Jessica at Bioephemera posts a provocative quote about the way we train and employ young people who are seeking careers in academia:
They’re doing exactly what we always complain our brightest students don’t do: eschewing the easy bucks of Wall Street, consulting or corporate law to pursue their ideals and be of service to society. Academia may once have been a cushy gig, but now we’re talking about highly talented young people who are willing to spend their 20s living on subsistence wages when they could be getting rich (and their friends are getting rich), simply because they believe in knowledge, ideas, inquiry; in teaching, in following their passion. To leave more than half of them holding the bag at the end of it all, over 30 and having to scrounge for a new career, is a human tragedy.
— William Deresiewicz, The Nation
The author goes on to bemoan this “colossal waste of human capital” — all those talented young people spending time getting Ph.D.’s, then not eventually landing faculty jobs, when they could be going right into productive careers in some other field.
I’m sincerely unsure what to think about the occasional complaints one hears along these lines. On the one hand, I firmly believe that the grad school/postdoc/junior faculty years should be enjoyable ones, not days of peril and gloom living under a cloud of uncertainty. If there were a way to make the journey easier, I would be all for it. I can think of small ways to do so, and am certainly in favor of such incremental improvements.
But on the other hand, I really can’t think of any sensible major improvements, for a simple reason: there are many people who would like to be academics, and few available jobs. Short of multiplying the number of college professorships by a factor of three or so, I’m not sure how to address the primary cause of this anxiety — the difficulty in getting jobs. If you knew you were going to land a tenured spot at a good place, it would be much easier to bear the indignities of grad-student/postdoc level salaries for a few years. Deresiewicz says, “If we don’t make things better for the people entering academia, no one’s going to want to do it anymore.” But if that were true, why are there so many “highly talented young people who are willing to spend their 20s living on subsistence wages when they could be getting rich”? These seem to be contradictory worries.
Obviously one thing to do would be to dramatically cut down on the number of people who get into graduate school. But that just moves the bottleneck around, it doesn’t change its overall size. And I don’t want to be the one who says to a somewhat-promising-but-not-superstar-quality grad school applicant, “Sorry, I’d enjoy working with you, but we’ve decided not to admit you because in our judgement your chances of eventually getting a faculty job aren’t quite as good as some of our other applicants. So you see, it’s for your own good.” Generally the people who advocate this kind of strategy are the ones who have already been admitted to grad school. (If you’re waiting for Deresiewicz’s solution, here it is: “The answer is to hire more professors.” Well, okay then.)
Again, I honestly don’t know what should be done. I would love to improve the lifestyle and general well-being of students and postdocs in any feasible way. Not sure what that way would be.
Imagine what would happen to research if PhD students were paid at industry charge-out rates. Larger grants would be needed, and in a zero sum funding world, the list of the fundable would shrink.
No, we need cheap student labor to get our work done and to sustain a larger research community. The students should be glad that they are able to sacrifice their time (and lives?) for the greater good.
I’m from India and I’ll be starting by PhD in theory physics soon in the US. My only hope is that the academic job prospects here in India would be much better than in the US. The Indian government is pushing basic research with some gusto, and my only hope is that India’s institutions would start coming into their own in a few years. Of course, nothing would beat the research environment of the US for decades to come, but job opportunities may start pushing more and more ex-pat Indian PhDs (and I’ve heard that there are quite a few of them) to return, and thereby improving research quality here. I can only hope.
Look especially at the ‘India’ section of:http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472276a.html
The article from which Sean quoted, http://www.thenation.com/article/160410/faulty-towers-crisis-higher-education?page=full – is almost funny in a tragic way.
My personal favorite is this line: “Doctors and lawyers can set up their own practice, but a professor can’t start his own university.”
My solution to this problem is, that all those who don’t get academic jobs should indeed go and start their own university. Maybe it was not possible in the old world – in the new – who knows?
The closed world of academic research is choking on its own importance anyway – it needs a bit of fresh outside competition.
I’m surprised no-one has said this yet, but here goes: to some extent, complaining about a ‘waste of human capital’ in PhD training is missing the point. The system *requires* that waste, as things stand, and the reason is that there is no way of selecting people who will make good scientists from among the applicants to PhD programmes. In so far as the present system is designed to do anything, it’s to filter out the people with bags of enthusiasm, or stellar ability to do exams, or a whole bunch of other good things, but little or no actual aptitude or even liking for research. Anyone who’s spent any time in a supervisory role gets to see these students (OK, maybe some people or departments only get superstars, but believe me, that’s not all that’s out there) and currently the PhD + postdoc system is doing a rather efficient job of finding out whether they can actually do what’s needed and, on the whole, gently easing them out before they take up a faculty post if not.
(You can argue, and if I weren’t trying to be provocative I would do it here, that the filtering selects for the wrong kind of person, or that it’s particularly unfair on women, but I don’t think it’s possible to argue that some sort of filtering isn’t necessary.)
I agree with Martin: some sort of filtering is necessary. The two big problems are: a) figuring out whether the filtering process selects for the right kind of person/research program, and b) even towards the latter stages of the filtering process we have a pigeonhole principle at work.
The problem starts in undergraduate school. Too many students in undergraduate school means too many going to graduate school. Easy student loan availability makes it easy for too many people to attend collage.
If you want to fix PhD programs, then first eliminate government sponsored student loans for undergraduates. That will significantly reduce the number of students seeking graduate degrees.
Matt: Not to mention significantly reduce the number of students from poor backgrounds seeking degrees of any form.
A question for the seniorish academics with regards to limiting grad school intake:
How good a correlation is there between the rank of incoming students and their eventual research productivity as professors. If it is poor, then limiting intakes will necessarily reduce the quality of the researchers produced.
That being said, the ability to do independed research is useful in wider society; improved communications between grad schools and potential non-academic employers would help.
Part of the problem, of course, is that in many cases, professors have never worked outside of academia in their field. Introducing more non-academic professional relationships into academia would probably help guide those of us who love research but hate academia into finding sensible careers.
A terminal masters’ degree should be near-mandatory on your way to a doctorate. Few 22 year olds know anything about research, and expecting them to pick out a graduate department that is a good match, AND to make a four to eight year committment to that graduate department is a little much. If getting a masters and finding a new school was standard operating procedure, they’d have a little bit of experience at research, good context for deciding whehter this is for them, and they could move on with a lot more initial knowledge.
Also, the most successful students in my doctoral program almost all came in with masters degrees.
Also, I’d be much more sympathetic to Sean’s argument if the explosion in classes being taught by adjuncts and gradu student weren’t taking place. Schools are intentionally cutting back on faculty, because faculty are expensive.
Nameless: I have a degree in astrophysics. I had zero problem landing a job outside my field, once I figured out what kinds of jobs would find me valuable. The problem isn’t that industry jobs don’t exist for people with PhDs in particle physics and astronomy, it’s that they’re not obvious. More career resources for grad students and postdocs would help tremendously.
Justin S: You’re wondering what you can do as a grad student to help change things. Does your department hold a student-run seminar series? Try getting involved with that and occasionally inviting back former students and postdocs who have left the field and can give talks about their current careers. I think this is a really useful step that current students can take to help themselves out.
Matt,
As you’ve said:
“With Russia and China positioning themselves to defeat America in a future nuclear war, I decided to track the progress to war in the future. The idea being that historians in the future would be able to see the signs of nuclear war, so we should be able to see these signs too, but before a war actually occurs. The signs exist today, and I am in the process of moving out the United States to Europe. Also, recently I moved this blog to New Zealand from Seattle to make it survivable in the event of war.”
[Update: May 5, 2011] — On April 25, 2011 my family and I departed the US on a flight to Switzerland]
You think there’s a good chance that the war will come in the summer of this year? Gee, if this is what you really think is going to happen, who cares about student loans anyway? 😉
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
– Albert Bartlett
Exponential growth in population or resource use – or in the number of physics professors – is simply not sustainable. The number of physicists grew exponentially between 1870 and 1970 or so, and has remained flat thereafter. To think that a large fraction of PhD students could land a permanent academic position in a steady-state situation is absurdly naive. Perhaps sufficiently naive to disqualify an applicant from graduate school.
Also ponder that advising students is an important part of a professors job. With less students, less professors are needed. Or is there a reason why a university would hire ten professors to advice ten students in 20 years, when a single professor could do the same job for a fraction of the cost?
As a 50+ year-old physicist-manque who fell off the rails after getting my PhD, I agree 100% with the sentiments Sean is expressing. I would add a few things:
1. Grad school was a great experience, even though I didn’t continue in physics. Though the substance of my dissertation never became at all relevant, the sharpening of my math skills and the extra time I had for programming both helped a lot with my future work. Earlier gatekeeping would have denied me a great 6 years and the time to improve my knowledge and abilities.
2. Before going to grad school, I was much more certain I wanted to be an academic than after I got there. I would have been seriously bummed had I not gotten into a good PhD program, and doubt I’d ever have fully gotten over the rejection. Getting an up-close look at some real geniuses helped me to recognize the gap between me and them. I also learned what level of obsession it takes to become an academic, and realized that I didn’t have it.
3. A small criticism of academic physics training: because there are virtually no faculty who’ve had careers outside academia before returning to teach, there’s very little knowledge within the community about alternatives after the PhD. Senior faculty are unable to provide useful guidance to anyone who decides the academic route is not for them after all. I have no idea how to change that…
As a 3rd year PhD student (Immunology), I’m at the stage in my graduate school career when it seems that everyone asks me: What are your plans after this? I, like most of my peers, dread this question. I decided to travel down the doctorate path because after spending a few years with a B.S., as a laboratory technician, I realized I craved more independence and opportunities to design my own experiments and learn new skills. These were things that I believed I could not receive as a lowly, technician in the medical/health field.
Perhaps I was naive that, graduate school-earning that PhD, would open multiple doors to new careers that weren’t accessible with a mere B.S. I had no idea what I wanted to be post graduate school (although I wrote about being a Professor in my personal statement…), but I knew I didn’t want to be lab tech for ever. Now, halfway into my PhD career-many qualities of academia has been revealed: the endless begging for money, writing grants, hour long meetings that consume entire days, dealing with annoying graduate and undergraduate students who aren’t prepared or care about research, budgets, writing papers, teaching, grading, etc. Sure, most of those qualities are pretty unattractive, but attaining a full Professorship seems to be the most difficult job to attain for a PhD grad. It takes a lot of time (most people in biology reach Professorship in their 40’s), a lot of research publications, and a lot of experience writing grants, teaching and designing experiments. I figure all of these skills are qualities that successful graduate students need to obtain as well-no matter what career they choose. For that reason, I put “Professorship” on a pedestal-something to work towards, because it keeps me motivated to be productive and successful throughout grad school. I reason, as long as I’m still passionate about the research, it won’t do me any harm applying for pre-doctoral grants, working long hours, TAing, publishing as many papers as possible and applying to post-doctoral research positions. Any career I’m interested in (journalism, policy, teaching, academics, etc.) will value each of these skills. I’ve realized that you don’t merely learn about scientific research in graduate school-you learn independence, communication, and politics.
I know many students, who are certain they do not want to go into academia and for this reason, believe they don’t need to have a lengthy graduate school CV filled with good publication, presentation and scholarships. Sure, they have learned laboratory techniques, but it is as if they have given up midway through the PhD process. Perhaps, these PhD-holders are part of the “bottleneck clog”? Many graduate students have no idea what they want to do, except that they don’t want to do research anymore. But they haven’t gained many useful non-research skills. Professors urge their students to follow in their footsteps, after all they chose this career and perhaps stress the importance of academia to bolster their life choice. For this reason, most of them call any job not at a University as “alternative”. This nomenclature really deters many students from seeking out non-academic positions, causing them to feel trapped in a career path they aren’t passionate about, which can greatly affect the quality of our academic workforce.
Something, I definitely think should be improved in the biological sciences departments, is to offer graduate level classes/credits in non-biological fields (finance, journalism, policy, etc) not only to offer assistance to students who are interested in non-academic careers, but also for students interested in academia-because to be successful you need more than research-you need to know finance, writing and policy skills too to operate your own lab. My advice to current graduate students is to find something to be passionate about, only then will you gain insight into what you really want to do with your PhD. Because I am not exposed to these opportunities though my program, I search them out independently by: learning about politics and finance by serving on various Graduate School Student Government committees, embracing my teaching assistant-ships (not complaining about it, so much), and practicing my scientific writing by launching an Immunology Research Blog. I figure, if I aim high (academia) and miss-I’ll still earn a great career post somewhere…or am I still being naive?
Here we have asymmetry of information: undergrads often do not know the eventual job prospects from getting a Ph.D in a particular field, while colleges do. This results in a market in which power and benefits accrue to the informed, the college, and away from the student.
I suspect that most students use acceptance to a graduate program as a proxy for eventual job prospects ( I know I did ). However, the imbalance between the number of accepted and faculty jobs show that this is a poor proxy.
The problem, of course, and probably the root of the problem, is that current academics and university administrators require the current number of students to be admitted. That’s a key part of the revenue supporting their employment.
The answer to this conundrum would include, but could not be limited to, a reduction in the number of students accepted.
Contrary to your claim, Sean, this would not “just move the bottleneck around.” This would in fact eliminate much of the waste in human capital that comes from the eventually unemployable academic spending ultimately unproductive years in grad school and post-doc. So, instead of spending 8 years in school and post-doc and then finding another career, the rejected would-be grad student finds that career much earlier, and begins building economic value for society and for themselves.
Further, why would you not want to have to tell the not-superstar applicant that they aren’t good enough? Graduate schools do this all the time, given acceptance rates for Ph.D programs in the single digits. This would just expand the rejection pool by a few applicants per year.
I am speaking as someone who has failed to even get a postdoc and is now moving on to other things.
No one in this discussion seems to have really grasped what is so miserable about this system when you are at the bottom. Martin speaks of a ‘filter’. I agree that a filter would be useful if it was, in any way, meritocratic. As it is, unless you choose your PhD supervisor and subject such that it is something that is currently ‘sexy’ or ‘trending’ in your particular field, it really doesn’t matter how clever you are because no one is going to care about your work.
If I were leaving the field because I felt that I wasn’t smart enough then at least I could feel I could move on to something else, but being forced to leave because no one cares is not why I signed up to do a PhD in the first place.
University systems function under a cooperate model where graduate students and post-docs are not paid what they deserve. However, deans and higher ranks are paid much more than they deserve. The system feeds self-promotion and self-congratulatory behavior and pads the egos of those who succeed whether they are deserving or not. The expansion in university research over the past 20 years has diluted the talent pool and undermined those truly capable of great achievements. The peer review system is a poor regulator and is systematically corrupt. Anyone who thinks that living on a crappy salary is a sacrifice for contributing to societal good is a dupe.
Another comment on the point of postdoc pay: entering my fourth year as a postdoc in physics, I am now earning far less, in terms of total compensation or compensation/hour, than either of my *younger* brothers. Neither has a degree more than a bachelor’s, and neither brother has been working at their current job for more than two years. And what are their jobs? One is an engineer, the other is a *state park ranger*. While our mom complains frequently that they never pursued graduate degrees, but honestly my brothers earn more, work less, and have free time to do the non-work things they enjoy.
“Anyone who thinks that living on a crappy salary is a sacrifice for contributing to societal good is a dupe.”
The reason for being happy with a post-doc salary (or the academic pay-scale at any level) is not that you’re having a miserable time, but “contributing to societal good”. If you want to do that, go work for a badly-run non-profit devoted to helping the sick and the poor. The only good reason for working in academia doing scientific research is that you’re enjoying it. And getting paid enough to live on to do work you enjoy is the foundation of a good life.
Again, academic salaries on the whole are not “crappy”, but typically significantly above those of the average person of the same age. Having been paid to spend years learning what you want to in a graduate program doesn’t entitle you to a higher salary. Being in the top 5% of the IQ distribution may mean you have the choice to do things that make a lot of money, or things that are personally rewarding. It doesn’t mean that you have the right to both.
The problem with the academic job market is not the pay-scale, but the lack of job security for younger people. The main problem with being a post-doc is that you don’t know what kind of job you’ll have in the future (and in some subfields, can be pretty sure it won’t be doing what you’ve been trained to do and want to do).
I. I really think that the notion that years of education and/or intelligence should be direct correlates to income is somewhere between sadly delusional and hilariously naive. I can’t help but wonder how many people complaining about this have espoused the theory that economics isn’t a science. It would be pedantic and condescending to cast this in terms of supply and demand, and probably wouldn’t penetrate the entitlement mindset anyway.
II. Higher education, as an industry, is completely broken. Some of the commenters above have hit on quite valid reasons as to why this is, but the basic truth is that undergraduate degrees are exceedingly easy to obtain. There exists no option for someone who wishes to have even the most menial office job to not have a college degree. This exerts a bottom-up pressure on any exceptionally talented (and, truthfully, any marginally talented) individual to seek higher education. The proliferation of “professional masters” programs, the explosion of lawyers, and various other graduate degrees are part of this phenomenon. The government subsidy on loans exerts more of an influence on cost inflation than the quality of undergraduates, in my estimation. It is simply inarguable that the subsidization of tuition has not wreaked havoc on costs: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/01/InflationTuitionMedicalGeneral1978to2008.png
III. A fix for the stated problem (limited options for PhD graduates) is somewhat elusive, but my knee jerk reaction is “what’s wrong with being a postdoc?” (other than the implied failure to become a professor). The best solution, as clayton hit dead on, is to reduce information asymmetries, which will have the effect of making the pursuit of a doctorate less attractive. Given that supposedly PhD candidates are intelligent and likely computer literate, it’s possible that enough of them don’t care about money that the market is already where it should be economically.
Magoonski has it right. It will take a cultural revolution to fix these problems.
The best people, who have the most options, tend to go into other fields. Academia ends up with the mediocre ones, who can’t do anything else but are simply the most persistent. That is where we already are; our universities are full of good-not-great physicists with some amount of luck and a huge commitment to physics.
Easy answers: Restrict the number of PhDs. Give more job counseling. Make available more statistics instead of hiding them away. If you really can’t think of anything to be done, then you should get out of physics; this is pretty trivial stuff.
The problem with the “accept less grad students” argument is it assumes the only reason to get a Ph.D. in physics is so you can get a job in physics. In fact, there’s another great reason to get a Ph.D. in physics — it’s a great way to learn a whole lot of physics. The fact that everyone feels like they’re doing it for the job is a cultural problem. I’m not sure how to fix it… more career counseling to expose grad students to other options? Multiple grad school tracks, one for future researchers, one for the guy who just wants to understand string theory or whatever before he jumps ship for finance? I imagine most people would choose to start out in track A, but just having the other as an option might get people thinking “You know, I can learn a ton of physics and then do something else with my life, and that’s OK”. Undergrad institutions often have such multiple versions of the physics major, why not grad schools?
My story is probably atypical, but: I went off to grad school to get a doctorate with the intention of teaching high school, which, after the doctorate, I have done for 32 years. It’s been a very enjoyable life. I have outstanding students and my salary is easily the equal of many professors’ at the sort of places I would have been likely to get tenure. (How good are my students? This has nothing to do with me, of course, but: Michael Turner gave a talk to two of my classes (his son was in the second) and after having several of his questions answered, said, to the earlier class: You’re better than my (University of Chicago) undergraduates.)
I think people should get Ph.D.’s not because they necessarily want to teach college or even do research, but because they want to learn a lot about a subject they love. After that, if you are really good at research (I’m not), you ought to try to land a job at a university or a place like Wolfram/Apple/Microsoft/NAG or whatever. If not, if you love your subject and love to teach, there are a really fabulous bunch of high schools in this country where the pay is surprisingly good and the students as good as Harvard’s. (Where do you think those Harvard kids come from, anyway?) There are world class public schools like New Trier in Winnetka and Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York, and a bunch of private schools that are also excellent.
Teaching high school is much, much harder than teaching college (I’ve done both), and there is really no time (except maybe the summers) for doing any sort of research. But for me it’s been a very good life, and some might want to consider it if Plan A doesn’t work out.
Peter, just want to applaud your contributions to this thread. Always great to see you pop in. Your voice (principally in your book and on your blog) is invaluable.