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How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)

blogs.lse.ac.uk

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Re: How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)

#31

Post by daleroberts »

1stop wrote: post #26
daleroberts wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg to differ. You can make a significant amount of money as an academic in Australia if you are in the right discipline to get a market loading and be able to do consulting on the side. AU$200-300K a year is easy to achieve for these academics some are even pulling in $500K+ by the end of their career. Plus the 17% superannuation means you'll retire with a nice big pot of retirement money at the end. Very hard to…

Which discipline are you speaking of? That kind of money I've only heard of in finance land (for academics)... and that kind of dried up after 2008.

Yes, Finance is the biggest and the money still flows. Look at all the recent hires in Finance at UNSW and UMelb who have been appointed at the Senior Lecturer level straight after PhD. Market loadings are paid in Medecine too. Probably Law as well... I've also heard that Statistics and doing Machine Learning consulting on side is good too. What surprised me the most is all the arts/sociology academics doing big consulting contracts connected to "foreign aid" work.

Re: How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)

#33

Post by i000 »

danieltillett wrote: post #17
timrpeterson wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having tenure affords opportunity. Can't get the golden parachute unless you play the game long enough (i.e., waste prime years).

I certainly missed the golden parachute. Even if I hung around until I was deadwood I would not have made anything financially. No academic in Australia gets rich just out of being an academic. I don’t regret my time as an academic other than my last two years. I should have left earlier, but the security the job afforded my family kept me there longer than I really should have stayed. This is a mistake many people m…

A well established principal investigator said this to his lab during a crisis "we are out of money" meeting: "We are all in the same boat, but only I have a parachute"

Re: How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)

#34

Post by daleroberts »

sillygeese wrote: post #27
daleroberts wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg to differ. You can make a significant amount of money as an academic in Australia if you are in the right discipline to get a market loading and be able to do consulting on the side. AU$200-300K a year is easy to achieve for these academics some are even pulling in $500K+ by the end of their career. Plus the 17% superannuation means you'll retire with a nice big pot of retirement money at the end. Very hard to…

Ah yes, fat salaries on other people's money, and a fat pension on other people's money! Sweet deal!

Yep, you'll find fat cats in every industry. My main point is that not only is there "dualisation" like is proposed in the article but out of those who have made it into a tenured position there is another hard split between those academics that are creaming it and those that do ok.

Re: How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)

#35

Post by rhodri »

i000 wrote: post #33
danieltillett wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly missed the golden parachute. Even if I hung around until I was deadwood I would not have made anything financially. No academic in Australia gets rich just out of being an academic. I don’t regret my time as an academic other than my last two years. I should have left earlier, but the security the job afforded my family kept me there longer than I really should have stayed. This is a mistake many people m…

A well established principal investigator said this to his lab during a crisis "we are out of money" meeting: "We are all in the same boat, but only I have a parachute"

I can't imagine a parachute is that useful on a sinking ship

Re: How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)

#36

Post by theOnliest »

akshaypuradkar wrote: post #24
theOnliest wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your point, but this kind of attitude often (intended or not) leaves humanities PhDs out in the cold. Sure, for a PhD in computer science you might convince the public that your work is worthwhile (there may be some practical application). My PhD is in the field of music theory...a field which has practically zero real-world applications. It's still important as an academic field, but the long-term benef…

"long-term benefits to society" is one attitude. Surely you have better argument in defense of your field or humanities generally. Can you elaborate a bit on the kind of attitude you talk of?

Sure. (I wasn't as clear as I might have been...it's early yet.)

I was preempting a response that I often hear when this debate comes up, which is that "the market" will fix the problem of underemployed PhDs. This often turns into an argument that research that has "practical value" (as judged by the general public) is somehow more important than that which does not. On Hacker News I sense that it's common to read "PhD" as "STEM PhD," and the response is "it's fine, they can just find positions in the industry."

This logic tends to fall short when applied to the humanities in general, and external (non-university) funding for humanities research is shockingly less than those in STEM fields. The National Endowment for the Humanities has an annual budget of $167 million, and the National Science Foundation, compared to $7 billion for the NSF (numbers from Wikipedia). Humanities research often tends to get mocked in debates on public funding: "Why are we, the taxpayers, paying this person to go look through archives in Germany looking for fragments of music by Robert Schumann?"

The humanities do not, in general, have "practical application," at least if practical application means monetary value (as it often does). As 1stop notes in a sibling, humanities research is often research for the sake of culture, or for the sake of research itself. I got into my field because I love it, but also because I think there is inherent value in knowledge. The number of people who will read my dissertation could likely all enjoy a meal together, but for those few people it matters deeply.

So there is some long-term benefit to society for humanities research (other people, likely also scholars, can benefit from it later), but it's not a benefit that's easily quantified. In today's society, this is a problem without a clear solution, and it's an attitude I see a lot on HN (with constant talk of valuation and whatnot).

Re: How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)

#37

Post by loup-vaillant »

1stop wrote: post #29
sillygeese wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, fat salaries on other people's money, and a fat pension on other people's money! Sweet deal!

... That describes every job... ever. Unless you are the one stealing the resources directly from the land... in which case: Fat salaries on other peoples' property. But hey, hate on the academics, they are the WORST! right?

> That describes every job... ever

Wait, what? Most jobs give you a salary, sure, but you nearly always end up producing far more value than you are paid back. The thieves are the shareholders of the company you serve.

(As for the land… not every piece of land is someone's property —and that's good.)

Re: How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)

#38

Post by tdumitrescu »

danieltillett wrote: post #13

As some one who managed to succeed in the academic rat race (tenured professor) and who quit to do more productive things, my feeling is academia is more like cult. When inside it you believe you are doing important things, and on occasion you actual do (i.e. teaching and research), but the important activities are basically a hobby you fit around your full-time job of administration and politics. Once outside you re…

My experience was very similar. While I was in the land of postdoc fellowships and part-time teaching, it was a great job where I gladly accepted low pay in return for freedom to work on my own projects and structure my time independently. By the time I was a few years into a tenured post (at a European university), the amount of administrative drudgery, committees, useless meetings and other BS entirely unrelated to my skillset as an academic had grown tremendously - enough to make it quite easy to quit when I saw opportunities in the software industry. When I look back at it now, I still bristle a little at how much worse it got over the years, almost feels like a bait-and-switch. I have several other friends who've since left their tenured positions while still young, all of us with this feeling that we were stuck in a type of work we really hadn't signed up for.

Re: How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)

#39

Post by loup-vaillant »

nice1 wrote: post #6

If someone comes up with a better system, it will be adopted. It is very hard to determine who has the capacity to be a Professor. The current system works fine most of the time. It is true that crackpots get through on occasion, but the vast majority of professorial appointments are reasonable.

> If someone comes up with a better system, it will be adopted.

No. New, better systems are automatically adopted only if they help the establishment. Anything that question the privileges of those currently in power will meet heavy resistance (or inertia).

Re: How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)

#40

Post by danieltillett »

daleroberts wrote: post #25
danieltillett wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly missed the golden parachute. Even if I hung around until I was deadwood I would not have made anything financially. No academic in Australia gets rich just out of being an academic. I don’t regret my time as an academic other than my last two years. I should have left earlier, but the security the job afforded my family kept me there longer than I really should have stayed. This is a mistake many people m…

I beg to differ. You can make a significant amount of money as an academic in Australia if you are in the right discipline to get a market loading and be able to do consulting on the side. AU$200-300K a year is easy to achieve for these academics some are even pulling in $500K+ by the end of their career. Plus the 17% superannuation means you'll retire with a nice big pot of retirement money at the end. Very hard to…

Well those of us in the natural sciences don’t bring in that sort of money. Given how much work and poor pay is required to get a tenured position the pay is not good.
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