More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

Post by zaik » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 7:11 PM UTC

jjk166 wrote: post #85

zaik wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, the ideas that have thrown incredible amounts of money against them on the open market all have been developed in academia. The current AI craze, the internet, the physics required for chip production, encryption, etc.

Academia works on nearly everything, so it's no surprise that successes come out of it. Especially if you are willing to squint your eyes a little and describe something which has a few elements of the final useful innovation (but noticeably not the secret sauce) a precursor then anything can be traced back. That does not mean academia, nonetheless academia in its current form, is the optimal system for producing inn…

Post by disqard » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 8:21 PM UTC

dawnchorus wrote: post #58

wordpad25 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't competition good for innovation?

As a former postdoc in the physical sciences (who is now out of academia mostly for family reasons), I don't like the constant argument I hear about whether competition is good or bad in research and especially academic research. I think it is the wrong question. Competition is inherently good in that whatever researchers are competing over will be optimized in the long run. We wish that we were optimizing for new/gr…

Post by geysersam » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 9:21 PM UTC

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.

Post by numpy-thagoras » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 9:24 PM UTC

qrsjutsu wrote: post #24

Had a friend once who wanted to do research in an urgently necessary direction. Didn't get the money or academic support. Couple years later she told me that happens a lot but one is so focused on their work and the illusion that "once I'm there ..." so strong, that one ignores the hard evidence and much debated proof, despite, well, one's own training.

Post by xxpor » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 9:27 PM UTC

pca006132 wrote: post #81

krallistic wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... (Wester…

I feel terrible for the idea of jugding academics based on the amount of grant money they can get... It feels like encouraging a lot of smart people to find ways to waste money, even when they know that they don't really need that much for their project.