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More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

nature.com

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Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

#41

Post by pca006132 »

vv_ wrote: post #15

I'm not sure about the situation elsewhere, but in Lithuania, it feels like professors produce articles or tackle topics solely to check a box. Most of the content generated by universities here seems completely irrelevant and ends up being discarded after completion. The courses are very bland and uninformative too.

I sometimes just wonder, a lot of professors are bad at teaching because they don't have to be good at it. Is it the same for universities? It feels like reputation for universities are quite detached from the courses they have or teaching quality. Rankings focus a lot on quantitative measures, but teaching quality is hard to measure quantitatively. The output of universities, i.e. the quality of their students, depend on both the teaching quality and "IQ" of their students before admission, which is mostly a feedback loop because universities with good reputation get the best students... Optimizing for teaching quality also means that professors spend more time on teaching and less on research, which may reduce their research output and reduce the ranking, which has a more immediate effect on the reputation than teaching quality.

Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

#42

Post by bowsamic »

astahlx wrote: post #8

The question is: How many decide against doing a post doc, while considering it for some time during the PhD time. When you commit becoming a postdoc, you know how the game is played, you have a good network, you have a good topic to work on.

> When you commit becoming a postdoc, you know how the game is played, you have a good network

I wouldn't agree to those. I was perhaps overly supported during my PhD, not preparing me for the reality of being abandoned/expected to be totally independent in the postdoc

Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

#43

Post by michaelt »

According to https://data.aaup.org/academic-workforce/ there are 270,000 tenured professors in the United States.

Assuming a tenured professor holds that position from age 35 to age 65, that's 9000 tenured positions to be filled per year.

According to https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2023 there are 57,000 research doctorates granted per year.

So 84% of people granted PhDs don't make it in academia.

Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

#45

Post by Ekaros »

pca006132 wrote: post #36
wordpad25 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't competition good for innovation?

It depends on incentives. From what I can see in CS, a lot of young researchers are focused on short-term projects, disconnected from actual problems, and spend lots of effort to package the result to increase the chance of getting a paper in top conferences/journals, because they need this for their career. They will be forced to leave academia if they don't have enough results in time, from what I know. And even fo…

In the end my take is that there is too much supply for research for the funding that exist. So lot of it focuses on wrong metrics and as thus is somewhat wasted. Or energy is spend on wrong things like chasing that funding.

I am not sure if we can afford more funding, so maybe amount of research should be cut in some way...

Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

#46

Post by Ekaros »

wordpad25 wrote: post #29
noobermin wrote: post #27

Academia is one of those realms where I just wish things would collapse. Working conditions are terrible for the educational level they expect, yet there are always more and more graduate students and post-docs to exploit, so the wheels keep turning. A naive perspective is a glut of experts is a good thing because a society with more experts could produce more innovations and development but because of the peculariti…

isn't competition good for innovation?

Up to certain point. Beyond that there is lot of waste.

Say you have 20 competing products that want to get noticed or know to sell. Obvious solution for them is to pour more and more resources in advertising. Eventually this advertising takes away from actual product as more time and money is spend on it instead on the product.

Advertising in academia is publications but also applications for funding.

Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

#47

Post by jojobas »

michaelt wrote: post #43

According to https://data.aaup.org/academic-workforce/ there are 270,000 tenured professors in the United States. Assuming a tenured professor holds that position from age 35 to age 65, that's 9000 tenured positions to be filled per year. According to https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2023 there are 57,000 research doctorates granted per year. So 84% of people granted PhDs don't make it in academia.

Many of them never wanted to be in academia in the first place, or at least shouldn't have wanted it. If you're in a class full of people who want to teach this same class, you might be questioning why you're there.

Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

#48

Post by benrutter »

noobermin wrote: post #27

Academia is one of those realms where I just wish things would collapse. Working conditions are terrible for the educational level they expect, yet there are always more and more graduate students and post-docs to exploit, so the wheels keep turning. A naive perspective is a glut of experts is a good thing because a society with more experts could produce more innovations and development but because of the peculariti…

> I'm not sure what the solution is.

Really interesting to think about what an ideal academia would look like. I think a lot of us have an idea of 'pure science' which has never really existed (by which I mean, since the industrial revolution science and academia has been tied to industry).

In terms of conditions, I think this issue is solved elsewhere by unions (there are always people wanting to be hollywood script writers, but the writers guild of America does a good job of maintaining decent conditions despite this). I don't know how that could even come close to applying in something like academia though.

Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

#49

Post by krallistic »

pca006132 wrote: post #41
vv_ wrote: post #15

I'm not sure about the situation elsewhere, but in Lithuania, it feels like professors produce articles or tackle topics solely to check a box. Most of the content generated by universities here seems completely irrelevant and ends up being discarded after completion. The courses are very bland and uninformative too.

I sometimes just wonder, a lot of professors are bad at teaching because they don't have to be good at it. Is it the same for universities? It feels like reputation for universities are quite detached from the courses they have or teaching quality. Rankings focus a lot on quantitative measures, but teaching quality is hard to measure quantitatively. The output of universities, i.e. the quality of their students, depe…

Teaching is not really relevant in the hiring process of professors.

I saw several committees for prof position and teaching is treated like a checkmark. You should done it and provide a small sample lecture (which you prepare much more than your average lecture) and don't have to suck at it. After this checkbox, the differentiating factors are about citations and how much grant money you can/could/do have... (Western Europe, maybe somewhere else it's different).

Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

#50

Post by gunian »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #38

Not surprising. I quit after about a year. I could have stayed on but I realized that it just wasn't right for me. By then I had figured out that most research is done by post docs and phd students and it doesn't pay very well. Not that I cared about the money but I started thinking about what is next and did not like the perspective. Professors are basically there to manage the process and haggle for funding. They t…

sometimes I read posts like this and am awed. it feels like something out of a book to me

never had a chance to go to college, no family, no friends, no social skills, mostly dumb except for basic computer skills

my life except for like 1-2 years has been fighting to survive in horribly abusive situations currently unable to work with my own SSN being messed with by a bunch of human traffickers

but I love computers my dream in life is to learn about them and built an integrated app kind of like the M1 but for software and I probably will die or be killed way before that happens but its cool to see there are people way smarter that care about building as much out there and computers will get better

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