Glut of Postdoc Researchers Stirs Quiet Crisis In Science

HughPickens.com writes: Carolyn Johnson reports in the Boston Globe that in recent years, the position of postdoctoral researcher has become less a stepping stone and more of a holding tank. Postdocs are caught up in an all-but-invisible crisis, mired in an underclass as federal funding for research has leveled off, leaving the supply of well-trained scientists outstripping demand. "It's sunk in that it's by no means guaranteed — for anyone, really — that an academic position is possible," says Gary McDowell, a 29-year old biologist doing his second postdoc. "There's this huge labor force here to do the bench work, the grunt work of science. But then there's nowhere for them to go; this massive pool of postdocs that accumulates and keeps growing." The problem is that any researcher running a lab today is training far more people than there will ever be labs to run. Often these supremely well-educated trainees are simply cheap laborers, not learning skills for the careers where they are more likely to find jobs. This wasn't such an issue decades ago, but universities have expanded the number of PhD students they train from about 30,000 biomedical graduate students in 1979 to 56,800 in 2009, flooding the system with trainees and drawing out the training period.

Possible solutions span a wide gamut, from halving the number of postdocs over time, to creating a new tier of staff scientists that would be better paid. One thing people seem to agree on is that simply adding more money to the pot will not by itself solve the oversupply. Facing these stark statistics, postdocs are taking matters into their own hands, recently organizing a Future of Research conference in Boston that they hoped would give voice to their frustrations and hopes and help shape change. They ask, "How can we, as the next generation, run the system?"

Comments

Group of supremely well educated

[Spy Handler]

and unemployed brainiacs?

Form an evil syndicate and take over the world, of course.

Re:Group of supremely well educated

[Grishnakh]

Working for humanity doesn't pay the rent.

Sure, in the old days, you could just be a superhero in your spare time, while working some kind of part-time or other non-glamorous job to pay the bills and afford a modest home or apartment, such as being a freelance news photographer or a newspaper reporter or a police forensic scientist. However, these days the economy and employment situation is so bad that this just isn't realistic any more, so superheroes are forced to turn to the dark side and become supervillians. Most of them found that job searches were taking up all their time, leaving them with no free time to be superheroes, so they found instead that by turning to villainy, they could instead enjoy some of life's luxuries again, along with plenty of free time in their lairs in hollowed-out volcanoes.