Many Junior Scientists Need To Take a Hard Look at Their Job Prospects (nature.com)

In its careers section this week, science journal Nature surveyed more than 5,700 early-career scientists worldwide who are working on PhDs. Three-quarters of them, they told the journal, think it's likely that they will pursue an academic career when they graduate. How many of them will succeed? The editorial board of the journal wrote in a column published on Wednesday. Most PhD students will have to look beyond academia for a career, the editorial board added. From the article: Statistics say these young researchers will have a better chance of pursuing their chosen job than the young footballers. But not by much. Global figures are hard to come by, but only three or four in every hundred PhD students in the United Kingdom will land a permanent staff position at a university. It's only a little better in the United States. Simply put, most PhD students need to make plans for a life outside academic science. And more universities and PhD supervisors must make this clear. That might sound like an alarmist and negative attitude for the International Weekly Journal of Science. But it has been evident for years that international science is training many more PhD students than the academic system can support. Most of the keen and talented young scientists who responded to our survey will probably never get a foot in the door. Of those who do, a sizeable number are likely to drift from short-term contract to short-term contract until they become disillusioned and look elsewhere.

Comments

Very old news

[avandesande]

It's been this way since the 90's, possibly earlier.

Re:Yeah, been through that

[93 Escort Wagon]

As I recall, departments (or universities) can skim 50% or more from grants as overhead. Under the system you describe, this would have to stop, right?

Executive summary: No, that's completely orthogonal.

Longer answer:

If you've ever been involved with writing a grant, you know that overhead is a specific, separate entry on grant applications. You basically add up all the line items in your grant request, and then multiply that total by your university's overhead rate and add that to the request ON TOP OF the research costs you are asking the granting agency to cover. It's not in any way a "skim" or "cut" of a person's research funds.

It amounts to a direct payment from the granting agency to the university to cover general operations - administrative support, infrastructure, etc. When you write a grant, you don't generally have line items for "I need $150 of electricity over the next three years", or "I need 10% of a secretary's time" - or, for that matter, "I need to lease 3000 square feet of lab space in my academic department's building". Basically "overhead" is intended to save you, as a faculty member, from having to track a lot of tedious minutia which you probably don't want to spend time doing.

Re: Yeah, been through that

[chihowa]

Being a perennial postdoc is not an "academic career" and it's not what anybody is aspiring to. Ideally, it's a poorly paid training position that is supposed to precede a real career. In practice, it's just another way to squeeze the productivity out of young researchers before they get too jaded and quit academia.

Postdocs, like grad students, are just cheap labor (consumable resources) used to prop the whole system up.