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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?"
and unemployed brainiacs?
Form an evil syndicate and take over the world, of course.
We need more STEM, no, no we need less.
Historically university posts were open to people with a BA (e.g. John Wesley and John Newman at Oxford in the 18th and 19th century) That it now takes a PhD and post doctoral work to get the same post means that we are training too many. Therefore the only solution is to row back on the PhDs being generated; given that governments are looking for money saving measures, this would seem an obvious starting point.
I am a recent Ph.D. graduate in the biological sciences. A few things missing that are important to point out, I think:
Postdocs have the worst salary to education ratio of just about any position anywhere. You are paid, in some cases, 0-1% more than a first year graduate student, except you have 7 years experience and a terminal degree. Where I live, postdocs are paid a salary so low that they qualify for section 8 housing and a number of low-income welfare benefits. Raising a child is impossible, but by the time your postdoc is finished you may be 35 or older.
Unfortunately, refusing to do a postdoc is not a tenable position for many because becoming a faculty member absolutely requires at least one postdoc run, often two. Now, industry is recognizing the glut of postdocs available and are requiring years of postdoc experience for even entry-level industry positions.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
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.
Maybe, the thing we need is sTEM, or even just TEM.
How I got taught about how governments determine shortages is, they look at other markets or economies, ones which they'd like to imitate, and see what sectors that market is stronger at. Then compare to their market, and see where the shortages and over supplies are. Strong economies that do well, are going to tend to have high productivity with decent exports of innovative products.
So, the reason we keep hearing for more STEM is not because there actually is a shortage, but because they think the economy would be better with more of it. It's a matter of, "train" them up and they'll find jobs, rather than jobs and careers are there waiting to be filled. In some sectors, sure there are shortages, but in others, not so much. I'm in Australia, and I keep hearing about engineer shortages, but it's very difficult to find jobs at the moment. Companies aren't training, and just want someone with years of experience immediately. Statistics I keep on hearing that the majority of engineering graduates don't work in engineering here, they end up doing sales or other things where by virtue of completing an engineering degree, likelihood of having a dope is much lower than say an arts degree.
Science degrees for the most part aren't very useful (in Australia) unless you're aiming to get into academia, or one of the incredibly few research jobs. Because of the loans program for students (no upfront costs for study, minimal interest rate for repayment [below inflation iirc], and minimum income before you have to pay it off), a lot of people study, because they might as well. The issue with it is, a lot of people study things that really won't get them a career. Science is one of those areas of study which has many students, but not many careers afterward.
Best example I can give is from my university statistics. Science has the worst employment rate for graduates and postgraduates. https://www.uts.edu.au/...
If they had to pay their own way, the number of PhD students would drop tremendously and all the postdocs would leave to get jobs in the real world. Problem solved!
... aaaand, watch all the basic science they do dry up and blow away.
It's really easy to type on the internet on your transistor-based computational thing with the flashing blue LEDs and pass judgement on lazy academics who are of no use to society, isn't it?
I wonder if part of this PhD glut is a delayed effect of the recession, which decreased employment opportunities over the last 6 years or so. Given the choice between taking your bachelor's to work at Starbucks or living on a similar salary as a grad student but with the prospect of an advanced degree a few years down the road, it was a rational thing to do. Of course, the "best" available option is not necessarily a "good" option.
You mean study something that enhances profits for the very, very wealthy.
Academic research works on an awful lot of problems that *the world* needs to solve, yet it makes no money for the propertied class, so there are no investment or funds available to support it.
Many fighting this fight aren't fighting for their pocketbooks; they're fighting to do science in the interest of human goods, rather than in the interest of capitalist kings.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I am a newly tenured faculty in physics at a major DOE national lab. Let me chirp in with a couple of facts:
a) Biology is absolutely unique. Postdocs there are truly paid peanuts and the ratio of faculty/postdocs is incredible. And faculty don't even have fun since all they do is write NIH grants, most of which don't get through. What they do is really useful -- this is how we will get medicine for the 21st century, but the system is absolutely untenable. On the other hand, a lot of this experiments are really not "cutting science", it is a dumb repeating work where you just need to get a couple of techniques right. Basically, it is one notch above automation, but doesn't require thinking at night.
b) My postdocs are paid decent salary at around $60k per year. This is over twice what some poor biology guys get and less than what engineering postdoc get. But they are truly terrible, I naively expected my productivity to go up by a factor of 4 with three postdocs and instead it got down by 20%. The bottom line is that over half of newly minted PhDs are not capable of doing independent research. Sure, they might be clever compared to general population, can solve a differential equation if pushed, but not the kind of guys you need to unlock mysteries of universe. The fact is that majority of postdocs don't deserve to become faculty (this is why I am posting as AC :))
c) Grad schools, at least in physics, don't teach the neccessary skills. 80% of what we do is software engineering, basically a lot relies of simulations and nicely written code. It took me 10 years to become a decent (not great) coder, but it could have taken me 3 if properly taught during grad school. I had a postdoc that ran some of the state-of-the art codes on machines with 120,000 cores running for two weeks, you would have thought that a guy getting access to this kind of resources would know his CS: no, his version control was dated directories with copypasted code left and right in a non time monotonic fashion and his coding style was fortran in C syntax (the MPI/OMP parts were done by others). Go figure it. [Having said that, I tried to work with CS guys and they know their coding, but have no physics intuition, so that didn't work either. You need both, that is why it is hard to find the right people].
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg... ...
"Actually, during the period since 1970, the expansion of American science has not stopped altogether. Federal funding of scientific research, in inflation-corrected dollars, doubled during that period, and by no coincidence at all, the number of academic researchers has also doubled. Such a controlled rate of growth (controlled only by the available funding, to be sure) is not, however, consistent with the lifestyle that academic researchers have evolved. The average American professor in a research university turns out about 15 Ph.D students in the course of a career. In a stable, steady-state world of science, only one of those 15 can go on to become another professor in a research university. In a steady-state world, it is mathematically obvious that the professor's only reproductive role is to produce one professor for the next generation. But the American Ph.D is basically training to become a research professor. It didn't take long for American students to catch on to what was happening. The number of the best American students who decided to go to graduate school started to decline around 1970, and it has been declining ever since.
To most of us who are professors, finding gems to polish is not our principal problem. Recently, Leon Lederman, one of the leaders of American science published a pamphlet called Science -- The End of the Frontier. The title is a play on Science -- The Endless Frontier, the title of the 1940's report by Vannevar Bush that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation and helped launch the Golden Age described above. Lederman's point is that American science is being stifled by the failure of the government to put enough money into it. I confess to being the anonymous Caltech professor quoted in one of Lederman's sidebars to the effect that my main responsibility is no longer to do science, but rather it is to feed my graduate students' children. Lederman's appeal was not well received in Congress, where it was pointed out that financial support for science is not an entitlement program, nor in the press, where the Washington Post had fun speculating about hungry children haunting the halls of Caltech. Nevertheless, the problem Lederman wrote about is very real and very painful to those of us who find that our time, attention and energy are now consumed by raising funds rather than teaching and doing research. However, although Lederman would certainly disagree with me, I firmly believe that this problem cannot be solved by more government money. If federal support for basic research were to be doubled (as many are calling for), the result would merely be to tack on a few more years of exponential expansion before we'd find ourselves in exactly the same situation again. Lederman has performed a valuable service in promoting public debate of an issue that has worried me for a long time (the remark he quoted is one I made in 1979), but the issue itself is really just a symptom of the larger fact that the era of exponential expansion has come to an end. The End of the Frontier could just as well have been called The Big Crunch."
See also from 10 years ago!
http://www.villagevoice.com/20...
And somewhat more recently:
http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
A collection of general links I put together on schooling:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I am a scientist and I have been a postdoc (and government grant manager and industrial scientist). This is not new, but is more new to biology than it is to other fields.
This problem is real. Our best researchers can't find a job and are "sitting on the sidelines." The investment in those folks by the government (i.e. your taxes) is going down the drain the longer they're unable to do meaningful work.
My feeling is that the underlying problem is the insulation of academics from the commercial world. Most science professors don't know what is involved in commercial work, don't know the relevant skills for commercial work, and don't have a network for landing jobs for students in industry. There are far too many professors who don't know how to train their students for anything other than academic work, and some who are adamantly against training their students for jobs outside of academia.
The result is that industry jobs that many PhDs expect to get go instead to people who left school with a BS or MS and received more relevant on-the-job training in industry. The truth is that there are very few jobs where the experience of a modern PhD is more meaningful than 6 years of industrial bench work. The government and academia still hire preferentially by degree, but those folks can't hire enough people to put a dent in the supply.
To fix this problem we need radical changes to the way we pursue science. Some possibilities for the future:
1) getting a PhD is "for fun." This is the current reality. If we all accept and understand this, that PhDs have no competitive advantage over MS students in the marketplace, there is no problem. If we do nothing, this will continue and will eventually make the PhD system obsolete.
2) Control of research direction shifts toward industry (i.e. professors become subcontractors on grants to people like Merk and IBM). I doubt many academics would like this, and there would absolutely be problems, but it would generate students with broader skillsets and networks.
3) Control of research shifts back toward government labs. This used to be the way things were. Government labs sat between industry and academia and facilitated movement of people, ideas and funding. Entire funding agencies that supported these labs are gone. Grant managers and review committees used to mostly be active scientists at government labs, that's no longer the case. This would be expensive to get back to and would really be unfair to the foreign scientists making up the majority of our young scientific workforce.
4) Set everyone on the GSA scale. Right now you can get a recent grad in his 3nd year of work funded at $60k/year on a grant to a commercial grantee, but it's almost impossible to get more than $25k for that same work done by a "graduate researcher" in academia. (Even if professors want to do right by their employees, they often can't.) So, don't allow any more $20k/year graduate students on grants. Everyone gets paid based on a combination of local cost of living and experience (years & degrees). That's the GSA scale (ok, it kind-of is). Removing the discount for students would remove free grad school for scientists, but would immediately fix the problem that the best bench scientists can't find jobs.
Whatever happens, the solution is not going to come from inside science. Scientific leaders range from completely disgusted with the human trafficking which is the modern research economy to openly hostile to the idea that this problem needs to be solved. Most people just don't know what to think. There will be no consensus amongst us in science on what, if anything, needs to be done.
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.
I've worked and studied for years at a state university. It's basically become a retirement community with as much life and original thinking.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -- Max Planck
There's no way in hell they're going to give way to the young. They'll use their collective power along with age discrimination laws to block any effort to bring in new blood. I've seen it. The law shields them from having to compete against the young and clever.
So get used to unemployment, PhDs, at least until the most greedy, self-centered generation finally kicks-off.
Even if you feel that funding for scientific research shouldn't grow to at least meet inflation (and NIH funding hasn't grown to match inflation in many years now), there is still a problem in the funding of scientific research in the US. The big problem here comes down to how funding mechanisms pay for people who actually DO research. Grants are, more often than not, structured around the very meager pay that we have for graduate students. Faculty and other Principal Investigators (PIs) often have no choice but to hire grad students as they are the only people they can afford to hire - or are allowed to hire - under the terms of the grant.
However, PIs are not allowed to keep their grad students forever, either. Those grad students have to be let go (preferably with PhD in hand) at some point; it doesn't look good for anyone to keep a grad student around too long.
The idea of establishing a new rank of "senior scientist" - with common understanding of what it entails and a livable wage to go with it - is a great one. The problem is figuring out a way to pay those senior scientists.
That said, i don't have any pity for someone in their late 20s on their second postdoc. I know plenty of people in their mid-30s who are only on their first.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
To paint a slightly caricatural picture, when research budgets expanded, the people in charge used most of the money to expand their own labs rather than to create more tenured jobs.
That's because you can't create permanent jobs from temporary funding. No individual researcher has the power to create a tenure-track position, because those positions are created by the university. In the case of state universities, tenure track positions come directly from the state budget. Over the last 40 years, states have uniformly decided that providing a college education is not the state's job. State allocations have not kept up with inflation or student body growth. Since 1980, universities have had to meet a 95% increase in student body growth in parallel with a 40% decline in state funding. They've done this by raising tuition and hiring non-tenure-track lecturers.
Research is amplifies that trend. Research grants are nominally to the university, but they will generally move with the principal investigator. Research grants actually take away from faculty's ability to teach classes, and the shortfall is made up by hiring temporary, non-tenure-track lecturers. So, now you have the state commitment to long-term faculty being bought out with short-term contracts.
If you want to increase full-time, tenure-track faculty growth, you need to get state taxpayers to commit to the socialistic principle of state-funded education, raise taxes, and hire faculty. Research contracts won't teach your children.