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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?"
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?"
Welcome to the economy, academia. Cry all you want about funding leveling off. You shouldn't have expected it to grow indefinitely and shouldn't have whipped up class after class of student who will, in the real world, be unemployable to any degree that will pay off their loans before they're dead.
There are 2 ways to fix this:
1 - Stop creating students/graduates that no one wants to hire (postdoc or otherwise).
2 - Stop attracting students you have no intention of turning into graduates people want to hire.
It's not a university's direct job to ensure someone is employable, but it is their job to ensure that they are educated in something useful. Being unemployable typically means your skills aren't seen as useful enough to be paid to do shit (or unique enough to be the one selected out of many).
TL;DR:
Common sense: Too many cookies? Stop making cookies.
Academia: Too many postdoc researchers? Make more, faster.
But the problem is that universities are full of baby boomers that de facto do all the hiring. And guess who they want working with them? Other baby boomers.
Speaking as one of those old guys, sitting on faculty search committees and making hiring decisions, it's not hard to distinguish between researchers who have been doing fundamentally the same experiment for years and researchers with genuinely new and exciting ideas. Those two are almost never in direct competition. You hire one of them because he's got a proven record of bringing in substantial extramural support and your department needs someone who can pay his own salary and will raise the dept's publicity. You hire the other because you want a seed that will help grow your department, bring enthusiasm and energy to your students, and you have to hope that he'll be able to write decent grants.
New hires are almost all young people. (ie, under 35). Old people (over 50) are too rooted in their existing positions and too expensive to be a regular part of personnel decisions. Maybe as dept chairs. Maybe if they're specifically unhappy with their current position. No, the reason it's hard to get that first tenure-track position is not that the baby-boomers are sucking up the large number of new jobs. It's because a department that creates 10 new PhDs and 15 new postdocs each year only hires 1-2 new faculty. Very often, the salary for those new hires comes from the retirement of a senior professor, because everyone wants great universities but no one wants to pay for them.