Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Academia's 1%

chroniclevitae.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 144 posts

Re: Academia's 1%

#61

Post by hga »

themoonbus wrote: post #58
PaulHoule wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One difference is that the private sector gives second chances and academia doesn't.

Or, to put it another way, there are far more paths to success in the private sector than in academia. People change careers, move upwards, downwards, sideways, etc. Academia is much less forgiving.

In STEM, I have the very strong impression that there are many paths that will take you off the academic track, and essentially none that will get you back on it. E.g. you have to keep up with the current literature to some degree.

Re: Academia's 1%

#62

Post by Chinjut »

microcolonel wrote: post #60
projectileboy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't necessarily disagree with anything you've said, but there's a tone here and in Hacker News in general that bothers me - a fierce meritocracy that doesn't seem to have a scrap of empathy for anyone who doesn't fit into the top 1%. So if the rest of us lazy slobs in the 99% are unworthy to get into the best grad schools or Y Combinator, I'm to assume we should just find ourselves a quiet spot in the midwest in…

The fact that your first alternative to succeeding is giving up entirely, I don't see how you could make it to the midwest with enough money to buy the gun you'll kill yourself with. Resources; time, energy, attention; are limited. If you allocate resources to less-than-best people, you get less-than-best results, most of the time. If these people are the kind of weak, selfish pricks who think that the world owes the…

Our species would get killed if we had any empathy for anyone who doesn't fit into the top 1%? Your comment certainly conforms to the attitude projectileboy was lamenting...

Re: Academia's 1%

#63

Post by acadien »

impendia wrote: post #35

I am a mathematics professor at an R1 university who has been directly involved in faculty searches for four years in a row. This article is quite mistaken, at least from the perspective of an academic mathematician. (Maybe it is more accurate in the humanities.) (1) This year, two of the three candidates whom we interviewed got their Ph.D.'s at non-top-20 universities. We made offers to both of them. One of them tur…

>For one, the absolute leading researchers are at the top universities, and there is a big gap between these people and merely very good researchers.

I have noticed the opposite effect. Typically the best researchers are the worst instructors, prepare the least for their courses and couldn't care less about their teaching quality. Those that are both solid instructors and researchers are exceptionally rare.

While leading researchers may have a better grasp of their specialized field this is often not applicable in graduate courses. The exception being when those professors develop an entire course around their research and (often) force many of their research students into that course.

Re: Academia's 1%

#64

Post by nycticorax »

cle wrote: post #26
nycticorax wrote: post #8

The author seems to view the hiring statistics she cites as evidence of "bias", but I didn't see any attempt to control for the actual quality of the applicants. I.e. You could read all of this as just more evidence that the "system" works: the good schools tend to be enriched for good graduate students, who then tend to get a lot of the tenure-track jobs.

I was thinking the same thing, and then I read: "With institutional bias in hiring now proven by multiple social scientists..." Is anyone familiar with these studies? This is a crucial piece of information for the article.

I concluded that in that line, the author was referring to the statistics she had previously discussed. But I have to admit that it's ambiguous.

Re: Academia's 1%

#65

Post by east2west »

skosuri wrote: post #51
east2west wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know many biomedical faculty members in Stanfod pay their postdocs below NIH suggested levels, just because they can. I would caution people of survivor's bias. Only saints promote people with strong different options and who act on their options. Academia is full of strong egos.

Really, that is surprising, because it is disallowed. Stanford, like all UC's where I am at, have salary minimums. Stanford's minimum is higher than the NIH levels [1]. It would be hard to pay someone under the table, so I don't see how this is really occurring. [1] http://postdocs.stanford.edu/handbook/salary.html

I heard from my postdoc friends at Stanford a couple of years ago about the pay levels. It could have changed now but I doubt it. Do postdocs at Stanford still pay tuitions? My experience is that UCSF > UC Berkeley > Stanford as far as postdocs' compensation is concerned.

Re: Academia's 1%

#66

Post by MicroBerto »

> "..a quarter of all universities account for 71 to 86 percent of all tenure-track faculty.."

I find it funny when people are continually "surprised" by the appearance of the Pareto Principle.

It is everywhere (everywhere!), and that is why you should never stop fighting to become the top 10% of anything you do (that you care about).

Re: Academia's 1%

#67

Post by Chathamization »

hga wrote: post #55
Dewie wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't everyone who joins the military attain the rank of colonel or higher eventually?

On the other hand, when you become an officer you'd have to be grossly ignorant not to know about the (US) military "up or out" policy. One complaint here that seems to be legit is that students are not told how poor their job prospects are in raw numbers. Now, some of that is no doubt to avoid discouragement, you don't know if X student will later shine, or burn out, but....

That's an issue for academia in general. One gets the sense that during the boom times, the universities stopped caring about the job prospects of their graduates since they figured the degree would give them an advantage one way or another.

Re: Academia's 1%

#68

Post by rflrob »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #11
nycticorax wrote: post #8

The author seems to view the hiring statistics she cites as evidence of "bias", but I didn't see any attempt to control for the actual quality of the applicants. I.e. You could read all of this as just more evidence that the "system" works: the good schools tend to be enriched for good graduate students, who then tend to get a lot of the tenure-track jobs.

>You could read all of this as just more evidence that the "system" works: the good schools tend to be enriched for good graduate students, who then tend to get a lot of the tenure-track jobs. Then, I think we have to continue reasoning, why do those grad-students grow up and find they can only acquire tenure-track jobs by jumping to lower-tier institutions, where their own academic "children" will be considered infe…

They do that because their "better" colleagues from the top tier also get the jobs at the top tier. Note that "better" likely includes a healthy dose of luck.

Re: Academia's 1%

#69

Post by eli_gottlieb »

chaoxu wrote: post #48
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that much is obvious. But you would think that if a department is staffed by, say, MIT graduates, that they can do MIT-quality research, thanks to their MIT training, without being in the geographical vicinity of downtown Cambridge . Despite this, academic status-signaling seems to assume that the geographical vicinity is of profound importance.

Not everyone mit graduate is MIT professor good.

That's possible, but when we know that many people who are MIT Professor Good could not get into MIT for undergrad[1], it still requires us to believe MIT's admissions and graduation criteria for PhD students are very loose compared to all their other observed standards.

[1] -- http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2003

Re: Academia's 1%

#70

Post by skosuri »

east2west wrote: post #65
skosuri wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, that is surprising, because it is disallowed. Stanford, like all UC's where I am at, have salary minimums. Stanford's minimum is higher than the NIH levels [1]. It would be hard to pay someone under the table, so I don't see how this is really occurring. [1] http://postdocs.stanford.edu/handbook/salary.html

I heard from my postdoc friends at Stanford a couple of years ago about the pay levels. It could have changed now but I doubt it. Do postdocs at Stanford still pay tuitions? My experience is that UCSF > UC Berkeley > Stanford as far as postdocs' compensation is concerned.

Stanford has always been pretty good with postdoc pay, and postdocs never paid tuition. Pretty much all of these schools and mine (UCLA) are on similar levels. At all UC's postdocs are unionized as well given additional protections (like 1yr contracts, limits on training time, etc).
Post reply on HN