14 ms·

Academia used to offer smart people the promise of tenure and interesting work. Now they offer eternal postdocs and publish or perish. Is it any wonder they can

by jordanb 11y ago

Academia used to offer smart people the promise of tenure and interesting work. Now they offer eternal postdocs and publish or perish. Is it any wonder they can't retain good people?

unignorant 11y ago
Postdocs aren't that common in computer science. They exist, for sure, but most of the recently hired CS professors I know came straight from their PhDs.
- santaclaus 11y ago
  Most of the newly hired CS professors I know (at some legit schools - CMU, Waterloo, USC, UT Austin, etc) came from postdocs. Could be a sub-field of CS thing?
  - pgbovine 11y ago
    both can be true. super rough approximation for CS faculty job candidate consideration: Ph.D. outside of the U.S. followed by a postdoc in U.S. at School X ~ Ph.D. in the U.S. at School X
  - ru55 11y ago
    Definitely a subfield thing in part. Highly theoretical CS PhDs (complexity theory, algorithms, etc - the folks who are mathematicians in computer scientist's clothing) almost always require postdocs, both because they tend to be less heavily recruited by industry, and because the vast majority of departments are shying away from theory in favor of things that bring in more grant money and industry partnerships. Departments aren't stupid, though. They realize that grabbing star grad students with highly marketable skills in industry as they are walking out of their dissertation defense is probably the only shot they'll have at getting them. They will often "try out" industry or take a job at Google or MSR on the advice of their PI, noting that it's just as good as a postdoc but pays four or five times as much. Problem is, they then have to walk away from their $180k/year to take a faculty position that might not pay half that and could very well dead-end in a few years if the department leadership changes (or any of a dozen other precipitating factors) and they don't get tenure. All that said, I personally know of tenure-track professors at two of the schools you mentioned, plus ones at quite a few other top-flight CS departments (Cornell, Toronto, Washington, Cal), who were hired straight out of grad school.
    - hueving 11y ago
      I think you have a bias of looking at students from select top schools. A PhD student in almost any branch is going to have a really hard time getting a tenure track position unless they have an awesome research record (publications in top tier conferences/journals).
- davmre 11y ago
  Even if true (I know many professors who did postdocs), it's not clear what you think this proves. Faculty slots are very scarce and most newly graduated PhDs, even very smart ones, do not have "faculty job at a desirable institution" as an option immediately available to them. So they are left with the choice between postdocs and industry. Most choose industry, and it's not hard to understand why.
- stared 11y ago
  In other disciplines (e.g. mine - theoretical physics) it is not possible (whereas doing postdocs for 10 years or so is common). And while it is harder to transit (learning basic computer skills, while way easier than quantum field theory, takes time and effort), the opportunity gap is way higher. And it may be not a surprise that many data scientists with PhDs are physicists.
newjersey 11y ago
I think academia has a long way to go to reduce costs. I'm willing to cut services that universities offer if that means lower costs. Remove the nice dorms, cafeteria, and fitness centers. Remove the community outreach programs that isn't really the job of a university. And yes increase the number of introductory level classes taught by graduate students and post docs. I'm not worried about people moving from academia to industry. My hope is as we increase the rate at which people finish high school and go to college, we will have enough people for industry and academia. It is tempting to say we need to offer better wages and benefits for teachers but we can't digress. Cost containment should be our first priority. I think it is possible if we understand and agree with the compromises we will need to make.
- chrisbennet 11y ago
  Remove the administrators. "Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase." http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-re...
  - gozur88 11y ago
    The administrators aren't really the problem per se, though. They're there to address mandates from various levels of government. Colleges won't reduce the number of administrators because they can't under the current bureaucratic regime.
    - marcelluspye 11y ago
      I have a really hard time believing they had to triple the number of administrators due to government regulations.
    - melling 11y ago
      How do we know that you are correct? Maybe universities do have bloated staffs. Salaries, benefits, retirement are going to be a lot more costly than nicer dorms and a fitness center. People are offering solutions without following the money.
fullshark 11y ago
It's great if you lack marketable skills
- pgbovine 11y ago
  that's actually absolutely correct :) academia is best at doing things that are not directly marketable in the capitalist economy. in the early 1900s, a group of weirdos working on theoretical quantum mechanics couldn't find marketable jobs in industry of the day, so they had to do their work in academia. thanks to them, you have your iPhone now.
  - gozur88 11y ago
    That's actually the crux of the issue here. In the past AI research didn't have any commercial value, and now it does. So universities and departments are having to deal with new competition, and they'll have to adjust various forms of compensation as a result.
    - sgt101 11y ago
      Nope, what they will do is crank out Ph.D.s until the market saturates. This is actually a win win for the unis.
      - gozur88 11y ago
        The article talks about "stars", which implies quality over quantity. They probably already crank out too many infinitesimal-delta-thesis guys who are smart but not brilliant.
aub3bhat 11y ago
Postdocs especially multi-year postdocs are very rare in Computer Science. I have personally known several students get hired directly or after a one year post-docs. Multi-year postdocs are common in fields (Biology in particular) where job prospects offered by industry are comparable in salary and future opportunities to what postdocs offer.
_delirium 11y ago
This is talking mostly about perceived "stars" in academia, who already do have tenured or tenure-track positions (or offers of them), but leave for industry instead. So I think it's a different issue than the one you're talking about. For those people, one thing that's changed is that academia, in STEM at least, has grown into having a big management component. You're expected to run a significantly sized lab, and to continually bring in enough grants to pay for it. Professors at top universities spend a large amount of their time writing grants, hiring people, and networking with potential funding sources, and it's no longer really optional. There is a certain style of researcher who actually excels in this kind of position, managing a medium-sized research enterprise, and advancing a field by putting together good teams, providing high-level direction, and mentorship. It's like running a startup in some ways (obv. different in other ways). But not every researcher is good at or interested in that, and some would rather opt out and find a job that lets them focus more on their individual research. Another thing that's changed is pay. Academic salaries in CS have gone up significantly, to the point where $100k+ is common, and $150k+ for big names is also getting common, whereas professor jobs were traditionally more lower/mid-middle-class than upper-middle-class (more like "$75k+" than "$150k+"). But salaries at tech companies have gone up even faster. If a big name in deep learning gets offered $300k base plus a big stock package, the university's retention counteroffer isn't likely to come very close. Also, specifically in AI (which this article focuses on), data access and engineering/infrastructure support are other lures of industry. If you do machine translation, for example, moving to Google will solve many of your dataset problems. If you need a distributed cluster, there's expert IT staff working on it; if you do autonomous vehicles, there's expert engineering staff supporting your "demo platform". In academia you rarely can afford that kind of infrastructure or engineering support, so there's a lot more of grad students cobbling together DIY demos, and the postdoc hired mainly for his/her mathematics knowledge also moonlighting as the cluster admin.
- hooloovoo_zoo 11y ago
  I think your numbers are off by about a factor of 2 (underestimating). You can see the salaries for the UoC system at https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/ https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/. Note that most of the professorial salaries are labeled AY which means they are probably making 30% more annually. Salaries at private schools are even higher. Silicon Valley is not going to lure a "big name" away from a tenured job for south of a half-million a year.

by jordanb 11y ago

Academia used to offer smart people the promise of tenure and interesting work. Now they offer eternal postdocs and publish or perish. Is it any wonder they can't retain good people?

unignorant 11y ago

Postdocs aren't that common in computer science. They exist, for sure, but most of the recently hired CS professors I know came straight from their PhDs.

santaclaus 11y ago
Most of the newly hired CS professors I know (at some legit schools - CMU, Waterloo, USC, UT Austin, etc) came from postdocs. Could be a sub-field of CS thing?
- pgbovine 11y ago
  both can be true. super rough approximation for CS faculty job candidate consideration: Ph.D. outside of the U.S. followed by a postdoc in U.S. at School X ~ Ph.D. in the U.S. at School X
- ru55 11y ago
  Definitely a subfield thing in part. Highly theoretical CS PhDs (complexity theory, algorithms, etc - the folks who are mathematicians in computer scientist's clothing) almost always require postdocs, both because they tend to be less heavily recruited by industry, and because the vast majority of departments are shying away from theory in favor of things that bring in more grant money and industry partnerships. Departments aren't stupid, though. They realize that grabbing star grad students with highly marketable skills in industry as they are walking out of their dissertation defense is probably the only shot they'll have at getting them. They will often "try out" industry or take a job at Google or MSR on the advice of their PI, noting that it's just as good as a postdoc but pays four or five times as much. Problem is, they then have to walk away from their $180k/year to take a faculty position that might not pay half that and could very well dead-end in a few years if the department leadership changes (or any of a dozen other precipitating factors) and they don't get tenure. All that said, I personally know of tenure-track professors at two of the schools you mentioned, plus ones at quite a few other top-flight CS departments (Cornell, Toronto, Washington, Cal), who were hired straight out of grad school.
  - hueving 11y ago
    I think you have a bias of looking at students from select top schools. A PhD student in almost any branch is going to have a really hard time getting a tenure track position unless they have an awesome research record (publications in top tier conferences/journals).
davmre 11y ago
Even if true (I know many professors who did postdocs), it's not clear what you think this proves. Faculty slots are very scarce and most newly graduated PhDs, even very smart ones, do not have "faculty job at a desirable institution" as an option immediately available to them. So they are left with the choice between postdocs and industry. Most choose industry, and it's not hard to understand why.
stared 11y ago
In other disciplines (e.g. mine - theoretical physics) it is not possible (whereas doing postdocs for 10 years or so is common). And while it is harder to transit (learning basic computer skills, while way easier than quantum field theory, takes time and effort), the opportunity gap is way higher. And it may be not a surprise that many data scientists with PhDs are physicists.

newjersey 11y ago

I think academia has a long way to go to reduce costs. I'm willing to cut services that universities offer if that means lower costs. Remove the nice dorms, cafeteria, and fitness centers. Remove the community outreach programs that isn't really the job of a university. And yes increase the number of introductory level classes taught by graduate students and post docs. I'm not worried about people moving from academia to industry. My hope is as we increase the rate at which people finish high school and go to college, we will have enough people for industry and academia. It is tempting to say we need to offer better wages and benefits for teachers but we can't digress. Cost containment should be our first priority. I think it is possible if we understand and agree with the compromises we will need to make.

chrisbennet 11y ago
Remove the administrators. "Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase." http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-re...
- gozur88 11y ago
  The administrators aren't really the problem per se, though. They're there to address mandates from various levels of government. Colleges won't reduce the number of administrators because they can't under the current bureaucratic regime.
  - marcelluspye 11y ago
    I have a really hard time believing they had to triple the number of administrators due to government regulations.
  - melling 11y ago
    How do we know that you are correct? Maybe universities do have bloated staffs. Salaries, benefits, retirement are going to be a lot more costly than nicer dorms and a fitness center. People are offering solutions without following the money.

fullshark 11y ago

It's great if you lack marketable skills

pgbovine 11y ago
that's actually absolutely correct :) academia is best at doing things that are not directly marketable in the capitalist economy. in the early 1900s, a group of weirdos working on theoretical quantum mechanics couldn't find marketable jobs in industry of the day, so they had to do their work in academia. thanks to them, you have your iPhone now.
- gozur88 11y ago
  That's actually the crux of the issue here. In the past AI research didn't have any commercial value, and now it does. So universities and departments are having to deal with new competition, and they'll have to adjust various forms of compensation as a result.
  - sgt101 11y ago
    Nope, what they will do is crank out Ph.D.s until the market saturates. This is actually a win win for the unis.
    - gozur88 11y ago
      The article talks about "stars", which implies quality over quantity. They probably already crank out too many infinitesimal-delta-thesis guys who are smart but not brilliant.

aub3bhat 11y ago

Postdocs especially multi-year postdocs are very rare in Computer Science. I have personally known several students get hired directly or after a one year post-docs. Multi-year postdocs are common in fields (Biology in particular) where job prospects offered by industry are comparable in salary and future opportunities to what postdocs offer.

_delirium 11y ago

This is talking mostly about perceived "stars" in academia, who already do have tenured or tenure-track positions (or offers of them), but leave for industry instead. So I think it's a different issue than the one you're talking about. For those people, one thing that's changed is that academia, in STEM at least, has grown into having a big management component. You're expected to run a significantly sized lab, and to continually bring in enough grants to pay for it. Professors at top universities spend a large amount of their time writing grants, hiring people, and networking with potential funding sources, and it's no longer really optional. There is a certain style of researcher who actually excels in this kind of position, managing a medium-sized research enterprise, and advancing a field by putting together good teams, providing high-level direction, and mentorship. It's like running a startup in some ways (obv. different in other ways). But not every researcher is good at or interested in that, and some would rather opt out and find a job that lets them focus more on their individual research. Another thing that's changed is pay. Academic salaries in CS have gone up significantly, to the point where $100k+ is common, and $150k+ for big names is also getting common, whereas professor jobs were traditionally more lower/mid-middle-class than upper-middle-class (more like "$75k+" than "$150k+"). But salaries at tech companies have gone up even faster. If a big name in deep learning gets offered $300k base plus a big stock package, the university's retention counteroffer isn't likely to come very close. Also, specifically in AI (which this article focuses on), data access and engineering/infrastructure support are other lures of industry. If you do machine translation, for example, moving to Google will solve many of your dataset problems. If you need a distributed cluster, there's expert IT staff working on it; if you do autonomous vehicles, there's expert engineering staff supporting your "demo platform". In academia you rarely can afford that kind of infrastructure or engineering support, so there's a lot more of grad students cobbling together DIY demos, and the postdoc hired mainly for his/her mathematics knowledge also moonlighting as the cluster admin.

hooloovoo_zoo 11y ago
I think your numbers are off by about a factor of 2 (underestimating). You can see the salaries for the UoC system at https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/ https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/. Note that most of the professorial salaries are labeled AY which means they are probably making 30% more annually. Salaries at private schools are even higher. Silicon Valley is not going to lure a "big name" away from a tenured job for south of a half-million a year.