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As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

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Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#31

Post by YetAnotherNick »

chrisseaton wrote: post #11
refurb wrote: post #10

Supply and demand. We produce more PhDs than needed by either academia or industry. Hence, the burden of post-docs just grow (I was talking to a biology PhD who said 5-6 years of post-doc was typical, for chemistry I've seen people do 2).

> We produce more PhDs than needed by either academia or industry. I don't think so - industry can't hire enough PhDs. In my field (programming languages) shortage of qualified people is a bit of a problem at the moment! We wish there were more being produced.

Most Ph.D.s are unemployable in the field that they did Ph.D. in. There is only say very small pool Ph.D. topics which are needed in industry like ML, distributed system, pharmacy etc. Most of the Ph.D. is in fields like humanities, psycology, physics etc. doesn't have many openings in industry.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#32

Post by cs137 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #7
baka367 wrote: post #3

I spent 4 + 1 (extra year) going for the PhD. Getting funding for anything was nothing short of nightmare and the workload was (obviously) very high. Eventually I decided to scrap those 5 years for a triple salary as a junior developer and had a successful career since. Is casual coding more interesting than research/teaching - no, but staying in academia requires way more altruism than I could find in me. I also sti…

If you did a full PhD in what sense did you 'scrap' it? You just didn't do the defence?

It sounds like he went ABD.

In the US, PhDs can take 6-8+ years. There are some shitty advisors who delay their students' graduations to get additional low-wage labor. Also, the academic job market is terrible and has been for 30+ years, so it takes a full year just to do the search.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#33

Post by biophysboy »

The quote from a prof upset that they only received 28 applicants in about 6 months is pretty rich to read, as someone who is in currently a PhD student. They should be delighted so many people want a job with indefinite length, uncertain prospects, and very little pay.

I just recently got a post doc offer from someone, which I will almost certainly turn down because I know the reality: academia sucks, science is great. For years, people have put up with the former to enjoy the latter, but I think we are hitting a threshold.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#34

Post by adam_arthur »

cs137 wrote: post #27
adam_arthur wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Job openings vs labor supply tells you most of what you need to know. Job openings exceed job seekers by a record amount. Unemployment is close to a record low.

In other words, the dysfunction (unemployment) on which capitalists rely, because it scares people into taking shitty deals, is a bit less of a problem... but it's also causing other dysfunctions, because it turns out that this is a shitty system.

Well, if you want uncontrolled inflation, keep advocating for policies that push unemployment below the rate of sustainable full employment. It seems to be making people happy, after all.

Not like there are hundreds of years of economic history to learn from...

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#35

Post by kmmlng »

baka367 wrote: post #3

I spent 4 + 1 (extra year) going for the PhD. Getting funding for anything was nothing short of nightmare and the workload was (obviously) very high. Eventually I decided to scrap those 5 years for a triple salary as a junior developer and had a successful career since. Is casual coding more interesting than research/teaching - no, but staying in academia requires way more altruism than I could find in me. I also sti…

A PhD can mean a lot of different things. Personally, I'm employed as a research associate while doing a PhD, which in theory means I should do the PhD as part of my job. In practice, I do not get to do any actual research during the job and the PhD is relegated to weekends.

What I find curious: I get paid to do lots of things which are clearly complete nonsense, but the funding comes with the requirement that these specific nonsensical things must be done. I could do lots of useful things, but I do not get paid for those.

I'm far enough into the process that I've decided to just collect the stupid credential before I move on. Which is funny because I did not get into this for the credentials, but dropping out at this point would just look weird on my CV.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#36

Post by InefficientRed »

sseagull wrote: post #12
microtonal wrote: post #4

If you pay much lower than the industry and only give people temporary positions, it's not surprising people go elsewhere when they can. The solution is also quite obvious...

I hate the trivialization of this. The solution is not obvious. Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from? At least in my areas of science (chemistry), most of this money comes from grants, which comes from the NIH, DOE, or NSF depending on the project. Ultimately it comes from taxpayers, and portioned out by Congress. So the solution is either to get Congress to really care about this (…

I hate the helplessness of this. You have agency. You also have responsibility.

You have a chemistry phd. You don't have to build your career on other people's crushed financial futures. Either find a job where you can pay people well or find a job where you don't need to manage other people's labor to stay employed.

I have A LOT of dubious pet projects I could convince NSF to fund and would love to work on if I had the moral stomach requires to convince highly educated broke 30 year olds to give me hundreds of thousands of dollars in free labor. But I don't.

So instead I turned down TT offers and went to industry where I spend a lot of time convincing people with the money to actually pay living wages with good benefits to people who can work on slightly different things. I don't have a lab with my name on it. I don't have an office. I will never have tenure. No on calls me Professor or even Doctor. But I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds. My post-docs are paid $100k-$200k.

Stop relying on broke kids to fund your dreams. Leave academia and find a company who will fund your work. Or stay in academia and don't hire people to help you unless you can pay them even close to what they're worth.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#37

Post by Geonode »

sseagull wrote: post #12
microtonal wrote: post #4

If you pay much lower than the industry and only give people temporary positions, it's not surprising people go elsewhere when they can. The solution is also quite obvious...

I hate the trivialization of this. The solution is not obvious. Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from? At least in my areas of science (chemistry), most of this money comes from grants, which comes from the NIH, DOE, or NSF depending on the project. Ultimately it comes from taxpayers, and portioned out by Congress. So the solution is either to get Congress to really care about this (…

We could reduce the population of college admin which has exponentially increased in the past 40 years.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#38

Post by cs137 »

sseagull wrote: post #12
microtonal wrote: post #4

If you pay much lower than the industry and only give people temporary positions, it's not surprising people go elsewhere when they can. The solution is also quite obvious...

I hate the trivialization of this. The solution is not obvious. Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from? At least in my areas of science (chemistry), most of this money comes from grants, which comes from the NIH, DOE, or NSF depending on the project. Ultimately it comes from taxpayers, and portioned out by Congress. So the solution is either to get Congress to really care about this (…

You're correct. On the other hand, college tuitions are ridiculous, and the modern university is literally a billion-dollar corporation.

There's no excuse for the academic job market being this lousy when universities have so much money coming in from so many different sources.

The problem is that they spend it all on administration. Paying a "Dean of Multiple-Choice Quantum Intersectionality" $600,000/year is a way for rich white elitists to pretend they care about things they actually don't.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#39

Post by dagw »

chrisseaton wrote: post #11
refurb wrote: post #10

Supply and demand. We produce more PhDs than needed by either academia or industry. Hence, the burden of post-docs just grow (I was talking to a biology PhD who said 5-6 years of post-doc was typical, for chemistry I've seen people do 2).

> We produce more PhDs than needed by either academia or industry. I don't think so - industry can't hire enough PhDs. In my field (programming languages) shortage of qualified people is a bit of a problem at the moment! We wish there were more being produced.

industry can't hire enough PhDs

I think both are true. Academia is producing too many PhDs in fields that industry isn't interested in and too few with a background that industry wants/needs.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#40

Post by chrisseaton »

quantum_magpie wrote: post #25
chrisseaton wrote: post #9

> Postdocs in general aren’t paid well Sounds like everyone understands the issue... so why don't they respond by meeting the market price? If you want to buy something like a tissue sample for an experiment in a lab then you pay the market price. You wouldn't think to offer 20% of the market price and then be puzzled when nobody will sell it to you - you just pay the going price, and it's part of the cost of doing r…

The ones in control of money and the ones in charge of running their lab and hiring postdocs are not the same people. If you can't hire a postdoc for shitty salary, then that shitty salary can be repurposed for something else. The former won't ever budge for the latter until the whole system collapses. And even then, I dread that they will just leave it in ruins.

> The ones in control of money and the ones in charge of running their lab and hiring postdocs are not the same people.

Does this disconnect happen in other spending decisions?

For example does the maintenance department ask the administrators for money for new lightbulbs that cost $1 each and the administrators ask them to buy them for 25c instead, even if they aren't available for that price?

How can you even decide what to pay someone without looking at what the market says? Just pick a random number? If you're going to do that why not try to literally pay minimum wage?

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