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

science.org

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

#51

Post by dagw »

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...

They could also make job more attractive. I certainly know people who have the skills and passion to be attracted to the idea of a postdoc, many would even accept the pay they're currently offering. What they won't accept is being worked to death on bullshit tasks irrelevant to their research and being treated as free labor by their superiors.

Treat postdocs with respect, give them plenty of autonomy and freedom to focus on their research, don't make them work long hours or use them as servants, and you'll no doubt find many people willing to take the job without raising the pay.

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

#52

Post by thinkharderdev »

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.

I'm genuinely curious, does the work you are hiring for really require a PhD? To put it a different way, if you and the current employees in your job all started immediately after finishing your undergrad degree would you be any worse at your job?

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

#53

Post by MontyCarloHall »

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 (…

>Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from?

Cut the number of postdoc positions in half, double the salaries of the remaining positions, and make it much more competitive to get a postdoc. The purpose of a postdoc is a final training step for someone to become faculty. Only people who are clearly faculty material after finishing their PhD should even attempt a postdoc. Unfortunately, many professors take on postdocs who have no shot of becoming faculty because their lab runs on the cheap, experienced labor they bring.

Remember, the replacement rate for academia is exactly 1 postdoc with faculty aspirations per lifetime of each professor. Anything >1 and academia must grow exponentially to accommodate every single postdoc who desires a faculty position. Most professors have >>1 postdoc over the course of their careers, which means there are way too many postdoc positions in the world.

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

#54

Post by JOnAgain »

“Money is just sitting there that isn’t being used … and there’s these projects that aren’t moving anywhere as a result,”

What money?!? Lol. Headline should read, “People with 10 years post-secondary education not applying to jobs paying less than corporate entry level jobs.”

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

#55

Post by bjourne »

I think Western academia is mostly reliant on immigration. Few natives would accept the low pay/high workload combination that is a postdoc, but for an immigrant from a third world country it might be an amazing opportunity. Same reason most fruit and berry pickers also are immigrants.

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

#58

Post by jjoonathan »

slurpmaker wrote: post #42

Make it make sense. Offer Postdocs an actual career path not based on broken tenure and disposable adjunct professor roles, with hundreds if not thousands of applicants. Why would someone, with any field of study, be a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python developer role? Moreso, post doc'ing for the wrong professor can ruin your career, why risk that eithe…

"There's a shortage of Lamborghinis!"

"Oh? At which price point?"

"At the $4000 price point! It's a travesty!"

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

#59

Post by MrPatan »

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 (…

> Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from?

From defunding shit research. And don't give me that crap, you know exactly what kind of research you could cut without anything of value being lost. Start there.

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

#60

Post by sseagull »

cs137 wrote: post #38
sseagull wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh you have absolutely zero argument from me. One problem is the “professionalization” of universities, who are now run by admin “professionals", which removes power from the faculty.

Although one part of this is regulatory burden by the state. This adds lots of overhead which the university would probably rather not have.

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