9 ms·

So Many Research Scientists, So Few Openings as Professors

89 points by hvo 10y ago

untilHellbanned 10y ago
The world is about people selling crap they don't need to each other. If you can be honest with yourself enough to accept that, you realize there is no place for learning in this worldview. Getting money today (GMT) is all that matters, so until the govt finds a way to take everyone's not hard-earned money and redirect it toward more noble pursuits, I'm confident the trend will worsen.
- smaddox 10y ago
  Don't worry, I'm sure Trump has a solution in mind.
- tostitos1979 10y ago
  This seems to be a sarcastic off-shoot of the discussion but I gave u an upvote. Your point is completely valid ... a stable research environment needs government funding. I think this might be a US statistic but I recall reading that we spend more on any one of the top 3 sports than we spend on all forms of cancer research. This should be a no-brainer but it isn't. There was an ACM Communications article a few years ago by Moshe Verde where he pointed out that computation has radically altered both theory and experimentation - the two pillars of science. As a professional scientist, I firmly believe we are at the precipice of great discoveries that will benefit all of humanity - except we are squandering time, and the resources of the planet on stupid bickering.
  - untilHellbanned 10y ago
    Thanks. Somebody appreciated my point. The world is consumed by trivia. People with influence and money, who sadly are the often the ones most consumed with trivia, need to die, undergo brain transplants, or some other miracle in order to change the direction we are headed.
johan_larson 10y ago
This story again. The oversupply of aspiring scholars is really really not news. What would be news is any sign that things are changing, with applications to grad school dropping, or maybe the expansion of graduate school degrees that are explicitly not aimed at professorships.
- projectramo 10y ago
  I had always heard that this was the case in philosophy, literature and so on. Then, a few years ago, I heard it was the case in the sciences. Now it is in the technical disciplines, and it is egregious. (4x oversupply). The magnitude and the discipline is the news here (at least for me).
  - ryanSrich 10y ago
    Getting your graduate degree solely to gain professorship is a bad look for anyone, even in engineering. The supply of professors across the board has been extremely high for at least 5 years.
  - sseagull 10y ago
    The lack of scientists has been a myth for a long time, and probably comes from the lumping of very different fields under the umbrella of "STEM". Lots of good info from the IEEE Spectrum (2013): "The STEM Crisis is a Myth" http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth-an-ongoing-discussion http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth-an...
kneel 10y ago
It's a real shame how the recession has hit STEM funding. There are a lot of really exciting new technologies that are simply not funded. The private sector cannot innovate until monetization is in sight and the public sector is increasingly squeezed to publish papers with limited resources. The overall effect is less innovation and bad science.
- cloverich 10y ago
  > The private sector cannot innovate until monetization is in sight That feels like a sweeping condemnation of R&D in the private sector in general. I know very little on the subject, is there a strong base for this position?
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    It's a side effect of changes in the marketplace and the world. When big conglomerates ran big horizontal and vertical businesses, they did general R&D work that benefited their broader corporate mission. Bell Labs wasn't there because AT&T was some sort of benevolent charity. Now companies are mostly brokers between outsourcers and have a narrow focus. We haven't "caught up" with the capability that we already have, so startups have replaced corporate R&D, mostly using off the shelf stuff to make minor incremental changes.
    - delazeur 10y ago
      I don't know if this was legally enforceable, but I have heard that the existence of Bell Labs was essentially a quid pro quo with the federal government in exchange for being granted a regulated monopoly on phone service. More generally, I have heard that corporate executives in the golden age of American industry had more of a sense that they owed a debt to the public for all the free stuff they had been given (cost plus defense contracts, government R&D, radio and TV frequencies, ect.). I think there are some rose-tinted glasses involved in that analysis, but it was probably part of it.
  - sseagull 10y ago
    While "cannot" might be a little strong, it can be true, depend on the field and company of course. I used to work at a large company that in the past performed a large amount of fundamental research into physics, since it affected their products. I took a tour of the labs recently and they are a shadow of their former selves. It was depressing. I think reduction in private sector STEM comes from several sources. One is the private sector not willing to take the risk of something not working, no long-term thinking, etc. Another might be the relative difficulty in measuring the impact of your R&D department. In an era where every cost has to be justified and everything has to be measured by some metric, R&D begins to look like an expense rather than a profit generator, at least in the short-medium term.
frozenport 10y ago
I disagree with the bulk of this article. It certainly varies a lot of by field but in biophotonics I've seen a lot of extremely poor candidates, people who say things like "I don't do math", "I don't want to teach", "MATLAB is for other people", "I'm not a biologist so I can't explain my work". When I first started I thought these people sucked, and I was going to be great. What I learned is that the graduate development opportunities are rare, and many of the reason people suck are beyond their control. For example, working on tedious projects or bullshit projects, do to your PI's conflict of interest. Or simply put that your research rests on a foundation of lies. So, on one hand we have many people on the other hand we don't have many qualified people.
- untilHellbanned 10y ago
  Serious analysis irony here - your anecdote doesn't reverse the mountain of data in the other direction.
- p4wnc6 10y ago
  Saying "MATLAB is for other people" isn't the sign of a poor candidate. Saying "you will need to use MATLAB for this job" on the other hand is overwhelmingly a sign of a bad job, in the same way that any usage of Excel VBA whatsoever is a sign to run, run, run for the hills -- that firm is absolutely doing it wrong. I've also heard the opposite of your first example used as a criticism of candidates too. After completing my undergrad degree in math and then grad degrees in statistics, I was astounded how in industry, either describing yourself more as an engineer or scientist who does not work on the abstract math stuff or describing yourself as someone who is very interested in abstract math will both cause you to get rejected. The only way to win is to happen to have done a lot of difficult abstract math in the past and remember it all well enough to pass tricky interviews, but then to be overwhelmingly happy and satisfied with a job that will not ever ask you to use it and will instead burn you out on dumb shit stuff like fitting a regression to KPI data and using t-stats to directly do (fallacious) model comparison. The biggest career risk I've seen from having done very computer science-heavy statistics is underemployment. Your math chops will be pure credential, sometimes used by your manager to try to win arguments from authority about e.g. that dumb shit KPI regression. But you will 100% never be given open-ended modeling work that could actually have a positive impact on your business's bottom line. Essentially, you are hired to be some more senior person's sycophant political darling. You function internally much the same way that a big consulting company functions externally -- people already know what they want to hear, they just want you to tell them what they want to hear, slap together some plausible-sounding rationalizations for it, dress it up with buzzwords about big data and "insights", and be a show pony for talking about it. They emphatically do not want you for doing anything that would be called "real" work. There are occasional exceptions, especially in certain teams at certain established tech companies. But then, landing a position inside one of those teams is nothing but the same lottery as winning a professorship all over again.
wrong_variable 10y ago
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/tileshop_pmc_inline.html?title=Click%20on%20image%20to%20zoom&p=PMC3&id=4309283_nihms562644f1.jpg http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/ti... Right, What is the difference between Civil/Environmental and Environmental ? It seems the best bet is to study something like mining since the R_0 is so low there.
- aab0 10y ago
  Petroleum engineering regularly makes the list of degrees with highest pay...
  - nradov 10y ago
    The petroleum industry goes through boom / bust cycles every few years. Make sure to graduate during a boom.
- greenshackle 10y ago
  To oversimplify by a lot, Civil/Environmental = urban/industrial (e.g. industrial/municipal wastewater treatment, air pollution), Environmental = agricultural/resources (e.g. soil management, biofuels, soil decontamination for mining/oil). That's roughly how it was divided at my college, anyway.
HarryHirsch 10y ago
What the article curiously doesn't talk about it the fact that the non-academic job market at PhD level collapsed in 2007. In the news yesterday: even more cutbacks at Merck. The degree of offshoring and outsourcing that happened since 2003 in chemistry and the life sciences is incredible to anyone not in the field.
- srunni 10y ago
  More on the cutbacks at Merck: http://endpts.com/merck-triggers-a-new-round-of-layoffs-in-rd-reorganization/ http://endpts.com/merck-triggers-a-new-round-of-layoffs-in-r... > Merck’s move follows a major trend in biopharma R&D, as the biggest companies concentrate more and more of their work in the big hubs. And virtually all of the major players have downsized at one time or another. > Close to three years ago, Merck triggered a major reorganization in its R&D ranks, as the then new R&D chief Roger Perlmutter set in motion a plan that involved 8,500 layoffs, all of which were piled on a restructuring effort that was announced earlier. > Those layoffs followed a years-long gap in significant new drug approvals and a string of clinical setbacks. Since then, though, Merck landed a landmark approval of Keytruda, now the number two checkpoint inhibitor on the blockbuster cancer market, along with an OK early this year for its hep C combo, Zepatier, which is being sold in a rival-infested field.
bradleyjg 10y ago
I don't see any particular reason to tie research generally, and scientific research specifically, to institutions primarily organized around undergraduate education.
- HarryHirsch 10y ago
  When you are working at the coalface of research you are intimately aware of which concepts are relevant and which are not. That directly feeds into undergraduate teaching. You can't teach today what you taught 30 or 50 years ago, but at the worse undergrad-only colleges you can get away with it.
  - bradleyjg 10y ago
    Even if this is true, and it seems much more aspirational than something that actually occurs with any sort of frequency, that's merely one benefit to be weighed against all the disadvantages. To name just a few such: worse average teaching ability than a selection method that focuses on teaching ability, reduced research output due to splitting researchers' time between teaching and research, and of course the issue pointed out in the article that the needs of undergraduate education in large measure limit the number of research scientists. Were it not for the historical accident that we do things this way, I strongly doubt anyone would suggest we adopt it for whatever tiny educational benefit it may impart to undergraduates -- most of whom won't even go into the academic fields they are studying.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    You mean undergrad courses don't teach the same thing they taught 50 years ago? When did that change?
- JohnStrange 10y ago
  Well, I'm at a research institute as a postdoc. The problem is that there is no career path except for trying to get tenure, and since there are no openings and the competition in the academic middle field is insane, this is so unlikely that it has become unrealistic to plan for it even when you're doing good work and have adequate publications. So at least in my area there is no research career. It's a dead end.
Xcelerate 10y ago
> Now, as a new crop of graduate students receives Ph.D.s in science, researchers worry over the future of some of these dedicated people; they’re trained to be academics and are often led to believe that anything else is an admission of failure. As someone finishing up grad school, this doesn't seem quite accurate. To me, it seems like a lot of the interesting research is being done in industry. I remember scrolling through jobs online toward the end of my undergraduate and seeing "PhD required" for all of the positions I was interested in. Most of my friends working on their PhD are aiming either for industry or a research scientist position at a government lab (like ORNL). So I'm not sure who exactly constitutes this group that believes "not professor" = failure.
- beevai142 10y ago
  If you don't advance fast enough on your academic career, it can be read as a failure indicator by grant reviewers, which will reduce your chances to stay employed. If you're too old, and not past an appropriate career stage, you will also find it hard to find someone to employ you in academia.
- sliverstorm 10y ago
  What field are you in, though? I believe that attitude is tremendously pervasive the more "theoretical" the field is, e.g. the closer it is to math & physics, and the further it is from engineering.
  - Xcelerate 10y ago
    Well, it's kind of funny. My degree is chemical engineering, my advisor is materials science, yet all of my work is HPC/computational. A lot of this stuff has become very interdisciplinary (I studied more computer science papers than anything over the last year).
  - delazeur 10y ago
    I studied chemical engineering: all of our PhD grads chose industry over academia, and most of our young professors had come out of physics, chemistry, and biology departments. It was an interesting culture mix, partly created by the fact that ChemE is either disappearing as a field or changing to the point of being unrecognizable (depending on who you ask).
jostmey 10y ago
Three big problems: 1) Emphasis on funding translational research using government grants, which industry would otherwise be doing on its own. Hence, industry jobs have evaporated while basic science has languished. 2) Institutional salary caps on Grad students/Post docs, so training funds stretch too far resulting in an oversupply of entry level jobs. Better to pay the best people at competitive wages. 3) Growing divide between industry and academia, making job hopping even harder. Everybody is left worse off.
- typetypetype 10y ago
  4) Universities accepting more students into programs than could possibly get an academic job.
  - jostmey 10y ago
    Wouldn't be a problem if universities competed with each other to nab students with the highest scores. Universities would spend more money hiring students, leaving Universities unable to hire as many students.
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
      > Wouldn't be a problem if universities competed with each other to nab students with the highest scores Why do you think they don't now?
- mattkrause 10y ago
  A huge part of the issue, which you hint at in #2, is the "training" part. Most research is actually performed by trainees: undergrads, grad students, and some postdocs. This is silly because 1) the "training" is often pretty minimal (my PhD involved less coursework than an undergrad masters) and 2) most of the people doing most of the work have no idea what they are doing. Nevertheless, this still happens because there are TONS of established funding mechanisms for trainees: REU (and similar per-university programs for undergrads), and individual (NRSA) and institutional training grants (T31) for postdocs and grad students. In contrast, there are very few ways to fund more experienced individuals who are not running their own lab. This is bad for those people, and also bad for the institutions.
brador 10y ago
The cream of the crop will still rise to the top, so it's simply a case of the bar for Professorship is rising. Which is a good thing.
- GuiA 10y ago
  The counterpoint to that is that universities are moving more and more teaching positions to short term contracts with terrible pay and benefits. So skilled people might instead choose to go in the industry/pursue other opportunities, and the students find themselves with instructors who end doing what they do because they can't go anywhere else.
  - brador 10y ago
    And that's ok. If the Professorships have value to anyone they'll get paid. If some positions are being removed then maybe they just weren't that useful.
    - deong 10y ago
      That ignores a huge amount of evidence that we routinely shoot ourselves in the foot by making flawed assessments of the relative benefits of short vs. long-term rewards.
  - codexon 10y ago
    I find that the people that are best at research (and thus most likely to get tenure) are usually very poor teachers. Usually they are so good at their subject that they tend to skip steps in their explanations and forget how difficult a certain concept is and expect everyone to breeze through it. Unfortunately, universities optimize for research rather than teaching.
- mattkrause 10y ago
  I strongly doubt that is true, actually. I'm a few years out from my PhD. The classmates who stayed in academia are neither much smarter nor harder working than those who have left. It does select for certain personality traits, like risk tolerance and willingness to self-promote, but I'm not sure that's really what we want.
sjg007 10y ago
It would be wise to do an MD/PhD. The MDs have all the data. Also Business schools need professors.
- vibrio 10y ago
  I agree, but broadly stated, the path doesn't generally train good scientists. The MD/PhD is more like a MD/MS. They frequently are pushed through 'phd' more rapidly under the eye of Med School deans and to optimize MD/PhD training grant slots. A not insignificant number of MD/PhD trainee simply do it for the free med school also, with little interest or intent to pursue research.
- Fomite 10y ago
  Or you can do what I've done, get a PhD, and be friends with the MDs.
FatAmericanDev 10y ago
This is a good problem. The solution is to raise the bar: in order to be a professor you have to make a tangible advancement in your field, something that advances the state of the art by an order of magnitude.
- FatAmericanDev 10y ago
  Also, pay them more.
  - nradov 10y ago
    Where is the money going to come from? Undergraduate tuition has already reached ridiculous levels.
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
      You can start by disbanding the football teams.
      - jessaustin 10y ago
        That's a great idea, but at many schools it wouldn't actually raise much money. It's not as though the idiot boosters will be just as happy to see their money going toward lab equipment as toward e.g. barbells.
      - nradov 10y ago
        While I'm not a huge fan of college football, at many schools the football teams are effectively profit centers due to media rights and merchandising.
    - scottlocklin 10y ago
      You can get administrative head count back to 1980s levels. You can also ban 7 figure salaries for University administrators. That would pretty much do it. It is a simple problem with a simple solution.
  - 10y ago
sliverstorm 10y ago
Every year the market grows tighter, and federal money for research grants, which support most of this research, remains flat. This makes me think we (as a country, a people), having trained all these scientists, have a market opportunity for inexpensive research, and we aren't taking advantage of it. Sure, the best and the brightest might fight their way to the top, but we can get perfectly good science out of the middle of the bell curve too.
- raziel2701 10y ago
  But you need to find these researchers the equipment and infrastructure to do research, thus it's no longer inexpensive research. There's no money for this.
- danielweber 10y ago
  You can't have a million researchers do a 4000 man-year project in a day. There are decreasing marginal returns from throwing more people at a problem. Especially if they are publishing, because now you need more people to curate their publications. And if you throw enough researchers at something, they are going to find a bunch of spurious results simply because of the luck of large numbers. I don't know if we are at that point. But adding a bunch of average people to a project can easily slow it down. If you want to help the existing researchers, mow their lawns and buy their groceries and take care of their house maintenance problems. Let them concentrate.
  - sliverstorm 10y ago
    Not faster research, more scope. Things that we neglect today. Hell, form a paper review branch whose sole purpose is review/reproduction of results. We're not out of work to be done
    - danielweber 10y ago
      This is a good idea.
bane 10y ago
I run a small industrial applied research lab (<100 researchers). The truth is that, except in fairly specific cases, we don't need PhD level staff either. Just like in a university lab, the bulk of the hard work is done by people with Graduate (or in some cases Undergraduate) degrees. Practical experience in the field is also about 50% of what we need (since we're ultimately figuring out things that can go into engineering and deployed operationally, knowing what the end-state environment looks and runs like is critical). The role of PI is more often filled in our case by the corporate leadership. I honestly think that the lack of large industrial research labs and the drying up of good academic research positions is very much an issue of what would be R&D funding going to other things that provide better near term ROI: VC, stock market, etc. R&D is very much an investment like anything else and for whatever reason (patents, existing IP portfolios, etc.), it's just not a place that gets much attention at the moment as the money handlers have found that they have more ROI opportunity elsewhere. I think the modern substitute for old fashioned R&D is the modern tech startup. The siren call of these ridiculously inflated "valuations" is simply too much for investment managers and it locks up more and more money that could go towards other investments. There's more parallels there as well, R&D and Startup investment is a high-failure game. But the outcome of successful startups is likely to be much larger than the outcome of a successful R&D venture (which still has very long tails of IP capture, product development, marketing, etc.) I think it's a shame in the sense that, while we end up with dozens of photo sharing sites and social network startups, there's very few actual world changing ones out there. Most of what we get are not "hard" technical areas and their value derives from their faddish popularity - they're kind of the Karashians of technology. But I guess that's the way of the world.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- selectron 10y ago
  The goal of research (at least for basic science) isn't to make money, it is to increase knowledge about the universe. This knowledge is a public good, so it makes sense that private industries motivated by profit do not support fundamental research. Scientific progress is a rising tide that lifts all boats.
api 10y ago
... yet tuition has increased dramatically in the past 25 years. Where is the money going?
- fdgh 10y ago
  Where is the money going? Buildings and administration. The "undergraduate experience" that involves 24-hour gyms and subsidized restaurant-quality cafeteria food. The truth is that professorial salaries are low and tuitions are high (for full-price payers) for the same fundamental reason: universities set the levels where they are, because they can.
- scottlocklin 10y ago
  Administration and facilities. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administrators-growth_n_4738584.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administr... The interesting thing about this is that nobody complains about it.
asimuvPR 10y ago
This is one of the reasons I founded asimuv. You are better off founding your own project.
pc2g4d 10y ago
It all feels like a market signaling problem. When people are choosing majors and how far to go in school, they don't seem to have the right information. Lack of understanding of the marketability of different degrees surely harms the students/future workers, but would seem to be in the interest of certain employers who benefit from the glut of overqualified workers. Of course, oversupply in one sector is likely accompanied by undersupply in others.
- gozur88 10y ago
  I don't think the colleges are keen for students to have that information. College budgets depend on people getting degrees using debt they will have severe difficulty repaying.
- deong 10y ago
  This has nothing to do with marketing or prospects for different degrees. It doesn't matter what degree you choose -- if you go to graduate school, you'll be trained for a job that you will likely never get. That's as true in Computer Science as it is in Literature.
lifeisstillgood 10y ago
The thing is we could double the science budget in most industrialised nations without really noticing. Compared to all the other very low ROI work being done by government spending and the almost free cost of borrowing it's probably something we should do. Throw enough tenure against the wall and eventually something will stick
- mattkrause 10y ago
  Any chance you are running for Congress? :-)
  - lifeisstillgood 10y ago
    Running from Congress, yes :-)
pvaldes 10y ago
Please choose 2 among the 2000 problems that you need to be solved as soon as possible. Wait patiently whereas 1998 urgent problems unexplicably rot and spawn 50 new problems each. Learn how to live with the new situation. Talk about the old good times when life was much easier and you had plenty of money to spend. Repeat.

89 points by hvo 10y ago

The world is about people selling crap they don't need to each other. If you can be honest with yourself enough to accept that, you realize there is no place for learning in this worldview. Getting money today (GMT) is all that matters, so until the govt finds a way to take everyone's not hard-earned money and redirect it toward more noble pursuits, I'm confident the trend will worsen.

smaddox 10y ago
Don't worry, I'm sure Trump has a solution in mind.
tostitos1979 10y ago
This seems to be a sarcastic off-shoot of the discussion but I gave u an upvote. Your point is completely valid ... a stable research environment needs government funding. I think this might be a US statistic but I recall reading that we spend more on any one of the top 3 sports than we spend on all forms of cancer research. This should be a no-brainer but it isn't. There was an ACM Communications article a few years ago by Moshe Verde where he pointed out that computation has radically altered both theory and experimentation - the two pillars of science. As a professional scientist, I firmly believe we are at the precipice of great discoveries that will benefit all of humanity - except we are squandering time, and the resources of the planet on stupid bickering.
- untilHellbanned 10y ago
  Thanks. Somebody appreciated my point. The world is consumed by trivia. People with influence and money, who sadly are the often the ones most consumed with trivia, need to die, undergo brain transplants, or some other miracle in order to change the direction we are headed.

johan_larson 10y ago

This story again. The oversupply of aspiring scholars is really really not news. What would be news is any sign that things are changing, with applications to grad school dropping, or maybe the expansion of graduate school degrees that are explicitly not aimed at professorships.

projectramo 10y ago
I had always heard that this was the case in philosophy, literature and so on. Then, a few years ago, I heard it was the case in the sciences. Now it is in the technical disciplines, and it is egregious. (4x oversupply). The magnitude and the discipline is the news here (at least for me).
- ryanSrich 10y ago
  Getting your graduate degree solely to gain professorship is a bad look for anyone, even in engineering. The supply of professors across the board has been extremely high for at least 5 years.
- sseagull 10y ago
  The lack of scientists has been a myth for a long time, and probably comes from the lumping of very different fields under the umbrella of "STEM". Lots of good info from the IEEE Spectrum (2013): "The STEM Crisis is a Myth" http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth-an-ongoing-discussion http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth-an...

kneel 10y ago

It's a real shame how the recession has hit STEM funding. There are a lot of really exciting new technologies that are simply not funded. The private sector cannot innovate until monetization is in sight and the public sector is increasingly squeezed to publish papers with limited resources. The overall effect is less innovation and bad science.

cloverich 10y ago
> The private sector cannot innovate until monetization is in sight That feels like a sweeping condemnation of R&D in the private sector in general. I know very little on the subject, is there a strong base for this position?
- Spooky23 10y ago
  It's a side effect of changes in the marketplace and the world. When big conglomerates ran big horizontal and vertical businesses, they did general R&D work that benefited their broader corporate mission. Bell Labs wasn't there because AT&T was some sort of benevolent charity. Now companies are mostly brokers between outsourcers and have a narrow focus. We haven't "caught up" with the capability that we already have, so startups have replaced corporate R&D, mostly using off the shelf stuff to make minor incremental changes.
  - delazeur 10y ago
    I don't know if this was legally enforceable, but I have heard that the existence of Bell Labs was essentially a quid pro quo with the federal government in exchange for being granted a regulated monopoly on phone service. More generally, I have heard that corporate executives in the golden age of American industry had more of a sense that they owed a debt to the public for all the free stuff they had been given (cost plus defense contracts, government R&D, radio and TV frequencies, ect.). I think there are some rose-tinted glasses involved in that analysis, but it was probably part of it.
- sseagull 10y ago
  While "cannot" might be a little strong, it can be true, depend on the field and company of course. I used to work at a large company that in the past performed a large amount of fundamental research into physics, since it affected their products. I took a tour of the labs recently and they are a shadow of their former selves. It was depressing. I think reduction in private sector STEM comes from several sources. One is the private sector not willing to take the risk of something not working, no long-term thinking, etc. Another might be the relative difficulty in measuring the impact of your R&D department. In an era where every cost has to be justified and everything has to be measured by some metric, R&D begins to look like an expense rather than a profit generator, at least in the short-medium term.

frozenport 10y ago

I disagree with the bulk of this article. It certainly varies a lot of by field but in biophotonics I've seen a lot of extremely poor candidates, people who say things like "I don't do math", "I don't want to teach", "MATLAB is for other people", "I'm not a biologist so I can't explain my work". When I first started I thought these people sucked, and I was going to be great. What I learned is that the graduate development opportunities are rare, and many of the reason people suck are beyond their control. For example, working on tedious projects or bullshit projects, do to your PI's conflict of interest. Or simply put that your research rests on a foundation of lies. So, on one hand we have many people on the other hand we don't have many qualified people.

untilHellbanned 10y ago
Serious analysis irony here - your anecdote doesn't reverse the mountain of data in the other direction.
p4wnc6 10y ago
Saying "MATLAB is for other people" isn't the sign of a poor candidate. Saying "you will need to use MATLAB for this job" on the other hand is overwhelmingly a sign of a bad job, in the same way that any usage of Excel VBA whatsoever is a sign to run, run, run for the hills -- that firm is absolutely doing it wrong. I've also heard the opposite of your first example used as a criticism of candidates too. After completing my undergrad degree in math and then grad degrees in statistics, I was astounded how in industry, either describing yourself more as an engineer or scientist who does not work on the abstract math stuff or describing yourself as someone who is very interested in abstract math will both cause you to get rejected. The only way to win is to happen to have done a lot of difficult abstract math in the past and remember it all well enough to pass tricky interviews, but then to be overwhelmingly happy and satisfied with a job that will not ever ask you to use it and will instead burn you out on dumb shit stuff like fitting a regression to KPI data and using t-stats to directly do (fallacious) model comparison. The biggest career risk I've seen from having done very computer science-heavy statistics is underemployment. Your math chops will be pure credential, sometimes used by your manager to try to win arguments from authority about e.g. that dumb shit KPI regression. But you will 100% never be given open-ended modeling work that could actually have a positive impact on your business's bottom line. Essentially, you are hired to be some more senior person's sycophant political darling. You function internally much the same way that a big consulting company functions externally -- people already know what they want to hear, they just want you to tell them what they want to hear, slap together some plausible-sounding rationalizations for it, dress it up with buzzwords about big data and "insights", and be a show pony for talking about it. They emphatically do not want you for doing anything that would be called "real" work. There are occasional exceptions, especially in certain teams at certain established tech companies. But then, landing a position inside one of those teams is nothing but the same lottery as winning a professorship all over again.

wrong_variable 10y ago

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/tileshop_pmc_inline.html?title=Click%20on%20image%20to%20zoom&p=PMC3&id=4309283_nihms562644f1.jpg http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/ti... Right, What is the difference between Civil/Environmental and Environmental ? It seems the best bet is to study something like mining since the R_0 is so low there.

aab0 10y ago
Petroleum engineering regularly makes the list of degrees with highest pay...
- nradov 10y ago
  The petroleum industry goes through boom / bust cycles every few years. Make sure to graduate during a boom.
greenshackle 10y ago
To oversimplify by a lot, Civil/Environmental = urban/industrial (e.g. industrial/municipal wastewater treatment, air pollution), Environmental = agricultural/resources (e.g. soil management, biofuels, soil decontamination for mining/oil). That's roughly how it was divided at my college, anyway.

HarryHirsch 10y ago

What the article curiously doesn't talk about it the fact that the non-academic job market at PhD level collapsed in 2007. In the news yesterday: even more cutbacks at Merck. The degree of offshoring and outsourcing that happened since 2003 in chemistry and the life sciences is incredible to anyone not in the field.

srunni 10y ago
More on the cutbacks at Merck: http://endpts.com/merck-triggers-a-new-round-of-layoffs-in-rd-reorganization/ http://endpts.com/merck-triggers-a-new-round-of-layoffs-in-r... > Merck’s move follows a major trend in biopharma R&D, as the biggest companies concentrate more and more of their work in the big hubs. And virtually all of the major players have downsized at one time or another. > Close to three years ago, Merck triggered a major reorganization in its R&D ranks, as the then new R&D chief Roger Perlmutter set in motion a plan that involved 8,500 layoffs, all of which were piled on a restructuring effort that was announced earlier. > Those layoffs followed a years-long gap in significant new drug approvals and a string of clinical setbacks. Since then, though, Merck landed a landmark approval of Keytruda, now the number two checkpoint inhibitor on the blockbuster cancer market, along with an OK early this year for its hep C combo, Zepatier, which is being sold in a rival-infested field.

bradleyjg 10y ago

I don't see any particular reason to tie research generally, and scientific research specifically, to institutions primarily organized around undergraduate education.

HarryHirsch 10y ago
When you are working at the coalface of research you are intimately aware of which concepts are relevant and which are not. That directly feeds into undergraduate teaching. You can't teach today what you taught 30 or 50 years ago, but at the worse undergrad-only colleges you can get away with it.
- bradleyjg 10y ago
  Even if this is true, and it seems much more aspirational than something that actually occurs with any sort of frequency, that's merely one benefit to be weighed against all the disadvantages. To name just a few such: worse average teaching ability than a selection method that focuses on teaching ability, reduced research output due to splitting researchers' time between teaching and research, and of course the issue pointed out in the article that the needs of undergraduate education in large measure limit the number of research scientists. Were it not for the historical accident that we do things this way, I strongly doubt anyone would suggest we adopt it for whatever tiny educational benefit it may impart to undergraduates -- most of whom won't even go into the academic fields they are studying.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  You mean undergrad courses don't teach the same thing they taught 50 years ago? When did that change?
JohnStrange 10y ago
Well, I'm at a research institute as a postdoc. The problem is that there is no career path except for trying to get tenure, and since there are no openings and the competition in the academic middle field is insane, this is so unlikely that it has become unrealistic to plan for it even when you're doing good work and have adequate publications. So at least in my area there is no research career. It's a dead end.

Xcelerate 10y ago

> Now, as a new crop of graduate students receives Ph.D.s in science, researchers worry over the future of some of these dedicated people; they’re trained to be academics and are often led to believe that anything else is an admission of failure. As someone finishing up grad school, this doesn't seem quite accurate. To me, it seems like a lot of the interesting research is being done in industry. I remember scrolling through jobs online toward the end of my undergraduate and seeing "PhD required" for all of the positions I was interested in. Most of my friends working on their PhD are aiming either for industry or a research scientist position at a government lab (like ORNL). So I'm not sure who exactly constitutes this group that believes "not professor" = failure.

beevai142 10y ago
If you don't advance fast enough on your academic career, it can be read as a failure indicator by grant reviewers, which will reduce your chances to stay employed. If you're too old, and not past an appropriate career stage, you will also find it hard to find someone to employ you in academia.
sliverstorm 10y ago
What field are you in, though? I believe that attitude is tremendously pervasive the more "theoretical" the field is, e.g. the closer it is to math & physics, and the further it is from engineering.
- Xcelerate 10y ago
  Well, it's kind of funny. My degree is chemical engineering, my advisor is materials science, yet all of my work is HPC/computational. A lot of this stuff has become very interdisciplinary (I studied more computer science papers than anything over the last year).
- delazeur 10y ago
  I studied chemical engineering: all of our PhD grads chose industry over academia, and most of our young professors had come out of physics, chemistry, and biology departments. It was an interesting culture mix, partly created by the fact that ChemE is either disappearing as a field or changing to the point of being unrecognizable (depending on who you ask).

jostmey 10y ago

Three big problems: 1) Emphasis on funding translational research using government grants, which industry would otherwise be doing on its own. Hence, industry jobs have evaporated while basic science has languished. 2) Institutional salary caps on Grad students/Post docs, so training funds stretch too far resulting in an oversupply of entry level jobs. Better to pay the best people at competitive wages. 3) Growing divide between industry and academia, making job hopping even harder. Everybody is left worse off.

typetypetype 10y ago
4) Universities accepting more students into programs than could possibly get an academic job.
- jostmey 10y ago
  Wouldn't be a problem if universities competed with each other to nab students with the highest scores. Universities would spend more money hiring students, leaving Universities unable to hire as many students.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    > Wouldn't be a problem if universities competed with each other to nab students with the highest scores Why do you think they don't now?
mattkrause 10y ago
A huge part of the issue, which you hint at in #2, is the "training" part. Most research is actually performed by trainees: undergrads, grad students, and some postdocs. This is silly because 1) the "training" is often pretty minimal (my PhD involved less coursework than an undergrad masters) and 2) most of the people doing most of the work have no idea what they are doing. Nevertheless, this still happens because there are TONS of established funding mechanisms for trainees: REU (and similar per-university programs for undergrads), and individual (NRSA) and institutional training grants (T31) for postdocs and grad students. In contrast, there are very few ways to fund more experienced individuals who are not running their own lab. This is bad for those people, and also bad for the institutions.

brador 10y ago

The cream of the crop will still rise to the top, so it's simply a case of the bar for Professorship is rising. Which is a good thing.

GuiA 10y ago
The counterpoint to that is that universities are moving more and more teaching positions to short term contracts with terrible pay and benefits. So skilled people might instead choose to go in the industry/pursue other opportunities, and the students find themselves with instructors who end doing what they do because they can't go anywhere else.
- brador 10y ago
  And that's ok. If the Professorships have value to anyone they'll get paid. If some positions are being removed then maybe they just weren't that useful.
  - deong 10y ago
    That ignores a huge amount of evidence that we routinely shoot ourselves in the foot by making flawed assessments of the relative benefits of short vs. long-term rewards.
- codexon 10y ago
  I find that the people that are best at research (and thus most likely to get tenure) are usually very poor teachers. Usually they are so good at their subject that they tend to skip steps in their explanations and forget how difficult a certain concept is and expect everyone to breeze through it. Unfortunately, universities optimize for research rather than teaching.
mattkrause 10y ago
I strongly doubt that is true, actually. I'm a few years out from my PhD. The classmates who stayed in academia are neither much smarter nor harder working than those who have left. It does select for certain personality traits, like risk tolerance and willingness to self-promote, but I'm not sure that's really what we want.

sjg007 10y ago

It would be wise to do an MD/PhD. The MDs have all the data. Also Business schools need professors.

vibrio 10y ago
I agree, but broadly stated, the path doesn't generally train good scientists. The MD/PhD is more like a MD/MS. They frequently are pushed through 'phd' more rapidly under the eye of Med School deans and to optimize MD/PhD training grant slots. A not insignificant number of MD/PhD trainee simply do it for the free med school also, with little interest or intent to pursue research.
Fomite 10y ago
Or you can do what I've done, get a PhD, and be friends with the MDs.

FatAmericanDev 10y ago

This is a good problem. The solution is to raise the bar: in order to be a professor you have to make a tangible advancement in your field, something that advances the state of the art by an order of magnitude.

FatAmericanDev 10y ago
Also, pay them more.
- nradov 10y ago
  Where is the money going to come from? Undergraduate tuition has already reached ridiculous levels.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    You can start by disbanding the football teams.
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      That's a great idea, but at many schools it wouldn't actually raise much money. It's not as though the idiot boosters will be just as happy to see their money going toward lab equipment as toward e.g. barbells.
    - nradov 10y ago
      While I'm not a huge fan of college football, at many schools the football teams are effectively profit centers due to media rights and merchandising.
  - scottlocklin 10y ago
    You can get administrative head count back to 1980s levels. You can also ban 7 figure salaries for University administrators. That would pretty much do it. It is a simple problem with a simple solution.
- 10y ago

sliverstorm 10y ago

Every year the market grows tighter, and federal money for research grants, which support most of this research, remains flat. This makes me think we (as a country, a people), having trained all these scientists, have a market opportunity for inexpensive research, and we aren't taking advantage of it. Sure, the best and the brightest might fight their way to the top, but we can get perfectly good science out of the middle of the bell curve too.

raziel2701 10y ago
But you need to find these researchers the equipment and infrastructure to do research, thus it's no longer inexpensive research. There's no money for this.
danielweber 10y ago
You can't have a million researchers do a 4000 man-year project in a day. There are decreasing marginal returns from throwing more people at a problem. Especially if they are publishing, because now you need more people to curate their publications. And if you throw enough researchers at something, they are going to find a bunch of spurious results simply because of the luck of large numbers. I don't know if we are at that point. But adding a bunch of average people to a project can easily slow it down. If you want to help the existing researchers, mow their lawns and buy their groceries and take care of their house maintenance problems. Let them concentrate.
- sliverstorm 10y ago
  Not faster research, more scope. Things that we neglect today. Hell, form a paper review branch whose sole purpose is review/reproduction of results. We're not out of work to be done
  - danielweber 10y ago
    This is a good idea.

bane 10y ago

I run a small industrial applied research lab (<100 researchers). The truth is that, except in fairly specific cases, we don't need PhD level staff either. Just like in a university lab, the bulk of the hard work is done by people with Graduate (or in some cases Undergraduate) degrees. Practical experience in the field is also about 50% of what we need (since we're ultimately figuring out things that can go into engineering and deployed operationally, knowing what the end-state environment looks and runs like is critical). The role of PI is more often filled in our case by the corporate leadership. I honestly think that the lack of large industrial research labs and the drying up of good academic research positions is very much an issue of what would be R&D funding going to other things that provide better near term ROI: VC, stock market, etc. R&D is very much an investment like anything else and for whatever reason (patents, existing IP portfolios, etc.), it's just not a place that gets much attention at the moment as the money handlers have found that they have more ROI opportunity elsewhere. I think the modern substitute for old fashioned R&D is the modern tech startup. The siren call of these ridiculously inflated "valuations" is simply too much for investment managers and it locks up more and more money that could go towards other investments. There's more parallels there as well, R&D and Startup investment is a high-failure game. But the outcome of successful startups is likely to be much larger than the outcome of a successful R&D venture (which still has very long tails of IP capture, product development, marketing, etc.) I think it's a shame in the sense that, while we end up with dozens of photo sharing sites and social network startups, there's very few actual world changing ones out there. Most of what we get are not "hard" technical areas and their value derives from their faddish popularity - they're kind of the Karashians of technology. But I guess that's the way of the world.

deleted 10y ago
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selectron 10y ago
The goal of research (at least for basic science) isn't to make money, it is to increase knowledge about the universe. This knowledge is a public good, so it makes sense that private industries motivated by profit do not support fundamental research. Scientific progress is a rising tide that lifts all boats.

api 10y ago

... yet tuition has increased dramatically in the past 25 years. Where is the money going?

fdgh 10y ago
Where is the money going? Buildings and administration. The "undergraduate experience" that involves 24-hour gyms and subsidized restaurant-quality cafeteria food. The truth is that professorial salaries are low and tuitions are high (for full-price payers) for the same fundamental reason: universities set the levels where they are, because they can.
scottlocklin 10y ago
Administration and facilities. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administrators-growth_n_4738584.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administr... The interesting thing about this is that nobody complains about it.

asimuvPR 10y ago

This is one of the reasons I founded asimuv. You are better off founding your own project.

pc2g4d 10y ago

It all feels like a market signaling problem. When people are choosing majors and how far to go in school, they don't seem to have the right information. Lack of understanding of the marketability of different degrees surely harms the students/future workers, but would seem to be in the interest of certain employers who benefit from the glut of overqualified workers. Of course, oversupply in one sector is likely accompanied by undersupply in others.

gozur88 10y ago
I don't think the colleges are keen for students to have that information. College budgets depend on people getting degrees using debt they will have severe difficulty repaying.
deong 10y ago
This has nothing to do with marketing or prospects for different degrees. It doesn't matter what degree you choose -- if you go to graduate school, you'll be trained for a job that you will likely never get. That's as true in Computer Science as it is in Literature.

lifeisstillgood 10y ago

The thing is we could double the science budget in most industrialised nations without really noticing. Compared to all the other very low ROI work being done by government spending and the almost free cost of borrowing it's probably something we should do. Throw enough tenure against the wall and eventually something will stick

mattkrause 10y ago
Any chance you are running for Congress? :-)
- lifeisstillgood 10y ago
  Running from Congress, yes :-)

pvaldes 10y ago

Please choose 2 among the 2000 problems that you need to be solved as soon as possible. Wait patiently whereas 1998 urgent problems unexplicably rot and spawn 50 new problems each. Learn how to live with the new situation. Talk about the old good times when life was much easier and you had plenty of money to spend. Repeat.