Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

science.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 332 posts

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

#91

Post by bjourne »

persedes wrote: post #62
bjourne wrote: post #55

I think Western academia is mostly reliant on immigration. Few natives would accept the low pay/high workload combination that is a postdoc, but for an immigrant from a third world country it might be an amazing opportunity. Same reason most fruit and berry pickers also are immigrants.

Don't even know where to begin...but according to this [1] less than 5% of students in the US are international students. 1 - https://www.fwd.us/news/international-students/

"The dearth of Americans is even more pronounced in hot STEM fields like computer science, which serve as talent pipelines for the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft: About 64 percent of doctoral candidates and almost 68 percent in master’s programs last year were international students, according to an annual survey of American and Canadian universities by the Computing Research Association. In comparison, only about 9 percent of undergraduates in computer science were international students (perhaps, deans posit, because families are nervous about sending offspring who are barely adults across the ocean to study)."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/american...

Note that the definition of "international student" excludes those with permanent visas. The number of foreign born PhD students is therefore significantly higher than 64%. Don't know if there are any stats for citizen/non-citizen share of PhDs though.

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

#92

Post by throwawayarnty »

slurpmaker wrote: post #42

Make it make sense. Offer Postdocs an actual career path not based on broken tenure and disposable adjunct professor roles, with hundreds if not thousands of applicants. Why would someone, with any field of study, be a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python developer role? Moreso, post doc'ing for the wrong professor can ruin your career, why risk that eithe…

Postdocs in Europe are pretty comfortable and labs often have more stable/core funding.

Work can be pretty good postdocing in some labs in Europe.

But the end of the road is still that after the postdoc you’re expected to either be a rockstar or a nobody. So anxiety is always there.

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

#93

Post by sseagull »

InefficientRed wrote: post #83
kaffee wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. > My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing. I don't see the private sector funding ethnomusicology, philosophy, ecology, social history, ...

> I don't see the private sector funding ethnomusicology, philosophy, ecology, social history, ... sseagull mentioned NSF, NIH and DOE. None of those funds ethnomusicology, philosophy, or social history.

You left out ecology (again, which wouldn't be funded by business and I would consider important for society).

The NSF also gets somewhat close to the others via Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, which includes anthropology/archaeology and linguistics.

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

#94

Post by throwawayarnty »

microtonal wrote: post #87
sseagull wrote: post #12

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 (…

Academia is a pyramid, for every PhD position, there are fewer post-doc positions, far fewer permanent staff positions, and even fewer professorships. For most people, an academic career is a dead end. So, reduce the number of PhD and post-doc positions and increase the wages. Universities have been doing the opposite. E.g. some Dutch universities stopped offering relatively well-compensated employee PhD positions an…

Which Dutch universities? Just curious.

My perception was that phd students in Netherlands live quite comfortably.

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

#95

Post by pmyteh »

sseagull wrote: post #12
microtonal wrote: post #4

If you pay much lower than the industry and only give people temporary positions, it's not surprising people go elsewhere when they can. The solution is also quite obvious...

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 (…

"longer" is comparatively easy: More staff scientists (moving from grant to grant within an institution but on open-ended contracts) and fewer postdocs. "Paying more" is harder, though one or more of reducing marginal grants and lowering the ceiling on institutional overhead on grants would seem a reasonable start.

I've recently finished four years as a postdoc (and now have a permanent academic job and am applying for grants). It's the precarity of it which is a bigger killer than just the crappy salary. Fighting huge numbers of applicants for the chance to uproot your life (again) and move around the country for a contract that may be as short as 9 months, with every move having a good chance of being the end of your career (which you've invested years in training for). It's a grim position to put people into.

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

#97

Post by feet »

coldpie wrote: post #71
arethuza wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped doing a PhD after about 5 years - I was a Research Associate in a UK university so I actually got a salary which wasn't too bad but quite a bit below the going rate (I had a few job offers during that time). I left to co-found a start-up - never regretted it as I was "hyper cynical" (a direct quote from a colleague) about the whole academic world and how easy it was to play the "publish or perish" game. I l…

> I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread. Circa 2010, as I was finishing up my BS in CS, one of my professors asked me to have a meeting in his office. He was trying to recruit me into a graduate program under him, since he liked my performance in his class. I said I wasn't very interested, since I wanted to make things people will actually use. His response was there was a…

I think this is a short sighted perspective. Basic research is important and has farther reaching impacts than a CRUD web app. Just because you don't see immediate impact doesn't mean it isn't there

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

#98

Post by MontyCarloHall »

amathres_info wrote: post #86
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Most professors do not have >>1 postdoc in their careers, because most of us teach at less research-intensive (or entirely teaching-focused) schools that have no postdocs at all. The way things work now, even to get a liberal arts school job requires you to do a postdoc first (at least in my corner of STEM). Anyway, professors at research-heavy postdoc-having schools could get away with more than one. But certainly t…

>even to get a liberal arts school job requires you to do a postdoc first

That’s a great point that I neglected to consider. Regardless, the overall point still holds—the production rate of postdocs is much greater than the replacement rate of professors (at all institutions).

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

#99

Post by tiahura »

slurpmaker wrote: post #42

Make it make sense. Offer Postdocs an actual career path not based on broken tenure and disposable adjunct professor roles, with hundreds if not thousands of applicants. Why would someone, with any field of study, be a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python developer role? Moreso, post doc'ing for the wrong professor can ruin your career, why risk that eithe…

Why would someone, with any field of study, be a "scum of the earth" post doc

Access to coeds.

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

#100

Post by feet »

bmitc wrote: post #84

Honestly, there are just too many PhDs and too much glorification of PhDs. Academia is just far too inefficient as well. I have no idea where all the money that’s being moved around is going. My other thought is that maybe companies that pay little taxes but hire a lot of PhDs should maybe be looked at. Corporations have been extremely successful in outsourcing training to higher education, online learning, and other…

There's a bunch of glorification of physicians too, who are essentially repair techs for people
Post reply on HN