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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.
Employers want more to drive prices down, workers want fewer to reduce competition. Employers have more money and a better lobbying arm, so their opinion is the one we tend to hear.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
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].
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.
Am I alone in finding any of this news? I dropped out of academia almost 20 years ago (best decision I ever made, also one of the more difficult ones) and it was clear then to anyone who could do simple arithmetic that most of us (post-docs) wouldn't get faculty positions.
The calculation is simple: take the number of people your department graduated last year and subtract the number of faculty they hired. This is the number of graduates who won't get jobs.
Sure it's a first-order estimator, but first-order estimators are robust has hell and give results that are generally accurate enough for going on with. This one makes a few pretty good assumptions, particularly "Your department is typical" (this will typically be the case) and "Last year was typical" (also typically the case.)
The situation is made worse because the degree of specialization in academia is absurd. Departments are looking for people with experience in Left-handed Galambosian Transformation studies and if you've focused on Abidextrous Galambosian Transformation studies it simply isn't worth applying for the position, because there will be a dozen candidates with precisely the right qualifications. You won't even make the short list (I did a few times, but thankfully was never hired.)
So unless you happen by pure chance to graduate into a hyper-specialization that is enjoying a year or so of high demand at the moment of your graduation, you are out of luck. Nor can you predict what will be in demand when you graduate: academia is a fickle beast, and fields go in and out of fashion in less time than it takes for the typical PhD. So study what you love, because you love it. That way, and only that way, will you win.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
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.