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Goodbye Academia

anothersb.blogspot.co.uk

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Re: Goodbye Academia

#81

Post by santaclaus »

mynewwork wrote: post #64
plg wrote: post #47

Yet another worrying sign is that at my university (and I've heard similar stories from colleagues at others) is now deciding that instead of hiring 2 or 3 junior faculty positions (new academics straight out of a postdoc into their first faculty job), instead the priority is to spend the same money on one mid-career "poach" from a competing institution. Double the salary, and bigger startup package. Their rationale…

Most are making 5x to 7x? If we estimate that a professor in a low-paid field makes maybe $60k (ignoring the possibility of grants to pay for additional salary during the summer) this would mean most of your high school friends are now making $300k to $420k. It's rare that most of a high school or college's students go on to become 1 percenters.

OP might have graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#82

Post by deong »

curveship wrote: post #23

My own theory is that it will take academia another generation to figure out what it has done to itself. With entry-level conditions becoming more and more terrible, the best students will increasingly seek careers outside the academy, and academia will become populated by the second tier. At that point, it will have lost a prestige which will take another century to repair.

One reason that may not happen is that unless something drastic happens, supply for faculty positions will continue to outpace demand by a couple of orders of magnitude.

The average professional baseball player spends his life in the minor leagues, never making much, never seeing any real security. But the upside of being one of the lucky ones is such that you'll never have a lack of talented people trying to play in the big leagues. Academia's upsides are not financial, but the dynamics are basically the same.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#84

Post by deong »

jpwagner wrote: post #38
Create wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers make the problem clear. In 2007, the year before CERN first powered up the LHC, the lab produced 142 master's and Ph.D. theses, according to the lab's document server. Last year it produced 327. (Fermilab chipped in 54.) That abundance seems unlikely to vanish anytime soon, as last year ATLAS had 1000 grad students and CMS had 900. In contrast, the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics, curren…

The numbers make the problem clear Right, so the problem is that there are way too many students. Is the burden on the upcoming students to discontinue their track or on the universities (etc) to slow admissions and hiring postdocs?

The problem facing universities is that if they slow the rate of new PhD students and postdocs, they will quite simply have to shutter the labs. The entire system is built on the backs of very cheap research labor. That superstar researcher you see on television talking about the big new breakthrough from his or her lab hasn't written a line of code or laid hands on a beaker in 20 years. His or her job is to get a grant, hire students and postdocs to do the work, and immediately start chasing the next grant. Universities run on the 40% cut they get from these grants, which is why there's so much pressure to get funding in the first place.

Everyone knows we have too many PhD students, but no one can afford to be the person who doesn't hire more of them, since that would mean your lab has one person working, writing papers, and chasing funding, and the people you're competing with have an army doing the same things.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#85

Post by ChristianMarks »

I've left academia and returned, then left and am returning again. Thanks to the sequester, the NIH and NSF funding situation is bleak--I know successful PIs who currently have zilch. They're pursuing consulting contracts to make ends meet--at least in engineering this is possible. At this point it is trolling--pure sadism--to suggest that confidence and hard work will overcome the destructively competitive working conditions many academics look forward to every day. (I suppose I could be confident, for an additional charge.) Why is it trolling? Because the troll will never ever acknowledge his expectation that scientists (and science along with them) should thrive in a plutocracy as if it were a meritocracy [cf. Leiter, Brian, The Truth is Terrible (February 22, 2014). Daniel Came (ed.), Nietzsche on Morality and the Affirmation of Life (Oxford University Press, Forthcoming). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2099162 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2099162]

I happen to be returning to academia after leaving a non-academic job a few months ago. I spent the intervening months working an application with a friend. Over the past decade we have been attempting to solve a certain problem for ourselves. After dead end upon dead end, we have a prototype. Now, on the verge of re-joining the academic precariat, a potential customer has asked us for how much we would license our software. We'll see how that goes.

The probability of my landing a tenure-track position anywhere is less than the probability that the software venture succeeds (perhaps this isn't surprising, judging from my posts online here). One tires of playing zero-sum games for diminishing payoffs against people who should be your collaborators. This is the kind of the cost-benefit analysis one doesn't do explicitly that seems to underlie decisions to leave. (I am rational, according to a cost-benefit analysis I haven't done.)

Re: Goodbye Academia

#86

Post by dredmorbius »

bduerst wrote: post #61
cabalamat wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it wasn't for obscure scientific research, WhatsApp wouldn't exist.

Slippery Slope: If it wasn't for obscure scientific research, almost nothing we know would exist. It doesn't mean that obscure scientific research has the same market value as almost everything.

Oxygen has little market value, nor does language.

Market value is a measure of many things. Net benefit to civilization isn't one of them.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#87

Post by irollboozers »

dnautics wrote: post #55

I quit my second postdoc to launch a nonprofit research institute (we did not get funding, and are retrying later this year). I currently drive for lyft - and make more money than I did as a postdoc, with far fewer hours and better working conditions. This makes economic sense; it's not clear to me that what I was doing as a scientist was really doing society any good, at least as a late night driver I'm 1) giving pe…

The question is - would you continue to do science if you could remove all of the current broken system? Is doing science what you love? Is it possible that there can be a way to continue doing science without being a part of that machine?

Re: Goodbye Academia

#88

Post by Balgair »

My brother is leaving industry and going into the ivory tower later this year. He says that it's not just the DoD or the academy, its all government funding. He says the PhD is like a union card now. Lockheed just fired 4000 people[0] and NASA's average age is about 53 [1]. The entire DoD is aging and about to retire, with no-one in the 25-50 year old range, effectively. You'd think that they would then start hiring people in those age brackets, but no. It seems that the idea is to just let government funding die a slow death, that or transition to drones somehow. Its increasingly likely that the good jobs are going to be from private funding due to decreased tax revenue. We can see this in the Valley right now. This means you gotta know people to get the work, not just be 'good.'

[0]http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/awx... [1]https://wicn.nssc.nasa.gov/c10/cgi-bin/cognosisapi.dll?b_act...

Re: Goodbye Academia

#89

Post by larrys »

shas3 wrote: post #56
jseliger wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the allures of academia is the prospect of doing fundamental research It's also a false allure: the problem is that fundamental research requires funding, and the OP is pointing out that he can't get it. He'll be in essence locked out of research and not make a lot of money at it. This is like saying, "One of the allures of acting is the prospect of being famous and sleeping with lots of fans." On the one hand…

The analogy does not make sense. I know many colleagues who got into academia and were able to find plenty of funding. It wasn't a lucky break that helped them, but hard work and talent. The system is far from perfect, but it is not 'feudal', etc. as the parent comment claims. Systematic hard work can get you results in academia. From what I understand about show-biz, it requires a lot more than just talent and hard…

"Systematic hard work can get you results in academia. From what I understand about show-biz, it requires a lot more than just talent and hard work."

Agree (in that what you are saying makes sense. I don't have unfortunately (or maybe I should say fortunately) have personal experience in those particular job markets.)

In any case they appear to be pyramid type systems of success [1](and for that matter athletics are similar to this, right?) Things which many people strive for but few people actually achieve what they set out to achieve (throw startups into this mix as opposed to lifestyle type businesses).

One thing that these pursuits have in common is that money really isn't the primarily motivator in that while becoming a rock star may give you money (or an athlete or a top academic) I always thought that it was more the sense of accomplishment and fame that was much more important. Joe Dimaggio made quite a bit of money in his day but nowhere near what athletes today make but yet many people wanted to play baseball back then.

[1] Perhaps someone could point out the right phrase for this concept. I'm looking for the word that describes professions where people are generally driven to work hard believing they will be the ones that become famous or well known or "the best".

Re: Goodbye Academia

#90

Post by scott_s »

shas3 wrote: post #56
jseliger wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the allures of academia is the prospect of doing fundamental research It's also a false allure: the problem is that fundamental research requires funding, and the OP is pointing out that he can't get it. He'll be in essence locked out of research and not make a lot of money at it. This is like saying, "One of the allures of acting is the prospect of being famous and sleeping with lots of fans." On the one hand…

The analogy does not make sense. I know many colleagues who got into academia and were able to find plenty of funding. It wasn't a lucky break that helped them, but hard work and talent. The system is far from perfect, but it is not 'feudal', etc. as the parent comment claims. Systematic hard work can get you results in academia. From what I understand about show-biz, it requires a lot more than just talent and hard…

I got a PhD in computer science, and I landed a research job in industry where I get to do both research and development. So, half production, half academia.

I consider myself extraordinarily lucky. I can point to many different instances of luck that enabled me to be where I am now. Hard work and talent are a given, but among those that work hard and are talented, there's a lot of blind luck that determines who gets the few positions that are available. I continually remind myself not to fall prey to the narrative fallacy, and think that I was somehow "destined" for my current position, and that I got here entirely because of my own work. I was not, and I did not.

I know people who did not land those academic positions, and are either in industry not doing research, or stuck in the post-doc waiting room.

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