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As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

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Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the trivialization of this. The solution is not obvious. Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from? At least in my areas of science (chemistry), most of this money comes from grants, which comes from the NIH, DOE, or NSF depending on the project. Ultimately it comes from taxpayers, and portioned out by Congress. So the solution is either to get Congress to really care about this (…

>Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from? Cut the number of postdoc positions in half, double the salaries of the remaining positions, and make it much more competitive to get a postdoc. The purpose of a postdoc is a final training step for someone to become faculty. Only people who are clearly faculty material after finishing their PhD should even attempt a postdoc. Unfortunately, man…

We live in a very strange world where everybody has brain tattooed the idea that economy must grow a 5% each year, at any cost, but nobody claims that science should grow a 5% each year also.

Show me a single politic saying that science must grow, so we allocated more resources for it.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the "industry work" part of it produce publishable research that could be used towards a thesis?

Usually yes, but there are always exceptions.

Publish your hardly earned knowledge is directly against the interests of most private companies.

The smart people in industry don't do it, unless they need a government pass, or at least keep the best parts for themselves.

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