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A quarter of US-trained scientists eventually leave

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Re: A quarter of US-trained scientists eventually leave

#121

Post by 8note »

ribosometronome wrote: post #27
programmarchy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academia is more than a transaction. It's a social good. One that's also subsidized by the US taxpayer.

If we were to compare it to a transaction, I think something like California exporting alfalfa to Saudi Arabia might make more sense. We've only but so much water to use and it's far from absurd to question if it makes sense to let our limited resources get drained for exporting things elsewhere.

if it didnt make sense, woupdnt the water be going to something else?

the incentives might not be set up for the best market, but Saudi Arabia im sure is willing to outbid just about any other use for that water

Re: A quarter of US-trained scientists eventually leave

#124

Post by gigel82 »

US doesn't train anyone, that headline would only make sense somewhere in... every other country in the world (more or less), where the government actually subsidizes education (a lot of the times up to 100%).

In the US, people pay for their own training, so they can damn well go wherever they please.

Re: A quarter of US-trained scientists eventually leave

#125

Post by PaulHoule »

analog31 wrote: post #105
materials4028 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> much larger than the number of junior faculty positions generally available Expanding on this a bit, insight credited to bonoboTP: in a steady state the number of junior faculty positions will only open up at the same rate as current faculty retires. But each faculty member is expected to train dozens of students that are all in principle qualified for such jobs. Therefore, the vast majority, let's say 95%, of PhD…

When I was a physics grad student ~35 years go, this was called "the birth control problem. I had every intention of going into industry. I described it to my dad who got his PhD in the 1950s and he said it was the same back then. But there's a perennial "this time it will be different."

It wasn't the same in the 1950s. When it became really clear to me how dire the long term job situation was when I getting my PhD in the 1990s I started combing through issues of Physics Today and noticed that the field and academia as a whole was explosively expanding from 1920-1968 or so and there was a sudden crisis in the late 1960s, with an echo in the late 1970s and also when I was in in the late 1990s. (Physics Today said I had 2% odds of getting a permanent job even coming from a top school)

I had one day when I'd posted a Java applet to the web that got 100,000 impressions and getting so much attention for that and so little attention for papers that took me a year to write made me resolve to tell my thesis advisor that I was going to quit. Before I could tell him, he told me he had just a year of funding for me and I thought.. I could tough it out for a year. People were shocked when I did a postdoc when most of my cohort were going straight to finance.

My mental health went downhill in Germany and I stomped away, in retrospect I was the only native English speaker at the institute and I could have found a place for myself for some time had I taken on the task of proofreading papers and I can easily imagine I could have made it in academia but heck, life on a horse farm doing many sorts of software development has been a blast.

Re: A quarter of US-trained scientists eventually leave

#126

Post by aleph_minus_one »

MostlyStable wrote: post #89
j7ake wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I'm more skeptical than you are of the value of a string of new students coming through as opposed to just keeping the very best students, I'm also not suggesting we mandate this change or force it. I'm suggesting that we give people more information to make better informed decisions. If students decide that they are comfortable with a sub 20% job placement rate, then great, nothing needs to change. If they are…

> If students decide that they are comfortable with a sub 20% job placement rate, then great, nothing needs to change.

The problem is in my opinion not this low job placement rate per se (it is very easy to find out that this is the case for basically every prospective researcher). The problem rather is the "politics" involved in filling these positions, and additionally the fact that positions are commonly filled by what is currently "fashionable". If you, for some (often good) reason, did good research in an area that simply did not become "fashionable": good luck finding an academic position.

Re: A quarter of US-trained scientists eventually leave

#127

Post by nathan_compton »

SimianSci wrote: post #14
slwvx wrote: post #7

A more positive-sum view is that the US is bringing the rest of the world up in science every time it exports a PhD.

While indeed a positive outlook, I think alot of Americans are beginning to wonder what the benefit will be to them. The isolationist and xenophobic rhetoric of recent years is mostly a reaction to a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development. While I dont agree with the sentiment, its not entirely incorrect to describe such relationships are parasitic more then…

The idea that Americans don't get any benefit from the global order is absolutely ridiculous. There isn't a stick we ARE getting the short end of.

Re: A quarter of US-trained scientists eventually leave

#128

Post by bdangubic »

almosthere wrote: post #107
nutjob2 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So let me see: a person from another country receives a service that is exclusive, very limited and in high demand (PhD), pays for it, and that person eventually takes it back to country of origin. US education must be in a woeful state because that is the definition of export. Given the exclusivity and value of the service you'd think you'd want to hang on to it, but I guess xenophobia is one thing that is more impo…

I've been hearing nothing but bad things about the actual education in US institutions. I think they've tarnished their name at this point to no return.

exactly. that is why everyone is lining up to try to get in US colleges and acceptance rates of top schools is in the single digits :)

Re: A quarter of US-trained scientists eventually leave

#129

Post by aleph_minus_one »

Onavo wrote: post #69
msteffen wrote: post #29

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…

There's that and the fact that a lot of people who attain graduate degrees are immigrants who do so for the sake of immigration. The whole system essentially self selects for cheap labor and exploitation. If the feds put a high salary requirement on it like the E or O series visas, perhaps the system might change. The scientific minds of India, China, and Russia don't come to the US and slave away in the lab purely o…

> The PIs and laboratory heads all know damn well how the system works, they are no better than those bosses of H1B sweatshops, except perhaps they do their exploitation from ivy filled ivory towers rather than in Patagonia vests.

In my observation there do exist quite some people among the PIs and laboratory heads who are quite highly idealistic for research, but have no other option than playing this rigged game of academia.

Re: A quarter of US-trained scientists eventually leave

#130

Post by aleph_minus_one »

godelski wrote: post #112
msteffen wrote: post #29

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. This is definitely true, there are more physics PhDs graduating from the top 2 schools than there are total faculty positions listed each year. BUT you are missing that there is still demand for positions out in industry as well as government labs. But there'…

> 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.

Very few companies and industries want employees who

- are very conscientious ("has the diligence to see [the tasks] through"), and

- are much more effective working on their own, i.e. are no "team players" because they don't really need a team ("this person can work on ill-defined tasks").

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