111–120 of 180 posts
“40% move to China” This is the plan not a coincidence. China pays huge “grants” to their citizens to come to the US, get educated, work in big tech/science, then bring it all home.
Thousand talent tier incentive is drop in the bucket, most sea turtles return because only so high you can climb in US with cold war bamboo ceiling. Past certain point, both US PRC can cut big checks, PRC lets a yellow face climb to top.
My understanding is that scientific research has a dual problem, where the number of students needed to carry out existing professors' research is much larger than the number of junior faculty positions generally available. The result being that most trained PhDs must leave (US) academia because there are no jobs for them. In fact, I've heard scientists complain that universities owe it to students to provide more he…
> where the number of students needed to carry out existing professors' research is much larger than the number of junior faculty positions generally available.
BUT you are missing that there is still demand for positions out in industry as well as government labs. But there's also a decline in that right now as we're going through a time of encouraging more engineering and less research.
In reality there's a pipeline of research. If you haven't been introduced to it, I like to point to NASA's TRL (Technology Readiness Level) chart[0]. The pipeline is from very basic research to proven systems. Traditionally academia and government labs do the majority of work in the low TRL while industry research handles mid level (stuff that isn't quite ready for production). The reason for this is due to the higher rate of failure of low level research and so shifts risks away from industry. Not to mention that industry has different incentives and is going to be more narrowly focused. Academia and gov labs can research more long term projects that will have large revenue growths but may take decades to get those returns. I mean how much do we get from the invention of calculus? Or the creation of WWW? We'd also get far less growth and profits were these not more distributed.
So while yes, getting a professorship is a challenge and highly competitive, it is far from the only path for these graduates. We can also do a lot to increase (or decrease) their options by increasing (or decreasing) funding for science. There's a lot of science that happens outside academic labs and they still depend on PhD graduates to be able to do most of that work. If you want these people to have jobs, fund more low level research[1]
> I've heard scientists complain that universities owe it to students to provide more help finding a job in industry after they graduate.
I mean even putting the personal experience to the side, don't we want to make the most use of the resources we have? Don't we want to get graduates connected to labs/work places where they will be most effective? This is still a surprisingly complex problem to resolve and even limiting the hiring problem to PhDs (where there's far less noise than general hiring) it is still a complicated problem.
[0] https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/somd/space-communications-...
[1] But I'd also say that we might be encouraging too many people to do PhDs. Doing a PhD "for a job" is a bit odd. A masters is better intended for that. But a PhD is more directed towards doing research work. That said, in the worst case a PhD says "this person can work on ill-defined tasks and has the diligence to see them through." Regardless of the industry, that is a pretty useful skill.
My understanding is that scientific research has a dual problem, where the number of students needed to carry out existing professors' research is much larger than the number of junior faculty positions generally available. The result being that most trained PhDs must leave (US) academia because there are no jobs for them. In fact, I've heard scientists complain that universities owe it to students to provide more he…
Quit after two semesters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thousand talent tier incentive is drop in the bucket, most sea turtles return because only so high you can climb in US with cold war bamboo ceiling. Past certain point, both US PRC can cut big checks, PRC lets a yellow face climb to top.
Maybe in the defense industry. Elsewhere? Nah.
"Using newly-assembled data from 1980 through 2024, we show that 25% of scientifically-active, US-trained STEM PhD graduates leave the US within 15 years of graduating." I believe there will be a significant "discontinuity" in the data beginning in 2025. Likely along the lines of (1) US-born science majors going abroad for their PhD's (and likely staying there afterwards), and (2) a major decline in foreign students…
We tend to overestimate the short term effects due to polarization and the constant media cycle.
My understanding is that scientific research has a dual problem, where the number of students needed to carry out existing professors' research is much larger than the number of junior faculty positions generally available. The result being that most trained PhDs must leave (US) academia because there are no jobs for them. In fact, I've heard scientists complain that universities owe it to students to provide more he…
If the culture normalized such that a much larger proportion of research was conducted by permanent, non-faculty, research employees, this would both reduce the need for so many students and increase the jobs available for students, and create a new employment niche with a different balance of teaching/administration/research. It would basically be turning "post doc" into an actual career rather than a stop over. Thi…
Not to mention that the type of research being done has drastically changed too. There's many more projects that require wide collaboration. You're not going to do something like CERN, DESI, LIGO, or many other scientific mega projects from a single lab, or even single field of study.
The academic deal has changed. It used to be that by becoming a professor you were granted facilities and time to carry out your research. In return you had to help educate and foster the next generation. It is mutually beneficial. There were definitely abusers of the system, but it is generally not too difficult to tell who in your own department is trying to take advantage of the system, but incredibly difficult to identify these people when looking from the perspective of a university administration. There's been more centralization in the university administration and I'm afraid Goodhart's Law is in full force now.
What I'd like to see is more a return to the Laissez-faire approach. It shouldn't be completely relaxed, but to summarize Mervin Kelly (who ran Bell Labs): "You don't manage a bunch of geniuses, they already know what needs to be worked on. That's what makes them experts in the first place." At the end of the day we can't run academia like a business and it really shouldn't be. The profits generated from academia are less direct and more distributed through society. Evaluating universities by focusing on their expenditures and direct profits alone is incredibly naive. We're better able to make less naive evaluations today, but we still typically don't (it is still fairly complex)
What I mean is that if you don't like the company you work for in, say, SF, you can switch companies without having to switch houses. In Academia... it's akin to going to conservatory for classical music: you have to travel to where the orchestral openings are. This is a bit of a legacy problem from Wilhelm von Humboldt's idea to combine teaching and research, which led to the modern university system.
I'm far from the first person to say this, btw. Convergent Research's "Focused Research Organization" concept as well as The Arc and Astera Institutes are a few recent examples of people trying to provide escape routes from having to deal the large degree of "institutional tech/systems debt" in university contexts. For a great essay on why this is necessary, see "A Vision of Meta-science" (highly recommended if you are interested) [1].
The good news is that people are starting to come around to the idea that the scientific ecosystem would benefit from more diversity in the shape, size, and form of science-generating institutions.=The NSF just announced a new program to fund such "independent research organizations." I think this could give people who want to go into the sciences as a second career and who have a bit of an entrepreneurial tendency a new kind of Job opportunity [2]. We talk about Founders all of the time in Tech, we should probably have some equivalent in the best possible sense of the term, in the Sciences.
[1] https://scienceplusplus.org/metascience/ [2] https://www.nsf.gov/news/nsf-announces-new-initiative-launch...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the culture normalized such that a much larger proportion of research was conducted by permanent, non-faculty, research employees, this would both reduce the need for so many students and increase the jobs available for students, and create a new employment niche with a different balance of teaching/administration/research. It would basically be turning "post doc" into an actual career rather than a stop over. Thi…
Your suggestion would have fewer fresh eyes to look at the problem. If the scientific enterprise were just about churning out widgets, then yes it’s better to have permanent staff. But having a strong training pipeline for the globe is a huge plus for US prestige, and the top people are still offered jobs as faculty or industry within the country, so it still a net gain for USA. But it’s brutally competitive for the…
> Your suggestion would have fewer fresh eyes to look at the problem
But the current system has a problem of training people for a job and then sending them to do something else. Even a professorship is a very different job than a graduate researcher or postdoc. Most professors do little research themselves these days, instead managing research. Don't you think that's a little odd, not to mention wasteful? We definitely should have managers, and managers with research backgrounds themselves, but why not let people continue honing their research skills?
> it’s brutally competitive for the individual scientists
1/4 within 15 years doesn’t sound like a huge problem.. if it were 80% within 5 years, ok you’d have my attention.