Plight of the Postdoc
Is Modern American Science Strangling Its Young Talents In the Cradle?
SOURCE: AP
Colleges and universities are graduating more science and engineering Ph.D.s, but diminishing opportunities are derailing young scientists from future careers as scientific leaders.
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At first glance, it might seem that American science finds itself in a kind of golden age. According to the National Science Foundation, the United States is graduating more Ph.D.s in science and engineering than ever before, with 29,854 in 2006 representing an all time high. Meanwhile, we spend more on research, employ more scientists, and publish more peer-reviewed research than all competitor nations. There’s no end in sight, either: Just last week, the House of Representatives voted to boost the budgets of four key science agencies by $337 million.
Even the most promising young scientists, those with the natural ability and discipline to fulfill their potential and become tomorrow’s leaders in innovation—and eventually upon which the nation’s future depends—are struggling.
Appearances, though, can be deceiving. Mounting evidence suggests that looming institutional shortcomings are eroding the ability of the so-called “science pipeline” to produce a healthy future national science infrastructure—and unless we shift the traditional paradigm rapidly, the consequences could be dramatic. Two recent studies underscore this point: One, from the National Institutes of Health, reports that the current generation of young scientists may be turning away from careers in research due to funding issues and the need for institutional change. Concurrently, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ new report, “ARISE: Advancing Research In Science and Engineering,” concludes that early-career researchers face greater challenges today than ever. The continual and grueling search for funding, the Academy suggests, fosters overly conservative decisions about laboratory research directions, which in turn impede the impact of government-funded science and thwart the careers of younger talents.
It’s no secret that many young people who otherwise might nourish an interest in science—or in academia generally—get drawn away from the ivory towers to pursue private sector opportunities promising higher salaries and better possibilities for family and lifestyle. For those still hoping to advance in science, the practical barriers that our system currently creates are tremendous; and what’s more, all signs suggest they’re getting worse.
Science graduates intent on the journey to a professorship must first get through a postdoctoral appointment (or three), and sometimes a multiyear probationary period. In a 2005 survey, the average amount of time for holding a postdoctoral position was 3.8 years. All the while, salary is low and work hours are long. There is tremendous pressure to publish….or perish. And only then does the search for a faculty position begin—a search that keeps growing tougher.
The National Science Foundation reports that between 1972 and 2003, the share of recent doctorate holders hired into full-time faculty positions fell from 74 percent to 44 percent. During the same period, the number of science and engineering Ph.D.s in postdoctoral positions rose from 13percent to 34 percent. Even as we’re producing more advanced science graduates than ever, the traditional academic trajectory affords fewer and fewer options.
And that doesn’t even begin to address the difficulty of winning tenure. Between 1993 and 2003, the number of faculty-level jobs at research universities without the possibility of tenure increased from 55 percent to 70 percent. Most foreboding of all, the probability that a Ph.D. recipient under 35 years old will obtain a tenure-track job fell to 7 percent. In short, we’re shutting down opportunity for the vast majority of young American scientific talents.
And it’s not just happening because of a dearth of faculty positions, tenured or otherwise. Trends in the availability of research funding show a similar constriction of opportunity. Since 2003, the rate of funding for independent grants has fallen dramatically, and young scientists have been most affected. Today, less than three percent of the main independent research grants go to scientists under the age of 35, and the average age of first-time awardees is 43. And so at what should be the most productive period of their careers, new faculty must dedicate an enormous amount of time to submitting repeated grant applications. In fact, according to the ARISE report, new investigators are submitting twice as many proposals as established investigators and typically receive substantially smaller awards.
All of which means that at a time when they should focus on learning and honing their skills, young scientists must instead compete with senior scientists for funding. Indeed, given that an investigator’s scientific status derives in part from how many grants he or she obtains, it may not always in the best interest of mentors to pass on all their accumulated knowledge to students—for fear of losing future funding opportunities themselves.
In some cases, one can even single out an apparent hoarding of research funds. In 2007, two hundred scientists received six or more NIH grants, and a single investigator won 32 grants, while many others got close to ten. An NIH advisory panel has recommended that grant awardees devote at least 20 percent of their time to each, but these numbers show a clear disconnect between intentions and reality. These multiple awards are going to established investigators—who are certainly not spending one fifth of their time per study—while younger scientists would probably devote more energies to the work. Thus, laboratories around the country are fostering a “survival of the oldest” dynamic.
Particularly in the biomedical field, this opportunity gap between young and old is a quirk of politics. When NIH funding doubled between 1998 and 2003, many new Ph.D. positions were created, which in turn allowed established investigators with more students to submit better proposals. But then in 2003, NIH funding leveled off. Older scientists now had a successful history based on the funding boom, and fallout today reveals significantly more scientists over the age of 70 finding support compared to those under the age of 30. Perhaps the situation is best summed up by NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, who wrote in a recent Science magazine Policy Forum article, “Like farmers during difficult times, we should not ‘eat our seed corn,’ but protect it.”
Thus, the frustrating pursuit of funding in science severely constrains productivity and creative departures—and the United States will suffer from the loss of a healthy research enterprise if job market, tenure, and funding patterns continue to prevent innovative young researchers from pursuing their most daring ideas. While we obviously need to create some hurdles so as to identify the most gifted and dedicated minds, our current model goes far beyond a reasonable winnowing process. Even the most promising young scientists, those with the natural ability and discipline to fulfill their potential and become tomorrow’s leaders in innovation—and eventually upon which the nation’s future depends—are struggling.
Sheril Kirshenbaum is a marine biologist at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke. She blogs at The Intersection with Chris Mooney.
Comments on this article
A very interesting, and yet, alarming article for all of us to digest. Qualified, bright young minds need to be encouraged and even nurtured in a most difficult field, not turned off by such inequity.
June 27th, 2008 at 8:41 amSome ’struggle’ is necessary and even beneficial, but not when it is so unfair as to turn off and outight eliminate the hope for our future in this world.
Dear Sheryl,
June 27th, 2008 at 9:46 ama most interesting, well written and provocative article.
The big Pols are promoting the need for more scientists and many are entering the field only to find that the morass of funding is holding them back from applying their new found knowledge. Where will we go from here?
All the best to you and your hardworking colleagues.
Love Sue Kiok
I think the answer is two fold. First, corporations need to be taxed for the benefits they derive from government funded research. SO much Biotech and electronics start out as government funded research in government labs, which a company or two then manage to trademark or patent by tweaking slightly. Once they do, they get the profit, and the government gets . . . . . .
Second, we need a broader outreach to Americans about what science does. Many Americans would be shocked to know science underlies traffic control, or bridge construction, or even the operations of the rescue squad that saved their uncle from a heart attack. If you show American, clearly and concisely, how science works in their lives, I suspect they will start demanding more science funding.
June 27th, 2008 at 10:20 amThere definitely needs to be better auditing of %effort, if some people manage to accumulate THAT MANY grants beyond the recommended effort time limit. That is totally absurd. There is no way that can be constructive for anybody beyond the lab that has all that money–and in the end, it hurts those who are stuck under that cushy umbrella when they go to move on, since more than likely their advisor will continue to sit on all the money there is available for that kind of research. It would be much more effective to promote the various post-docs in the lab who are probably ACTUALLY managing those projects to some level of independence and spread those all as independent grants to them.
June 27th, 2008 at 12:44 pmThanks for raising this issue.
Three quick points. 1) This problem extends far beyond the biomedical field. It perhaps appears more dramatic there because of the big increase in funding that occurred at the turn of the century, but it is systemic throughout science. In fact it is my experience that some of the fields that didn’t see the big increase have had this problem going on 20 years now. 2) This is not the “plight of the postdoc”, but the plight of a generation of scientists. Witness - “the average age of a firt-time awardee is 43.” There is a lost generation of scientists and opportunity in this country. 3) As Sheril is aware and has worked to point out, things like this tend to affect women disproportionally, driving them out of the field at a time when we need all the talent we can get. If women didn’t make the rational decision (based on the environment) to leave the field after ten years we wouldn’t have a shortage.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:49 pmThis is the Twenty first century and we “protect” our cites towns and villages with SAND BAGS. The once in a hundred year rain fall seem to occur every few years. New Orleans looses soil every year as if that is inevitable.
June 28th, 2008 at 10:50 amThe only time we came close to full employment was during world war two. What we need is the science community to develop plans for managing water, research to enable us to green America, and combat global warming.
Your article details the fact that our schools are turning out a great number of scientist,yet you complain that they can’t get teaching positions. Do we need a great deal more teachers or do we need funding to encourage our new scientist to find practical solutions to todays problems so our grandchildren will no longer have to rely on SAND BAGS.
Society needs more citizen-scientists, yet there’s no place in academia to put them. The answer is to shunt them, without stigma, into other fields. It is criminal that PhD programs continue to promote (even implicitly) the idea that “real” scientists are tenure-track academics.
Any school that grants PhDs without a functional knowledge of one or more allied fields (business, law, policy, communications, K-12 education) has scammed its students and left them crippled and unprepared for the career realities ahead.
July 7th, 2008 at 8:56 amA man of his stature with the title “the NIH director” is the highest and most respectable government science/medicine administrative job, he writes “we should not eat our seed corn but protect it”?.
What his writing underlies is that even this high and mighty NIH director knows the problem of the young scientists, especially the postdoctorall fellows. But yet, he has not taken neccessary measures to help improve the current NIH funding system. This area is grossly/largely ignored or deliberately let loose without much restructuring.
The whole academia or higher education system in USA needs a careful reorganization, otherwise what you see will continue, a single faculty of 65 or 70 years old will have all the funding available and sit on it for years until his/her dementic brain kills all the funding with as many as 32 grants (MOST OUTRAGEOUS DISPARITY) and our most valuable and efficient young scientists will be struggling to meet the ends between the academia, lab and their family committments.
What our current academic policies and atmosphere does is to chase the potential young scientists out of labs. Why blame these youngsters if they seek green pasteurs elsewhere like a “biotech job or an industry job”, they have no choice than to look elsewhere for their future.
August 7th, 2008 at 11:42 pmNowadays Science should be regarded like a hobby, otherwise one is at serious risk of trashing ones whole life and easily become some sort of weirdoo, an everlasting wandering jew-like dork ready to undergo the curse of taking a starting blatant poor choice, the ongoing effects of which will keep you in the struggle for surviving, in this darwinist realm, till the end of your days.
Unfortunately, I know many cases for whom the decision to quit was too late and now some of them are flipping burgers with impressive records of more than 30 papers each in journals with IF ranked among the top 10% of their areas. Get advice, I mean real guidance and info about these chopping factories of young-human flesh aka the universities and their slave-driving science departments. Dont get pissed of, neither ripped off by these professors who promise everything to keep you working on THEIR own projects. Postdoc have become bargains, taking over the role of the technicians more expensive. It could be fine spending 1 or 2 years as postdoc, as it used to be in the old times, extend it longer will wreck your life entirely. Dont trust anybody in this false world. Above all, be honest, dont cheat yourself.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:18 amHere’s an a similar prespective:
January 29th, 2009 at 5:38 pmhttp://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html
What does the general public see as justification for academic science funding? Nothing:
I don’t see any significant medical applications that have come out of all the billions spent in the last thirty years on “Medical Research”.
I see lots of predictions: stem cells, telomeres, etc. But, meanwhile we are seeing the same classes of antibiotics ( losing their effectiveness), the same chemotherapy poisons ( Cancer death rates are not improved) etc,
MRi doesn’t count as that was just engineering after I.Rabi first measured the MRI effect, and Radon did the math. Both were well before the thirty year cutoff above.
Moreover, the statistics of most of the medical research are so badly done that the studies keep contradicting each other. They are done by
–at best–PHD biostatistics people–who don’t have the understanding of the theoretical underpinning of statistics that a MATH PHD in statistics does. ( I know you biostatistics people will scream, but I am correct here: the NSF has shown over and over again that over 90% of the statistics in medical papers –in fact, in biology papers–is incompetently done.) What the general public sees is a constant barrage of news reports that contradict each other and lead to total distrust of medical research: E.g. “Eggs are bad for you, they cause heart disease”, “Eggs are fine, they don’t cause heart disease”; “Estrogen prevents heart disease”, “Estrogen causes Heart Disease, “Estrogen is maybe safe?”.
So, why should we concerned that postdocs in medical research don’t have careers. Maybe, we should shut down the whole thing, until it
cleans up its act?
Physics research: Except for a few applied backwaters like optical
nanomaterials,and Bose-Einstein condensates–physics research has produced NOTHING of any significance in the last thirty years. Most of the last generation of researchers has gone into string theory–a theory with no experimental underpinnings, which has the feel of medieval scholasticism ( How many type II heterostrings fit into the energy range of [a,b] in a pinhead sized mini-black hole in eleven dimensions?) How many billions have we spent on physics?
Astronomy: ( results claimed by astrophysics): So called dark-energy,
which is probably just Einstein’s cosmological constant in play. So called Dark Matter–for which the current “explanations” are the above science fiction. Very exciting–but how many billions have we spent on this field and its space telescopes etc? How much have we actually learned about Dark Matter–( Nothing). Applications to society–Nil.
Pure Math: Solved major conjectures of the last century–like the Poincare conjecture, and Fermat’s last theorem. Does the paying public care about hometopy types of sphers or sums of powers of integers? Nope. But, math—suffering from the worst grant funding of all of these fields–and for far longer–is very inexpensive.
Chemistry: No significant new development from academic chemistry in the last thirty years–by what I mean something like the invention of polymers ( aka plastics) or organic chemistry, or synthetic dyes, –which spawned trillion dollar industries. Whatever happened to the promise of Laser chemistry?
Ome could go on science field by science field. Considered from a general public perspective, or from that of a socially conscious congressman–it is a miracle that academic science is getting ANY funding at all.
How many billions wasted on chemistry?
Now, if we had a public fascinated by understanding the universe, with the economic resources to spend on that, and if the sciences cleaned up their act ( and we all know about the abuses in research)
it would be different. But, basically, we should get down on our knees and kiss the floor every day that we are supported to do science at all.
Now, someone who spends 45 years of their life as a science student
and then as a researcher and then has to change fields:
From the perspective of the general public–who often have to change jobs and career fields several times in a lifetime, these postdocs are basically Whiners. At least the science geeks got to work at something they liked to do for half their life–for which they take an economic hit ( like someone who would rather be a low paid librarian then a highly paid truck driver). WHat are these nerds complaining about?
Want a society where scientists get good jobs, proper treatment?
Then follow what your intellectual and educational “inferiors”–the truck drivers did–create something like the teamsters–and Strike, Strike, Strike–shut down critical engineering based industries etc.
( Are their any industries that are actually science based–not engineering based–I mean right now, not in the ” We will invent a new tech, then new products” sense.”?) If not, then fall in with the engineers who view themselves to be underpaid etc.
Whining for government help is not effective, Start a STRONG union.
April 11th, 2009 at 7:46 amWell actually, Cancer survival rates are slightly improved in the last thirty years: ( From the Mayo clinic):
// Overall cancer survivor rates: For cancers diagnosed from 1974 to 1976, the five-year survival rate was 50 percent. Between 1995 and 2001, the latest five-year survival rate data, the survival rate was 65 percent.
//
( One might ask how much is due to early detection, and how much of that is due to medical research of the last thirty years and not to
more attention to screening and the MRI?)
So, I will change my earlier comment ( of a general public perspective):
” All those billions for three decades on academic cancer research, and we have only gone from 50 to 65 percent survival?” ” And is that really due to gains in research–which i have paid my tax dollars for
April 11th, 2009 at 8:02 am?”
Astronomers will say:
Gee, we found lots of extrasolar planets.
The public will say:
OF course, I saw them on Star Trek.
Any physicist will say:
Of course, the laws of nature are not unique to our solar system, so planets were expected to be there.
A perverse senator might say:
All that money to prove an expected conclusion?
Most members of the general public will say:
And, how does this improve my life?
Again: Form a strong union.
April 11th, 2009 at 8:11 amTenure:
The general public is laughing:
“You expect lifetime job security?”
“And you are complaining that your chance is only seven percent?”
April 11th, 2009 at 8:18 amMy own experience:
A few days ago, I was at a Starbucks where I met a private sector computer consultant. I was making some of the same comments as the poster above did, and he replied:
“All Science is done in private industry”. “Academia produces nothing”.
I said, Name one fundamental discovery that came from industry, and not from academia.”
( U was hoping that he would say ” The transistor”, because all three types wee actually patented by a part-time academic two decades before Bell Labs “reinvented it”. )
After a few moments of thought, his face turned white and he left in an upset state.
April 11th, 2009 at 8:33 amOf course, there are fundamental discoveries from private industry–the edison effect, for example. But, my anecdote is an example of the contempt that most people have for academic research science,
April 11th, 2009 at 7:40 pm