistic to label salaries above the American median as "pennies"?
Prison labor = Slavery. PostDoc research with no publication acknowledgement? = Slavery. ( U.C. Berkeley score is -2 Post Docs. ) Play music for free at Music festival? = Slavery.
Any more examples?
>And you're expecting them to make pennies?
I don't think the person you are replying to was expecting this. Rather, I read their comment as agreeing with you that the benefits and compensation were low enough that few people would be interested in the position except as a stepping stone into a better faculty position.
That usage of "you" was more in the proverbial sense. My bigger disagreement with the parent was about calling it training.
In life sciences, it's common to see postdocs as trainees. That kind of makes sense, as MDs are also trainees in the same career phase.
You also sometimes hear people talking about "postdoctoral students", which is less reasonable.
i kinda read the "training" position as someone providing training to others. for which postdocs are very much underpaid and abused by the unis.
I left academia after my PhD, with no regrets.
As a grad student, for the duration of your thesis work, you're locked into a specialty at a specific institute that isn't necessarily first-tier, may need to work at a level of intensity that prevents you from attending to a proper job search, and may end up under a professor who doesn't adequately support your career (e.g., with reputation and favorable recommendations).
In short, many things can go wrong, but you're focused on finishing. Under those conditions, if you do go straight into an industry job, it may be a shitty job that's not much better than a post-doc.
A brief stint as a post-doc gives you an income while you repair your career. This may involve changing specialties, developing your own research idea, working in a more prestigious institute or under a famous professor, or searching for industry jobs. Whatever it is, my own advice would be to only consider doing a post doc if it serves a credible purpose, otherwise, getting paid to get older isn't worth it.
In my field (physics), it was customary for grad students to work for their PhD advisor as a post-doc if they didn't already have a job lined up. I know lots of people who did that. It may inflate the number of "postdocs who leave academia" if it's not really a new job and their intention was to leave academia all along.
It's not as if there is a surplus of academic job slots that are going unfilled. The pyramid where one professor trains multiple grad students quickly becomes unsustainable.
Indeed, and in my field, it even had a name: The "Birth Control Problem." In fact, the problem extends to post-docs. Professors were even training multiple post-docs. I saw that quite clearly.
I was lucky to have role models: My parents were both industrial scientists, so the idea wasn't foreign to me. And I figured that I could always become a coder if things didn't work out. ;-)
Re-reading, I may have been unclear: I meant that some people take temporary post-docs with no intention of staying in academia.
You should absolutely only do a postdoc on the supposition that you will get a tenure track faculty position afterwards. It makes no sense financially or emotionally to do one if your goal is to go into industry.
But how can we know that we picked the right person for the job if we aren't at the very least absolutely sure the alternatives were worse?
The human mind resists accepting decisions made without a proportional amount of effort put into those decisions. If we only get one candidate for the job, we will either hire them and deal with constant nagging doubt, or we will lower our standards to get more options we can reject to feel good, but at which point we've now created false hope in the remaining candidates and an illusion of more opportunities existing than actually do.
Humans are messy, and so everything is always fucked. Even when it's not, we find a way to make it so.
This is not how industry works, at least not in the US. Hire a good person, they sink or swim, life goes on. It’s only the harsh narrow bubble of academia that pits smart people against each other this way.
Maybe you haven’t been privy to conversations about whether certain people are sinking or swimming.
I would rather keep a consistently mediocre individual than an inconsistent one because I know what I can and can’t trust the former with. I have to keep checking in on the latter. But I’ve met more than a couple loudmouths who disagree. Who think they can raise their stock by pushing someone else’s down.
Whether you see actions or not, I assure you that time and energy are being wasted on regrets.
I absolutely am in those conversations and see the time and energy, and some of it is mine, across a sizable organization. I am absolutely not saying that industry is a friction-free meritocracy, and of course there are politics everywhere.
What is unique to academia is the static supply of jobs. When people don't leave, new people face a huge uphill battle to join, and that battle is largely against their competition, not the institution that they seek to join.
A large percentage of phds do a postdoc because it's easy and familiar, not because it's part of strategic planning of their career...
Depends on the industry. If planning to shift from biomedical research to pharmaceutical R&D a postdoc can be a major win.
life isn't all about the endgame? sometimes you just want to do research for a few more years
If you can afford it, and that's your passion, great. But (at least in the states) you are instead a student with a doctorate degree now in play and saddled with a lot of student debt (150k average), I'm not sure it makes sense. That unfortunately is roughly 77% of folks out there (at least as of 2020).
I don't think I ever remember a time when the walls of the pyramid were shallow enough that the base could support all of the people at the top.
2 out of 5 people getting all the way to the end and discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.
A lot of people convince themselves that what they aren't feeling now will finally come to them after one more milestone, and as long as there enough milestones ahead of them they can play for time until it happens. Or they hit Sunk Cost and feel like they can't tap out now because they'll look like idiots, ignoring how much bigger an idiot you look like for wasting X more years of your youth and saddling yourself with even more debt. Or existential crisis with much the same outcomes. "Who am I even if I'm not..."
* discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.*
It’s not the research or teaching that drive people out of academia. It’s the endless and humiliating scrambling for money. Everyone who’s not a psychopath hates that part of the job, and the people who are any good at it have options outside of academia.
>2 out of 5 people getting all the way to the end and discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.
Research and teaching can take place outside of academia.
>A lot of people convince themselves that what they aren't feeling now will finally come to them after one more milestone, and as long as there enough milestones ahead of them they can play for time until it happens. Or they hit Sunk Cost and feel like they can't tap out now because they'll look like idiots, ignoring how much bigger an idiot you look like for wasting X more years of your youth and saddling yourself with even more debt. Or existential crisis with much the same outcomes. "Who am I even if I'm not..."
Learning can exist for the sake of learning and doesn't necessarily need to be reflected in career choice or identity.
For many it’s not easy to accept that "who you are" doesn't have to depend on the prestige of a title or a position, and that's often where people get stuck.
I think that all postdocs should stay in academia, why else would you do a postdoc? I assume (maybe wrong?) that most of the postdocs had intended to stay when starting the postdoc.
You can do research during your postdoc with chill timelines and pretty much 100% autonomy on your topic and then bootstrap a company with the ideas you've developed during said postdoc? In many countries the postdoc owns the IP of the research they're doing
i never heard of the postdoc owning the IP. it's always the university
Postdoc can be very advantageous on a resume. Where I am, if it's remotely related, you start at a higher engineering level than a PhD.
Big opportunity cost.
It's significantly easier to get a Visa from academia than work
Good point, didn't consider that. Makes sense there are some people choosing postdocs for immigration assistance or following a partner.
Right? I'm surprised 60% stay.
Sunk cost? Selection bias? I don't think you can get a PhD by accident, you have to really want to work in academia (or a specific industry). And I doubt getting a second post doc position is all that hard (as long as you're willing to travel), given they're capable of getting the first one. My understanding is that universities quite like being able to hire cheap, hard working, disposable researchers.
People who go into academia are probably willing to live the life of an underpaid researcher. The fact that they have the post-doc title instead of the professor title probably is that big a deal, nor is the salary going to change their decision. The lack of autonomy is probably annoying, as is the lack of stability. Having to worry that they might change labs and maybe cities every 3 years, and not knowing for sure if they'll get a job is probably the only thing actually making them quit.
I theory the incentive is to 1) eventually become a professor and 2) have more say over what projects you get to work on.
Both of these aren't real incentives for the bottom 80% of postdocs.
Seconded. Ex post doc here. Any post docs reading this, I would say - academia is a sort of gravy train for the middle class (in the UK). If you want a comfortable life without doing much of worth, you’re not really driven in your work, stick with it. You’ll have to fight for your lectureship but once you’ve done that you can live an easy life with the only difficulties stupid bureaucracy, politics, and cynicism.
However, if you have a bit more energy in you than that, have some ambition, leave asap. Startups are a great alternative. Big co research labs are another. Or just get a day job that you love and do research in the evenings. You could even get paid to do real research via patron etc if you do well.
I think academia in the uk is part of the social structure designed to maintain the status quo. The academics get good pensions and don’t do much, and in return they don’t challenge the ruling classes. Part of the class system.
There are some exceptions to this rule, some good places doing good research, but they are a tiny minority.
> Being in academia is not the only way to do research,
No, but (and I'm not in this space, so totally ignorant), is it not the case that if you're not associated with a Uni in some form that _PUBLISHING_ your research is all but impossible?
You can definitely publish outside academia. I assume you mean in scholarly journals specifically, and are questioning whether or not you need the backing or credentials of an educational institution to get past the gatekeepers—you can. It's just that, outside academia, where publishing is kind of a job requirement, there's not as much incentive to do so, and you may not always be allowed to do so by your employer.
Not to mention, many private companies actually offer better resources
Indeed. In other news, the overall pass rates for my (translated into US terms for the first three) middle school, high school, university and post-graduate degree were all approximately 50%. So this doesn't seem particularly bad.
Not surprising. I quit after about a year. I could have stayed on but I realized that it just wasn't right for me. By then I had figured out that most research is done by post docs and phd students and it doesn't pay very well. Not that I cared about the money but I started thinking about what is next and did not like the perspective.
Professors are basically there to manage the process and haggle for funding. They tend to not be very hands-on with research for the simple reason that that's not their main job. They mostly delegate that to people in their team.
And you can only become a professor by doing post docs, landing some tenured position and then maybe they'll make you a professor somewhere. It's a long, uncertain process and the failure modes are basically ending up with a teaching position or being otherwise stuck in some faculty mostly not doing research. Nothing wrong with that. But not what I was after. And a lot of teachers in university are basically people that dropped out of the process somehow.
Anyway, the whole management thing had no appeal to me: I did not want to be a manager managing other people doing all the fun stuff (research) while basically dealing with a lot of bureaucratic shit. Not my idea of fun, at least.
So, I left. It was the only logical thing to do. I worked for Nokia Research for a while after that. But the career paths there weren't a whole lot different there. And the whole thing started imploding a bit after the iphone launch.
These days I do startups and a bit of consulting. Mostly as a CTO, and I'm very hands on which is just how I like it. Inevitably, there's a bit of management involved as well. But I like what I do.
sometimes I read posts like this and am awed. it feels like something out of a book to me
never had a chance to go to college, no family, no friends, no social skills, mostly dumb except for basic computer skills
my life except for like 1-2 years has been fighting to survive in horribly abusive situations currently unable to work with my own SSN being messed with by a bunch of human traffickers
but I love computers my dream in life is to learn about them and built an integrated app kind of like the M1 but for software and I probably will die or be killed way before that happens but its cool to see there are people way smarter that care about building as much out there and computers will get better
Postdocs always seemed like a scam to me.
Almost by definition, if you're doing a Postdoc in a STEM field, you're probably qualified for a relatively well-paying job in industry [1].
And it's not like universities don't know this, people have been complaining about it for forever. They know if they were to just hire a person with a relevant PhD to do work, they'd ask for a good wage, so instead they dangle this "maybe you'll qualify for a tenured professor job eventually if you do underpaid labor for us for N years..."
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My relationship with academia is...complicated. I dropped out of college in 2012, worked as an engineer for awhile, did a brief stint as a researchey-person at NYU, got laid-off from there, worked in industry for another several years, tried school again in 2018 and dropped out again in 2019, finally finished my degree in 2021, and started a PhD in 2022, and did an adjunct lecturer thing from second-half of 2022 to first-half 2023.
Since I was working full time (and couldn't pay my mortgage on academic wages), I was doing a PhD at University of York part-time remotely. It was fun, but I wasn't just paid poorly, I had to pay them! About $15,000-$16,000/year American [2]! Even though I was doing work for the school, writing code for them that's not categorically different than the code I got paid yuppie engineer salary for, I was losing money in this prospect (and not just the normal opportunity cost kind).
I did it for two years, but I dropped it in November of last year because it was an expensive thing that I wasn't convinced was actually going to pay off for me. The PhD was already pretty self-guided, I could still research the topics I was interested in for free, academia's pace is glacial-at-best, and I didn't burn any bridges so I could go back later if I really wanted.
I might still publish a paper with my advisor in this next year (that's still pending), but of course since I'm not enrolled-in and paying-money-to the school, it won't count towards any credential. I think I'm ok with that.
[1] There might be exception to this but I can't think of many.
[2] depending on the dollar->pound exchange rate.
> Almost by definition, if you're doing a Postdoc in a STEM field, you're probably qualified for a relatively well-paying job in industry
Be careful: many people who are great postdocs are rather overqualified (and thus rather not suitable) for many jobs in industry.
Getting well-payed in industry requires in my opinion skills that are opposite to those that make you a great postdoc:
In industry you must not be a truth-seeker who can deeply absorb himself in problems. Being a truth-seeker makes you an insanely fit in the brutal office politics.
Also, while I do insist that in graduate school you actually learn a lot about leadership (in the sense of being able to push people to do great things), the abrasive and highly demanding leadership style in graduate school and academia is commonly very undesired in industry (but in my opinion not bad: a very particular kind of people (who will love graduate school) flourishes in such an environment).
It’s not exactly overqualification, more misqualification. If all you have to say for yourself is “I have completed 23rd grade, look at all these papers I wrote,” your skills and experience, no matter how deep, have diverged from the needs of almost any conceivable employer. I strongly encourage anybody thinking of doing a PhD to get a job in industry first, even if just for a year.
I've found STEM research to be different than that. Lots of opportunities to build and design whilst growing understandimg. Work with diverse teams and students of multiple levels. Communicate, work with, and network with industry individuals.
That depends entirely on the company. Where I am, what you say is mostly nonsense. Postdocs usually end up being the people leading (head down focused design or management) new projects that are directly or indirectly related to their research.
At least in computer science, postdocs have other benefits:
1) they can be well paid, like high five to very low six figures;
2) they can be an extra year or two to figure out your own research direction with some help but not much oversight;
3) they can be much easier to get than industry positions -- sometimes requiring little more than a solid publication record and advisor recommendation;
4) if you've been in a university environment for ~a decades and liked it, it might strike you as an easy path to keep doing that (this is probably the worst reason, though).
This is skewed by computer science postdocs at highly ranked schools, though. Yes, people taking these positions face opportunity costs, but the actual experience can be pretty nice.
Stanford School of Medicine has a FOOD BANK for Postdocs because they literally can't afford groceries lol
Hmm this doesn't sound like what I experienced a professor doing... But this probably depends on the location and the discipline... Or well at least here in Germany you can more or less pick what you want to do: more being a people / project manager or more own research, or a mix of that... The uncertainty/low chances of getting a tenured position are not different though... And though it might suck, this is something you know, at the latest, after your PhD.
This shift from hands on research to project management is pretty similar in industry from what I have seen. All of our principal applied scientists basically do the same thing. They don't really spend any time actually getting their hands dirty. Maybe other companies are different?
My spouse is a molecular biologist pursuing her PhD in RNA therapy. She works ~2x longer and 10x harder than I do, with only a third of the yield. You can only sustain that for so long. She's in academia solely because she's good at it. However, there are a few things I've observed from the sidelines:
- PIs can make your life absolutely miserable for no reason, and it's difficult to switch labs if you're otherwise making good progress.
- The pay is poor, and professors often joke about how cheap PhD students and postdocs are.
- A significant amount of time is wasted on internal politics, such as deciding whose name appears on a paper and in what order.
- Pursuing irrelevant papers just to secure tenure is common.
- Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.
- PIs often treat their subordinates like high school students, expecting them to work weekends for "research" and forgo vacations.
- It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.
It's exhausting, and there are better ways to make a living. She plans to leave academia as soon as possible.
With the exception of poor pay, I experienced all of those things while working as a software dev for a major company. And with the exception of irrelevant papers, a friend of mine went through all of those at a startup she joined after her PhD.
I am doing a postdoc now - the pay sucks (still good compared to non-tech salaries) but I like what I do, I can choose my own tools, and I'm not longer contractually obligated to put my name in papers I don't like.
The instability of the postdoc life sucks if and when you want to have a family, but it can also be very rewarding.
> With the exception of poor pay, I experienced all of those things while working as a software dev for a major company.
Same here. I've worked at grindy startups that made me want to leave the profession altogether—everything from gaslighting by small shop CEOs to firing threats, and even firing a colleague just to show "who's in charge."
But switching companies is always an option, as is switching domains. I did that multiple times without much trouble.
> The instability of the postdoc life sucks if and when you want to have a family.
I thought stability was one of the reasons people choose academia. By stability, I mean a supervisor or program that guarantees a steady influx of cash for a certain period of time.
Yeah, but it comes down to what gives you fulfillment. For me, I need challenging work with a reward in pay that matches the effort and academia doesn't seem to fit that curve.
Is short term stability, really stability? I think it's pretty rare to get post-doc contracts longer than 3 years, renewal after that is unlikely especially for a long period of time. You can't really be a post-doc long term and it can easily have you bouncing across the country/countries following funding. It's more stable than freelancing perhaps or maybe a startup.
There's stability in academia as tenured professor but outside that, there really isn't.
I've seen a lot of industry outfits fail to survive 18 months with everyone doing the job they were hired for.
Poor pay is an understatement. Back in 2010’s when I graduated, I was making USD$21K per year! If you calculate the hourly rate it is probably close to $3/hour given that PhDs work every day, and specially in the holidays that the advisor has more free time.
We were jokingly say that they don’t dare to call it a salary, that is why they call it a stipend.
That’s exactly how much I was making in 2010 when I graduated. It’s even much worse than that because the benefits sucked and the school took back about about 1/3rd in the form of outrageous parking fees and outrageous student fees that required us to pay for tickets to every sports game we couldn’t even attend. Add overpriced books to that too.
It took a PhD to figure out how not to accumulate any new debt for those 6 years. I would have been first in line for food stamps, if they were available to us. I literally couldn’t afford to stay in student housing.
That's awful! I was a postdoc then and the NIH standard was $40k.
are you in the US? that's surprisingly low as by the mid/late 2010's PhD students in stem fields were averaging 30k. for the many postdocs on nih-supported grants i seem to remember ~60k being standard at that time. eg https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/salary-cap-stipen... .
In 2013, I graduated from a top 3 school in my field of engineering. I was getting paid $23 000/year as a PhD student.
I hated it every second of it too. 11 years later I still loath everything I did then.
For readers still in a position to make a choice: interviewing and carefully selecting the lab / professor that you attach yourself to for the PhD is really a good idea!
Unfortunately, a lot of people enter the pipeline (in the US) not yet equipped to evaluate the possibilities.
If that’s you, get the masters degree that gives you enough knowledge to make an informed choice, then move if necessary.
> interviewing and carefully selecting the lab / professor
Worth pointing out supply can be slim in narrower fields of research or for location requirements, like being close to a significant other.
But careful. Many professors lie. And many of them are nasty.
Talk to the grad students of other professors
> - It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.
Rather: because they deeply love doing research.
I've worked in academia for almost all of my adult life, although in CS/LangSci not in molecular biology. Either I got lucky or it is some other reason, but I have not had the same experience.
> She works ~2x longer and 10x harder than I do
Now, I don't know how long you work but most academics I've met do it because they love it. Mind you, it's not like there is no pressure to stay on top of your game, and endless administration tasks do eat up a lot of your time that you would like to spend otherwise. But I know a lot of people who work at the weekends not to make up for lost time, but because their work is their passion.
> - PIs can make your life absolutely miserable for no reason, and it's difficult to switch labs if you're otherwise making good progress.
That is true, although you can also have awful superiors in a regular job. And it's not easy to just switch jobs for a lot of people when that happens. Also, I've personally never had any issues whatsoever with my PIs, so the opposite can also be true: PIs can be very supportive and interested.
> - The pay is poor, and professors often joke about how cheap PhD students and postdocs are.
Not true in my experience, the pay in academia has always been more than acceptable. But again, I was in CS/LangSci, and I know that for instance in the humanities, pay is lower for similar jobs.
> - A significant amount of time is wasted on internal politics, such as deciding whose name appears on a paper and in what order.
In all my many years, there was never any case where the author issue has ever come up. Also, perhaps I was lucky (again), but I've almost only experienced collegiality across groups in the places I worked. I wouldn't say that "internal politics" is a bigger issue in academia than in industry.
> - Pursuing irrelevant papers just to secure tenure is common.
The pressure to publish is real, but irrelevant papers do not really help you a lot. Your time is better spent doing work that can make an impact. That said, not all ideas that you pursue lead to amazing output, and you cannot afford to let half a year of work go to complete waste. So, yeah, if worst comes to worst, you might opt for a lower-tier conference and squeeze at least some insight out of your failed work, but it is not common to specifically try to create irrelevant papers.
Also, over the years, the acceptance rate for main conferences has become increasingly hard to get over, as competetion is ever increasing. So, you do want your work to be relevant, or else it's not much you'll get out of it.
> - Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.
I've read about this on the internet to the point where I believe it's real. However, I cannot personally attest this, as my work places have always been different.
> - PIs often treat their subordinates like high school students, expecting them to work weekends for "research" and forgo vacations.
Not true in my experience, I and my colleagues, including PI, have always tried treating students and other group members respectfully. There is, of course, a certain expectation regarding your work ethics, but for the most part, I've never heard of anyone demanding from subordinates to forego vacations.
The only thing I can think of is when the deadline for an important conference comes up and everyone's really trying to get some final experiments done in time. Then it could happen that you're asking someone if they could do it, but I've also been in situation where the answer was "no" and that was, of course, accepted.
> - It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.
Probably true.
> It's exhausting, and there are better ways to make a living.
"Better" is completely subjective. I loved working in academia but that doesn't mean that there were plenty of situations where I didn't like something and loudly complained.
The one thing that's missing on your list and which for me was the deal breaker in the end was that, depending on where you are, the prospect of getting tenure is very vague and insecure. When I was young and independent, I didn't care if I only had a two-year contract. But as you mature and eventually start a family and/or buy a house, your responsibilities and priorities shift.
So, in the end, I am one of the 40% or whatever that left academia, but it was not the work itself that I minded, it was the lack of a secure future. I mean, as secure as any future could ever be...
>> - Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.
> I've read about this on the internet to the point where I believe it's real.
My experience as a PhD student in France circa 2016: a professor comes into our office one morning, tells me "your work is completely stupid, irrelevant and useless anyways, you should just stop" and then leaves
Lmao when I was in a PhD program, my French advisor told me something pretty similar. I dropped out, but maybe that is a French thing instead of an academic thing.
A PhD is one thing, but doing it in Europe is a double whammy. People there, in general, love to use culture as an excuse to be rude for no reason. Germans and the French seem to take the crown in that regard.
Gallic pride is a helluva thing
> Not true in my experience, the pay in academia has always been more than acceptable. But again, I was in CS/LangSci, and I know that for instance in the humanities, pay is lower for similar jobs.
This could also depend on location, but from what I’ve seen, postdoc CS pay in most places is less than what you can earn as an entry-level frontend engineer at a medium-sized scale-up.
This may be true - and I wasn't trying to claim that you can make as much money in academia than in the industry, I'm arguing that you often get paid a quite decent salary that allows you to live very comfortably.
Could you make more somewhere else. Quite certainly! But ask any Humanities grad what they're making in their first job outside academia.
> - It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.
This is really the root of most other problems mentioned.
The cost outweighs the benefits
According to https://data.aaup.org/academic-workforce/ there are 270,000 tenured professors in the United States.
Assuming a tenured professor holds that position from age 35 to age 65, that's 9000 tenured positions to be filled per year.
According to https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2023 there are 57,000 research doctorates granted per year.
So 84% of people granted PhDs don't make it in academia.
Hi - please don't assume that retirements become job postings. Tenure lines have to be granted in many cases; if a dean is told by the provost to trim, then tenure lines are not granted after a retirement. My department has not matched its attrition rate for some time now.
I thought the 40% number seemed lower than my experiences suggest. But this is a solid point that suggests that even 84% is too low. I guess it could be as high as 90%.
Many of them never wanted to be in academia in the first place, or at least shouldn't have wanted it. If you're in a class full of people who want to teach this same class, you might be questioning why you're there.
Perhaps too simplistic since tenure is not the only way to “make it” in academia. Many people have academic careers without making tenure. You’ve also excluded people who publish impactful work, spend time teaching, and leave before seeking tenure. It might be fair to say 84% of graduating PhDs don’t make tenure, it’s just jumping to conclusions to say they don’t make it in academia.
Also don’t forget there’s a large time lag between graduating PhDs and when they get tenure, so today’s 270k graduates might be shooting for the next decade’s 15k or 20k tenure spots. Or… who knows they might be shooting for the future 5k spots if the rumors about colleges trying to reduce their use of tenure are true.
“Non-tenure-track faculty account for about half of all faculty appointments in American higher education.” … “About 90 percent of all full-time lecturers and nearly 50 percent of all full-time instructors are nontenure track.” https://www.aaup.org/report/status-non-tenure-track-faculty
Sounds like a lot more than I'd expect, especially considering ~50% of those 57000 doctorates probably don't even want to continue in academia. It's starting to look like the odds of landing a tenured position are quite good.
Yes, I expected the 40% to be much higher too. I guess once you go from PhD to postdoc it changes a bit, but again just looking at the numbers the pipeline gets a lot narrower at each transition.
I would have expected a higher percentage. Few openings and a high bar for whatever there is. It was tough to get an assistant professor job 30 years ago and I can't imagine what it must be like now.
> I would have expected a higher percentage.
This. A 60% stay rate evokes scenarios of academic inbreeding and a total disconnect between the real world and the small bubble where research groups operate.
> A 60% stay rate evokes scenarios of academic inbreeding and a total disconnect between the real world and the small bubble where research groups operate
Why?
Academia's current structure rewards behaviors that don't necessarily create value. The "publish or perish" mentality encourages quantity over quality, leading to the replication crisis where many published findings can't be reproduced. The system tends to reward those who conform to existing academic paradigms while marginalizing innovative outsider perspectives that might bring valuable real-world insights.
When academics move directly from being students to faculty without external experience, it creates an echo chamber. This isolation from practical applications and market forces risks turning academic pursuit into a self-referential game - where success is measured by metrics like publication count and citation numbers rather than actual contribution to human knowledge or societal progress.
This separation from real-world feedback mechanisms means we may be investing significant human capital into activities that optimize for academic metrics rather than meaningful outcomes. The challenge isn't just about individual careers, but about ensuring our research institutions remain connected to the practical problems they're meant to help solve.
"Publish or perish" is fundamentally a wrong diagnosis. Publishing is generally the good part of the academia. If you are interested in your work, you obviously want to tell about it to other people in the field. Some specific publication venues are tedious and bureaucratic, but the pressure to publish is generally internal, not external.
Moving directly from being students to faculty is rare. It mostly happens in fields where the demand for PhDs is unusually high. Because universities can't compete with salaries, they have to offer positions people may not be ready for if they want to attract top candidates.
The norm is doing PhD, postdoc, and the first faculty position in different institutes – precisely to avoid the echo chamber effect. And unless you are from a particularly large country, you are expected to do at least one of them outside your home country.
Success measures are what they are for two reasons: competition and long-term focus. Academic research is fundamentally interesting, and there are far more competent people trying to do it than funding. And because people can't afford to wait for decades to measure the real-world impact, the academia must base career progression on something that can be determined quickly enough. If you are doing the kind of research where practical applications can be expected in a few years, the industry is a better place for you. They have a lot more resources for research than the academia.
I'm currently doing research on a topic I started working on ~15 years ago. In that time, the topic has progressed from something interesting and potentially valuable to a mainstream idea with plenty of research funding. If the work is successful, we may start seeing measurable real-world impact in 5-10 years.
Ah yes, the real world of corporations and all their made-up bullshit. Much more real than a university.
ML papers by Western universities barely touch on the problems that practitioners face.
The only papers I see that are routinely useful have half the authors having a .in or .cn email at the end with the rest having Indian and Chinese names in US institutions.
The only western papers which aren't extended advertisements for their company are from people who are making something for themselves.
For example the best paper on image classification I've ever seen was posted on a private discord and was about better labeling the parts of a vagina as part of a stable diffusion training pipeline.
I used the methods without change and got better than state of the art for document segmentation.
Certainly, some countries have a more engineering-focused academic style. Western academia has always been more about advancing knowledge, which IMO is academia's mission.
> Western academia has always been more about advancing knowledge, which IMO is academia's mission.
You can advance knowledge in ways that are aligned with the nation's strategic needs. That would imply the career path of researchers would be oriented towards industry instead of pie in the sky projects.
I fail to see why universities should align on their country's strategic interests. Universities are not political nor military entities. Additionally, pie in the sky projects is what's needed to advance science, which is very distinct from advancing technology (industry).
> I fail to see why universities should align on their country's strategic interests.
In the UK, the industrial and military research labs have been closed, there is nothing being done except in universities. The university projects are really specific and don't join up in any way. There is no equivalent of DARPA guiding research proposals to be useful but Governments still think that the universites will define the next generation of industrial products.
Source: my own area of trying to use computers for Materials Science.
Yeah. Practical working implementations of the latest in ML image classification technologies are a rapidly changing incremental improvement problem that industry is already all over, so not really surprising that this isn't a major focus for US university research: if PhDs or even potential PhDs want to do that they can get a much higher rate of pay at a private company.
All the foundational work that has lead up to the current practices in ML was done at universities. It's not like Google invented the transformer from scratch completely over night.
Figuring out new and better ways to make the owners richer is both a real-world and chronically underfunded problem.
No one ever thinks of the poor owners.
> Ah yes, the real world of corporations and all their made-up bullshit.
You're posting that sort of message in a startup-oriented online forum.
There was a point in time where Google was lauded by it's success story as progress originating in investments in academia.
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Ditto, I would have thought it would be somewhere in the mid to high nineties.
I couldn't read the whole article due to the paywall. I wonder (now that my knee has stopped jerking) whether they consider non-tenure-ladder professorial positions at universities as 'academia'. e.g. adjuncts, lecturers, staff or contract researchers, lab administrators, ...
For sure they do. I can't see it being only 40% otherwise.
Keep in mind that this is a postdoc. The thing you do after you complete a PhD, and for most of history, something you only did after you started working as a professor.
I'm not sure about the situation elsewhere, but in Lithuania, it feels like professors produce articles or tackle topics solely to check a box. Most of the content generated by universities here seems completely irrelevant and ends up being discarded after completion. The courses are very bland and uninformative too.
I sometimes just wonder, a lot of professors are bad at teaching because they don't have to be good at it. Is it the same for universities? It feels like reputation for universities are quite detached from the courses they have or teaching quality. Rankings focus a lot on quantitative measures, but teaching quality is hard to measure quantitatively. The output of universities, i.e. the quality of their students, depend on both the teaching quality and "IQ" of their students before admission, which is mostly a feedback loop because universities with good reputation get the best students... Optimizing for teaching quality also means that professors spend more time on teaching and less on research, which may reduce their research output and reduce the ranking, which has a more immediate effect on the reputation than teaching quality.
Teaching is not really relevant in the hiring process of professors.
I saw several committees for prof position and teaching is treated like a checkmark. You should done it and provide a small sample lecture (which you prepare much more than your average lecture) and don't have to suck at it. After this checkbox, the differentiating factors are about citations and how much grant money you can/could/do have... (Western Europe, maybe somewhere else it's different).
I would say teaching is not that relevant specifically for most tenure-track positions at big research universities. It is absolutely something you need to demonstrate some actual experience and proficiency with if you get a position at a small liberal arts college or a community college, where tuition is basically how they keep the lights on.
I’d also say that even at an R1, teaching volume at an acceptable quality is sometimes rewarded if your college within the university is very undergrad-heavy, because it can be part of how the university apportions funds to departments. So, it wouldn’t matter at a med school, but potentially a little in arts and sciences, though still in distant second to research.
There are also a small but increasing number of tenure track teaching-focused positions at big research universities. These folks typically help design and teach the biggest intro lectures and/or other very time- and labor-intensive courses. There are fewer of these positions than I’d like to see in an ideal world, but not zero.
Can confirm this. Teaching is a pass / fail grade for new professors to get tenure in most places. Your ability to get grant funding and publish highly cited papers are astronomically more important to the university than your teaching abilities.
I was told by a seminar speaker one time about a pre-tenure professor who was awarded his University's highest teaching award one day. The very next day he was denied tenure because he didn't publish enough.
I recommend reading the book "Tenure Hacks" [1] to anyone interested in pursuing a career as a tenured professor. I don't agree with all of the points in the book, but it is an important and eye-opening alternative perspective to the typical narrative surrounding academic positions.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Tenure-hacks-secrets-making-tenure/dp...
I feel terrible for the idea of jugding academics based on the amount of grant money they can get... It feels like encouraging a lot of smart people to find ways to waste money, even when they know that they don't really need that much for their project.
It does distract from the process of actually doing research, but I will point out that funding agencies take past productivity into account, so you can’t do literally nothing with the money and expect a grant to get renewed.
Managers in tech get judged by how much HC they accumulate. Same thing.
I think it doesn't really enter the equation. The single worst lecturer I've had at university is now a professor. I don't enough about tenure tracks and we also call them differently (not adjunct, associate, etc) - but he's still there, 20y later, teaching (I think he just had gotten his PhD back then). I can only hope he has improved from "open script, read one page at a time, close script, dismiss".
At least he showed up! That is what we call an A for effort.
Meh, not actively messing up the course is already better than some of the other professors...
> spend more time on teaching and less on research, which may reduce their research output
It's ironic that universities are primarily judged by their research output rather than their teaching, even though their original purpose was to share and preserve knowledge.
But the academic paper printer goes brrrr!
Oh don't you worry, most of them are like that almost everywhere.
There is a box to tick to keep tenure. Academics tick that box.
System behaves as designed. Situation normal: all fucked up.
Can't read the article, but it's about postdoc.
- Many people who did a PhD and didn't want to do research don't do a postdoc
- I would say, "40% have left so far'. Following the same cohort for a few years might yield even higher numbers (because as long you haven't made your mind about quitting research, you are still a postdoc and not accounted for leaving, even it's your 10th year...).
Academia is one of those realms where I just wish things would collapse. Working conditions are terrible for the educational level they expect, yet there are always more and more graduate students and post-docs to exploit, so the wheels keep turning.
A naive perspective is a glut of experts is a good thing because a society with more experts could produce more innovations and development but because of the pecularities of academia, you instead get extreme competition and little to no innovation really. You do get a lot of following and hyping trends for grant money. I'm not sure what the solution is.
I think maybe it suffers from the same problem of the video game industry, that being that there's a never ending supply of people trying to get into the industry that has only the slightest relationship to the demand for such roles.
In the videogame industry, this mostly led to a bunch of low paying, long hour, lousy jobs with high turnover. Why pay more for a low level employee if you can get a new hire for cheaper? In academia, money is a little less hierarchical, so it led to a madcap fight for grants with all of the related downsides.
Hmmm... and with video games as with academia, the glut of willing low-pay labor hasn't actually made the end product much better at all.
As someone who has worked in academia for more than 20 years, in four countries, (and now is a professor in a top 3 world institution) I can tell you that it very much depends on where you work. Working conditions depend on the larger and smaller culture. It is a mistake to assume that everyone is living the same experience.
Kindly, given your credentials, it does sound like your situation is a bit biased. That said, of course let me know where you are so I too can enjoy your luck.
I am in London at the moment but I worked in Italy, Austria, USA before. I would never, for any kind of money, go back to academia to the USA for the reasons you listed.
> I'm not sure what the solution is.
Really interesting to think about what an ideal academia would look like. I think a lot of us have an idea of 'pure science' which has never really existed (by which I mean, since the industrial revolution science and academia has been tied to industry).
In terms of conditions, I think this issue is solved elsewhere by unions (there are always people wanting to be hollywood script writers, but the writers guild of America does a good job of maintaining decent conditions despite this). I don't know how that could even come close to applying in something like academia though.
Yet, the ideas that have thrown incredible amounts of money against them on the open market all have been developed in academia. The current AI craze, the internet, the physics required for chip production, encryption, etc.
Academia works on nearly everything, so it's no surprise that successes come out of it. Especially if you are willing to squint your eyes a little and describe something which has a few elements of the final useful innovation (but noticeably not the secret sauce) a precursor then anything can be traced back.
That does not mean academia, nonetheless academia in its current form, is the optimal system for producing innovations. How much effort is being wasted on things that will never pan out? How many great potential innovations are not being researched right now because the system does not prioritize them? How many needed to start in academia vs how many just happened to?
Well if there is a more efficient way, the big companies haven't found it yet. Guess where they hire their research people?
Paying people to leave academia does not seem like a major endorsement of the academic system. No one is arguing that intelligent people who have spent years working in a field aren't valuable, just that they might not be reaching their full potential under the current conditions.
Further, I would recommend very strongly against using big companies as the gold standard of innovation, especially not efficient innovation.
Then I wonder who you think does the most efficient innovations. Apparently it's not universities like MIT. It's not big companies with research institutes like Bell Labs. The military? Please don't say VC funded startups.
more experts would be a good thing, if there was money for them. no point in producing phds if they don't get the resources to do research (including a respectable salary)... as it stands now academia is almost a scam (phd+ level)
isn't competition good for innovation?
It depends on incentives. From what I can see in CS, a lot of young researchers are focused on short-term projects, disconnected from actual problems, and spend lots of effort to package the result to increase the chance of getting a paper in top conferences/journals, because they need this for their career. They will be forced to leave academia if they don't have enough results in time, from what I know. And even for established researchers, they have to do something similar, so their students can have enough results. And they need to try really hard to get funding, because institutions want researchers that can get lots of funding, so institutions can get money from that.
This is probably not the complete story, and probably a bit too pessimistic, but I think this is true...
In the end my take is that there is too much supply for research for the funding that exist. So lot of it focuses on wrong metrics and as thus is somewhat wasted. Or energy is spend on wrong things like chasing that funding.
I am not sure if we can afford more funding, so maybe amount of research should be cut in some way...
Or maybe try not to judge researchers based on the amount of grants that they can get...
Up to certain point. Beyond that there is lot of waste.
Say you have 20 competing products that want to get noticed or know to sell. Obvious solution for them is to pour more and more resources in advertising. Eventually this advertising takes away from actual product as more time and money is spend on it instead on the product.
Advertising in academia is publications but also applications for funding.
No, only if you have a narrow definition of innovation. Producing something actually new and actionable isn't always aligned with doing something that gets citations.
Too much competition is bad for innovation since it leaves no room for exploration.
The peacock is a product of competition. Of course the competition was for passing on genes, not survival, so the peacock developed a massive tail which is a huge waste of resources and attracts predators. But surviving with such a handicap is super sexy to other peacocks.
Competition is great at meeting the criteria of the competition. If the competition values anything other than innovation, like say grant money awarded or social standing, it is suboptimal for promoting innovation.
As a former postdoc in the physical sciences (who is now out of academia mostly for family reasons), I don't like the constant argument I hear about whether competition is good or bad in research and especially academic research. I think it is the wrong question. Competition is inherently good in that whatever researchers are competing over will be optimized in the long run.
We wish that we were optimizing for new/great ideas, but we aren't. In our current academic system, we are optimizing for number of papers and number of quick citations on papers (where quick = within 2-5 years). The reason these incentives are present is because they are largely deterministic in the outcomes of academic hiring, tenure decisions, and funding proposals. It seems to me that everyone discusses academic hiring and tenure ad infinitum, but less so for the details of the academic research funding system.
For most academic research, when a professor submits a proposal for funding, it is tied very closely to work on one particular idea or group of ideas. The funding cannot be used for research outside of the proposal area. Furthermore one must achieve results within the confines and time period (a few years) of that grant if one hopes to receive more funding in the future. So when a new idea comes along during the process of working on a grant, you either a) do your best to spin the new idea as related to the current grant in some unnatural way and proceed or b) wait until you can get funding for the new idea explicitly. This is the system within which the professors must work. They are laser-focused on achieving results within the constraints of their existing grant proposals. And some of these are great research ideas. But after a while, most people tend to stick with the same old ideas and pursue smaller and smaller ideas within the same area. This is why old professors are still pursuing the same overdone research they did when they were younger. You need new, young people to give an influx of new/bold/crazy ideas to pursue.
Now, the graduate student or postdoc must also work within this system, except that they have no say over the research directions. They must work on the professor's research ideas, not their own. There's fundamentally nothing wrong with that because it is the classic master/apprentice relationship which is generally a good thing. (After all, you can't have well-formed ideas until you know what you're doing, and that takes time. Without this type of system, you get outlandish crackpot ideas that are worse than wrong - they are useless.) But over the years of training, the grad student/post doc probably has a few good ideas. But what do they do with those ideas? Generally...statistically...the answer is nothing. These good ideas die with the grad student/post doc's unrealized academic career, since by far most have to leave academia before they can work on their own ideas (and there's simply no place outside of academia to work on your own ideas).
You would hope that there would be an outlet for good new ideas from grad students and post docs, but there isn't. People learn from mistakes quickly that graduate school and postdoc is no time to be putting your ideas out there. You won't get to work on them yourself and they will be taken from you, period. Let's say you, as a grad student, propose something new and great to your professor, and ask if you can work on it. Chances are that the prof will say no because it isn't funded, or because you're already busy with their currently funded ideas that they must execute on quickly in order to get more funding, or the worst one (which I have seen many many times) is when the professor says "well that's more of this other postdoc's specialty - I'll let them work on it." Sometimes you could propose something and the prof says no, but then 5 years later they are now funded for it. And none if this is caused by malicious intentions: the professor probably forgot that idea even came from you - after all, how many conversations do you remember precisely from 5-10 years ago? - its just an idea that came from the ether somewhere. But other students and postdocs see these occurrences, even if not caused by maliciousness, and just choose to never share their best ideas because they know they won't get any attribution or recognition for them.
As a result, the system is not optimized for new and good ideas, which is the lifeblood of research. If anyone came along on this journey with me that I originally intended to be only a few sentences, I'm sorry I have no solutions. If anything, I feel lucky because 15 years later, at least someone else did one of my big ideas and it made an impact, so at least I get to know that "back in my day," I had some good impactful ideas in my research field.
Thanks for sharing this. I basically agree, and have a lot to say about the neither-black-nor-white state of academia but have never managed to communicate my thoughts as well as you did here.
>(and there's simply no place outside of academia to work on your own ideas).
And therein lies the rub. Excellent post overall!
I read your entire comment, and it echoed much of my experience in academia.
Thank you for taking the time to write this!
Finally somebody making sense in this thread!
It all depends on the metric you are optimizing for. In academia, the metric would be grant money, directly influenced by number of published articles and citations.
From that perspective, the system works. We are making more articles, in more journals, there is also plenty of money thrown around. Unfortunately, there is no incentive for correctness, novelty or usefulness in this system.
Falsification of results, especially in the soft sciences, is relatively easy. Verification of results, doesn't give you any credit. So you can have people producing articles with blatantly misleading or false results for decades, all without any repercussion.
And it's not much better in the hard sciences either. Because verification of results there, is even more difficult and costly. And again, we are not incentivizing verification.
It has to be a combination of competition and opportunity. If you take away the opportunity then it's just a middle school field day all day, nobody making it to play college ball let alone the pros.
I would guess that if there are economies of scale, concentrating production lowers the average unit cost and thus lead to more profits and thus more capacity for investment into R&D.
If, say, all steel production was done by 1-employee companies competing against each other, I don't think any one would be able to afford any serious investement.
Competition leads to innovation when the definition of success and its metrics are set correctly. A big chunk of "success" in academia is the number of publications, and funding often depends on that exact metric. As a result, competition in academia is very good for innovation in the field of producing papers and winning grants. I'm not saying the respective scientific research is wrong or doesn't exist, I'm just saying the system is skewed towards this one metric in an unhealthy way.
It's similar to competition in tech products not leading to innovation. The important metric there is financial growth and stock value, and there are ways to increase those metrics without really focusing on true innovation in the core domain.
The whole empire of academia is broken, and although I have went through the whole things, and now in an assistant professor type position, it 1) took too long, 2) paid too little as a post-doc, and still pays too little for my level of expertise, 3) the grant process is a burden that doesn't enhance productivity; it doesn't leverage my expertise; it bogs me down and keeps me from using the scientific skills I've built in order to play grantsmanship to beg for money. Multiple tedious submissions and revisions. 4) professors increasingly just become managers, the least valuable activity of their training set.
There are a lot of issues in academia, but that number (40%) is not one of them. Not everyone is suited for an academic job, and doing the PhD is not enough to understand what it is to do independent research/find your niche what you are good at/enjoy. I think in many universities now there are career development programs that help people transition to industry. Also now it is more openly discussed that many people will not get an permanent position, so postdocs are more prepared and that is healthy.
Hard work, poor pay, known perverse incentives, and awareness of the probably replication crisis in your field == burnout and tears.
Half my friends are postdocs or associate professors (including my wife) at top universities and none of them are happy with how it’s going. Most apply for jobs every now and then to imagine escaping. And they’re the ones doing well in the system!
Had a friend once who wanted to do research in an urgently necessary direction. Didn't get the money or academic support.
Couple years later she told me that happens a lot but one is so focused on their work and the illusion that "once I'm there ..." so strong, that one ignores the hard evidence and much debated proof, despite, well, one's own training.
"Once I'm there..." captures it so well. That attitude and reasoning is the mechanism for this entire self-perpetuating pyramid scheme.
Hard to believe that there is 6 available seats in academia for every 10 postdoc.
Lot of seats are basic researchers. Chasing after grant after grand or doing some work for someone else.
There are always plenty of adjuncting positions and contract-lecturer gigs to go around.
As they should. More often then not, going into academia means horrible working conditions and horrible pay... and there's job satisfaction when your instead of doing things you like or ones enrich society, you spend most of your time in a never ending fight for grant money.
Leaving is completely logical for anyone that wants to actually do impactful research, or wants to make a living wage, and wants sane hours and sane management.
Logic checks out. Not everyone should be a professor. The question is: should they have done a PhD and postdoc?
Sample of one: No regrets. It was a tough regimen and I got filtered out of academia. But, I grew immensely throughout the path and got to be around some exceptional minds. I shoulda/coulda have worked harder and been more daring.
It's like being a professional athlete. Until you get to the first division you don't know if you have what it takes and no one else does either.
I think that's generally true but I've noticed that there are a couple of people in every cohort who have the right stuff. They're good and everyone knows it, including themselves.
Glad this post was revived after being dead for some reason.
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I'm shocked it's that low. I suppose, it's limited by the number and motivations of people who apply for postdocs, but the amount of soul crushing disappointment and borderline abuse of postdocs is legendary.
I’m surprised the number is as low as 40%. You can’t help but question your existence when you, always the top of your class growing up and graduated college with distinctions, are making $50k a year (that was the postdoc salary at my very prestigious department at Princeton less than a decade ago) at a ripe old age of almost 30 and eyeing yet another term of postdoc.
I was in academia - I got a PhD, did a postdoc, got a lifetime faculty job.
And I'm so much happier now working in professional software engineering than I was in academia.
Did you give up a pension?
It might be a bit off-topic, but my friend, after receiving her PhD from the University of Leeds in England, decided to completely abandon the academic path and became an artist. And when asked why that happened, she can't give a clear answer...
Good!
Academia is done growing. For every full professor, there will be ONE spot for a full professor when he retires. That's a lot of grad students and postdocs who need to find something else to do with their education.
Most postdoc positions should not even exist.
There is no longer any incentive to stay in academia. Professorships are rare and not as lucrative as they once were. Staying in academia means living like a 19 yearold student well into your 40's.
my postdoc advisor (a tenured professor at berkeley) made us clean the air vents in the office by standing on a tall ladder with a vacuum as well as clean the floors.
I didn't leave academia, but I did leave that lab. That's some sort of power-play I have no time for.
This sounds like visiting undergrad research at MIT where the grad students’ idea of a joke was to have me clean the microwave.
Please name and shame. This is atrocious. Considering the fact that most graduate students/postdocs are immigrants on specific visas, this is tantamount to fraud.
I am surprised it is that low really, given what I hear about the competition for professor roles.
how many transfer into a tenure track position? There must be a large contribution from people becoming 'research scientists' who are not tenure track professors but remaining in academia, at a subservient position, permanently.
Isn't this a good thing?
We want to train highly skilled people and then unleash them in the private sector to create new companies or help push existing companies forward.
I'm not sure what the right percentage would be for postdocs leaving academia, but i would have assumed it was around 90% if you made me guess.
That just seems healthy.
> We want to train highly skilled people
After how many postdocs is one "highly skilled"?
Postdocs are foremost a failure of the academic job market (supply of eager researchers much larger than available academic positions) that over time has become some sort of ingrained filtering mechanism.
There are different kinds of postdoc positions.
Fellowships are generally the good ones. You get to explore research directions under the guidance of a more experienced researcher. Because you have independent funding, your mentor is not your boss, and you are relatively free to choose what to work on and how.
On the other end of the spectrum, some postdocs are just people a PI has hired to work on a well-defined project. Either because the institute does not have more appropriate job titles or because postdocs are cheaper than professional researchers. These are fundamentally ordinary jobs, and like any job, they can be good or bad.
> We want to train highly skilled people and then unleash them in the private sector to create new companies or help push existing companies forward.
Many of these people will become very frustrated in the private sector because they will very commonly talk to a brick wall with their ideas in the private sector. The private sector is commonly not the kind of environment where highly intelligent, novel, bright ideas are rewarded.
I think you are conflating postdoctor with degrees like masters and bachelors, surely?
That's why it is called "postdoctoral treadmill" by an old physics professor: https://yangxiao.cs.ua.edu/Don't%20Become%20a%20Scientist!.h...
Of course. The number of professors in academia remains more or less constant. So each university professor should have, over the course of all their career, a single student that will end up in academia. All the other students have to quit at some point.
I am in the academic circus since 20 years, in my opinion everything more than a masters degree is an expression of ones interests and a way of life: Its great and allows you to do things that only a few people on the planet are allowed to do and once you drop out you just get a normal job.
It takes a few years to bridge the income gap between you and the people that went towards an industry career immediately, but you got to climb around in the large hadron collector when it was not running and have lots of stories about strange British professors.
The question is: How many decide against doing a post doc, while considering it for some time during the PhD time. When you commit becoming a postdoc, you know how the game is played, you have a good network, you have a good topic to work on.
Not necessarily. A three or four year PhD in Europe is a short time to acquire a solid network (a lot of time is spent in training, unless the student is very proactive) and not all PhDs broaden their horizon to have a well differentiated topic to pursue after the degree. I would argue that true independence is actually acquired in the early postdoc years, but it requires a lot of work and a lot of luck.
TBH, 40% attrition rate is less I expected. Since each academic can train more than one PhD and postdoc every few years, which is the case, some attrition is required because the system cannot grow exponentially. The desired outcome in this context is that this talent incorporates to industry or other sectors where this expertise or problem solving skills are not wasted.
> When you commit becoming a postdoc, you know how the game is played, you have a good network
I wouldn't agree to those. I was perhaps overly supported during my PhD, not preparing me for the reality of being abandoned/expected to be totally independent in the postdoc
More anecdotal evidence: while writing my Master's thesis it became clear that my advisor (the dept. head) was quite interested in the subject matter, and repeatedly asked me to shelve it, do a quick-and-dirty thesis to graduate and return to working on my original draft during a PhD. I was very open to the idea, since I was in love with research ever since childhood.
We sat down and talked about what this meant in particular, the workload, compensation, options after graduating from the PhD program.
It broke my heart, but I had to turn him down. It felt like everybody who wanted to have a shot at having a career in academia needed to put an insane (read: literally destructive) amount of effort into it, all while accepting that it was extremely easy to get stuck for good. There is extreme pressure on postdocs to produce results, with institutions and labs becoming very cautious about working with people in their 2nd or 3rd postdocs if they hadn't published in high-impact journals until then. Also, good luck finding any sort of tenured positions, with more and more universities switching to freelance "collaborators".
I was not going to spend 80 hours a week investing in something where all odds are stacked against me. I was not going to put years of my life into a thing that can go 'poof' just because your stars didn't align, or because the faculty decided instead of hiring you on a professorship track, they would rather extort some more money and "let the contracts expire" when it was no longer convenient to have you there.
Does the 40% include parents leaving the workforce to raise their children?
> More than 40% of postdoctoral researchers leave academia
Why is that construed as a negative? Isn't it great that they are finding jobs and applying their disciplines in the industry?
Obviously. And much more leave on the previous stages.
Because academic science doesn't have scientific proof of existance. People shouldn't stay there, because there are no anthro-/psycho-/socio-/etc- reasoning that this way of organising people to seek new knowledge actually works, and it's efficient in any way.
The headline figure is not at all surprising. Academia is by design a pyramid, from undergrad through to tenured professor.
Yep. I left without even really trying to make it work. Academia has its good points, but the path to success is very grind-y.
I think it might be still easier to get to assistant professor than down a single tech tree in War Thunder.
How many come back?
I stayed in my tenure-track position for 3.5 years, left for industry for 2.5 years, and am now back in academia :)
Did you ever get asked why you came back to the academic world in the interviews? I'm curious how PhDs who've been in the industry are viewed from academia.
Oh yes. But given that I am in a software engineering department, they really value industry experience. I actually published way more in industry than I did in academia!
I'd argue it's likely that there are _too many_ postdocs pursuing it in the first place.
Does anyone have a link to the actual study? The linked DOI is a 404, and I'm confused by the phrasing of "more than 40%". Does the study not have a more exact number (with error)?
I wonder if they published that article too early, because the paper itself does not seem to be public yet. But I think this is the pre-print:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03938
I expected this number to be higher.
I guess more leave between postdoc and phd.
Is this actually a problem for society as a whole? Surely a lot of such people would be valuable in industry.
I think it is in a way, since postdocs are often bad preparation for industry. Postdocs usually learn skills that are useful in academia, not the skills that are useful in industry. And the knowledge they focus on is often hyperspecialised, and not necessarily valuable in industry (though that does vary by field).
Essentially, postdocs can be a good way to waste the most valuable years of highly intelligent people...
Comments like these make me want to vomit with how out of touch industry people are. No, fiddling with AWS or writing some simple Go code is not beyond the capabilities of a postdoc... You really are not doing anything that complicated. Switch the roles and you would be completely useless.
Hmm, I'm not a coder. In my field you do need some specialised knowledge you generally get through experience. And then you have the soft skills, like being able to work in a team, being able to run projects, understanding business needs vs doing what's technically interesting, etc. Postdocs do have some of those skills, but there is not much you get through a postdoc specifically vs doing a PhD or spending 7-10 years in an industry role. And, to be honest, your attitude is part of the problem - I sure wouldn't hire someone who will look down on the job or think they are too smart to do it, and neither should someone with 10 years experience be happy getting a job writing simple AWS code.
The point I'm trying to make is more about the opportunity cost, not the skills you get out at the end.
Glad to see self awareness is instilled by the academic process.
Where? Fintech?
Sorry Sarcasm aside: considering the never ending list of unsolved problems, it should. Sadly, more money seems to get spend on games, ads and stupid juice presses than anything really helpful.
Why are 60% staying is the real question it’s almost always the sub optimal choice
I'm surprised to hear that 60% stay in academia.
That’s way too low. What are the other 60% thinking?
Likely not enough to incentivize reform?
what does it mean to "leave" acadamia? Like it somehow goes away if your not part of an institution?
You cut your ties with it. You go away, it stays.
my point is "it"s definition is harmful and exclusionary. "it" could be broader, more decentralized and we should consider acadamia as well beyond funded institions.
looks about right, from anecdotal evidence
Elite overproduction is a thing, you know. It might be a feature but it's also a bug.
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