Comments on: It’s the Money, Stupid

By: bighnaraj panda

bighnaraj panda — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:24:15 +0000

why job is important?

By: web design company

web design company — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:55:13 +0000

>But the world that nurtured today’s senior professors, with PhDs earned in four years and appointments as faculty members and lab heads in their 20s, has vanished. What the great majority of today’s young scientists find instead is a penurious decade or more working in university labs, first as graduate students and then as postdoctoral researchers earning a “trainee” wage comparable to what a new liberal arts BA graduate makes. A couple years at a top graduate school really convinced me of this. There are entirely too many post docs approaching 40, and 8th year graduate students that don’t appear to be going anywhere but to years as a post doc.

By: ephys

ephys — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:54:53 +0000

This article does a great job of highlighting one of the massive problems facing academic science, but i think it misses one of the contributing factors to the causation of the issue, and thus is off the mark regarding possible solutions. the pyramid analogy should have been further explored in that successful senior faculty earn a disproportionate number of grants, awards, private money, public money and control over academia, leaving very resources for anyone else. our little world is very inwardly focused, and given that we use peer review to fund grants and publish papers, an “old boys” network always persists. this makes it very, very hard for new, young researchers to get the sorts of academic currency they need for advancement. in particular, senior faculty who have a proven track record of high level science are given an enormous amount of resources to continue their work by running a huge lab, which eats up resources in a remarkably incongruous way. i think the NIH and universities need to rethink how senior scientists are funded and how powerful they can become, due to the costs this incurs against creating fulfilling careers for the hundreds of thousands of grad students and postdocs who, the article rightly points out, are actually doing the work and spending 10-20 years slaving away in low-paid, indentured servitude. only a profound restructuring of the current pyramid and how it is funded will solve this problem.

By: Supernova

Supernova — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:07:11 +0000

The article makes many salient points, and I hope it will start a productive discussion within the community. That said, I am disturbed by the idea of limiting access to graduate school “to the number of people who could reasonably be expected to find career-level employment after they leave their professors’ labs.” To do this would require that we know quite reliably how many “career-level” positions exist for people with Ph.D.’s in science — something the author admits is unknown, even if you only count “faculty openings at research universities.” And why should we only count these kinds of positions? They are by no means the only career path available for science Ph.D.’s. I think we do ourselves a great disservice if we start viewing Ph.D. programs solely as machines for producing professors at R1 institutions.

My colleagues from grad school have gone on to a wide variety of fulfilling careers: they are now professors at liberal arts and community colleges, high-school teachers, lawyers, computer programmers, industrial scientists, science education specialists, journalists, consultants, and science policy experts, in addition to professors at research universities and career scientists at government labs. Sure, not all of them expected to take those career paths when they started grad school. But who are we to pre-select the ones that “get to” get science Ph.D.’s? How could we even determine which ones would thrive in the R1 environment? Grades and GRE scores certainly don’t tell the whole story; many of my most successful research-professor colleagues didn’t hit their stride until grad school, and many others didn’t realize until they had some lab experience under their belts that they really wanted to do something other than scientific research in a high-stress environment.

I like the idea of a funding structure that creates more staff-scientist positions in an effort to reduce the temptation to treat students and postdocs as cheap labor. But I don’t think we ought to bar anyone from grad school who shows the aptitude to get in and who is willing to work for the degree (though of course each institution has to set its own limits based on how many students it can reasonably support). Educate prospective students about the realities of the job market, including BOTH the dearth of “traditional” R1 faculty positions AND the wealth of “alternative” career paths, and let them make up their own minds about whether to pursue a graduate degree. We shouldn’t be arrogant enough to deny an advanced education to someone we suspect may not choose to follow in our footsteps.

By: Mateo

Mateo — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:43:35 +0000

I agree completely with Beryl and Barry.
I have had this issue myself, finishing PhD and finding out in what many call the ‘real world’ (another title for a post may be) that a PhD is too much. Positions of R&D in the industry prefer MS than a much more trained in science PhD… I wonder why….

By: Barry

Barry — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 02:57:53 +0000

An alternative to the above options in the article is to also increase the number of R&D positions outside of current universities by putting people with complementary skills together into economically viable alternatives. Make science and engineering more social.

There will be more start-up companies and greater diversity.

By: James

James — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 23:36:51 +0000

This is why every scientist I know from college (including myself) is on Wall Street.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 23:06:37 +0000

Spot on analysis. Perhaps schools could more actively invest their endowments in themselves by creating tenured professorships.

By: jonathan

jonathan — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:19:58 +0000

Wohoo! sweet article! I 100% agree. We just featured two posts about this situtation we are experiencing on the intramural side of things at the NIH. Take a look, and let us know what you think. Research Physician vs Research Scientist NIH Postdocs Do Not "Earn" a Living In the meantime, keep up the good work! great writing, really enjoying it.