13 ms·

When tenure never comes

151 points by the_duck 10y ago

purpleidea 10y ago
The author of the article never mentions what faculty or program they're in, or references any of their work. No doubt this is a real problem, but in this particular case they could just be a lousy researcher in a faculty that doesn't have a high demand for new professors. IOW the "psychology" / "liberal arts" over population. I'm not trying to knock any of those studies, but there is a large excess where I'm from.
- mjevans 10y ago
  Yet those programs would happily take on more than their replacement rate, while at the same time not being upfront about the actual chances of getting a job.
  - ptero 10y ago
    In general, though, I think most grad programs should take more than their replacement rate. There should be a (sizeable) outflow to non-academic jobs in a healthy system. This also requires not having an institutional "tenure or failure" mentality, which is, sadly, not uncommon in many science grad schools.
    - pmiller2 10y ago
      Yes, there should be a sizable outflow to non-academic jobs, but that implies that the demand is there, and that the jobs hey sufficiently well to make up for the opportunity cost of not earning for eight years or more. These conditions do not really exist for a lot of fields. How many jobs outside academia are there where a PhD in medieval history is an advantage?
      - disgruntledphd2 10y ago
        It's those transferrable skills, yo. In general, a liberal arts PhD will be able to work independently with little supervision, plan a course of work and make headway without much feedback. In general, they can also communicate effectively through text. I totally get that people don't want to leave their speciality, but the PhD will normally give students a bunch of skills that are hard (but not impossible) to get elsewhere. I have a psychology PhD, and now work at a tech company (I always loved stats, and discovered coding during the PhD due to laziness, so may not be a typical case).
- KingMob 10y ago
  As a former neuroscientist, that's somewhat true, but it's pretty bad all across academia. Every department takes on more grad students than can possibly fill academic offices.
- hooloovoo_zoo 10y ago
  The author seems to think writing a book is necessary for tenure, so he isn't in a STEM field (obviously many STEM professors write books but the vast majority of STEM professors who receive tenure have not written a book).
  - mturmon 10y ago
    A history grad student I knew (I was in STEM) remarked that if he couldn't get an adaptation of his dissertation published somewhere in book form, it would be a major career setback. Having graduated in 1992 with his PhD, his book came out in 1998, as he moved through a series of temporary positions. He's tenured at a major university now, but he does have to live in an out of the way and rather drab college town. It's no picnic.
- pmiller2 10y ago
  There's an overpopulation in virtually every field. Any graduate student can look to his or her left and right in class and realize that those people are his or her competition for a job that only one of them is going to get. The situation is only somewhat better in STEM fields, because there's more industry demand (where you can get paid more and have better mobility, but get looked down on by your academic brethren.)
  - maverick_iceman 10y ago
    > where you can get paid more and have better mobility, but get looked down on by your academic brethren And then 2 years later they will be asking you to find them a job. :)
mjevans 10y ago
I hate having to enable JavaScript just to read a website. It was worth it for this one though, just one main thing; still I almost didn't click it, I often don't. - I see that same mentality reflected in far too many places, no one wants to hire for a career anymore; and that's what 'tenure' is at a college. The 'contract' in society between the working class and those who employee them is beyond broken.
- fsck--off 10y ago
  You can read the site with JavaScript disabled if you also disable CSS.
Hermel 10y ago
An academic career should never be your only option. Make sure you study something that is useful in the real economy.
- pm90 10y ago
  I sincerely hope that people who are genuinely excited about research do not adopt this attitude. Our affluent society allows us to specialize in what we like; allowing the best of us to create art and mathematics and make discoveries in science is as important as being a "contributing member of society".
  - ghaff 10y ago
    We all have to make choices between what we enjoy and have a passion for and what pays the bills. For many of us, there is a degree of overlap though likely not 100%. Our society is not so affluent that, if what you are genuinely excited about is medieval German poetry, you can reasonably expect to be supported with that passion unless you win a very specific academic track lottery (or have other sources of income).
    - pm90 10y ago
      I was thinking more about scientific research, such as funding for pure mathematics, theoretical computer science and such. These are skills that require years of dedicated effort to master the basics and reach a level of understanding that is rigorous enough to start making original contributions and yet offer very little financial compensation in industry. You are right in that a decision has to be made in what areas we consider important enough to allow a sustainable career from it. In your example, I would certainly not fund a person for studying Medieval German poetry only; but more funding for research into history? Sure thing.
      - Karrot_Kream 10y ago
        Who decides where "funding for research into history" goes? In our STEM graduate program (a fairly prestigious one), it was pretty widely argued that you basically had to attach yourself to one of the big name grants to try and get funded. I had a few friends who had some ideas but their professors weren't too happy with those. They found a way to incorporate some of the buzzwords for a giant grant our university had, pitched it to the professor, who submitted a grant application, and got them funded on the idea. Professor was happy (he had money), students were happy, but at the end of the day, the process was idiotic.
arcanus 10y ago
Saddening story. However, as an academic myself, some bits were misleading or odd: > funding regulations meant the grant couldn’t pay my salary as its lead researcher I've never, ever heard of anything like this occurring. The most I have seen are cost sharing pieces where a grant cannot more than a certain % of your salary. But these are often known upfront by the PI! > The two disclosed who had submitted a grant proposal and whose book was near publication—all of which are needed for tenure. I was the only one in the room with books, articles, and a recently awarded grant. This strikes me as a highly bitter position to take. There is far more to tenure than only the number of grants, books, articles, etc. Were the articles published in high impact journals? How much $$ was the grant for? A researcher 5 years younger might get a tenure-track position with no prior grants, but a hot research topic, a few good publications and an excellent pedigree. > My financial reality still makes it hard to keep up with conferences. I haven’t had access to professional development funds since 2010 The author states he has funding grants but these did not explicitly cover several conferences? I'm very surprised by this, and this is not at all consistent with my experience. I had funding to attend conferences as a first year graduate student. > There are jobs in the southern US and in the UK, which would take me away from family and a new relationship that I cherish. I don’t need to start building a life from scratch in my late thirties. I definitely don’t need to do it for a nine—or three-month contract without benefits, or costs of moving. And if we’re talking about the US, I don’t need to be dealing with signing religious codes of conduct or dealing with campuses where eighteen-year-olds can carry concealed guns. The sad truth of the matter is: if you want to get a tenure track job, 99% of us will not truly have a choice in location where you live. Expect to move across the country (or across countries!). That is quite apparent when you sign up. You take what you can get. A friend took a position in upstate NY, and he hates the cold...
- scott_s 10y ago
  I suspect the author is from the humanities, which have starkly different funding realities than what you and I are used to. (Your profile says you are a computational scientist, and while I work in industry, I still publish in computer science academic conferences.)
  - 10y ago
throw_away_777 10y ago
Every student considering going to graduate school should read this article. Professors are very misinformed about how likely someone is to get tenure (most of them got it > 20 years ago, in a much better academic job market). This misinformation trickles down to students. The simple fact is that right now the average professor is graduating more than 10 phd students, only 1 of which can become a tenured professor at a research university. The job options in academia other than tenured professor are horrible and exploitative. I know many post-docs who have gone into industry after slaving away at temporary and low paying jobs for over 6 years. These post-docs were very bright and dedicated people, but the tenure track position requires lots of luck in addition to skill.
- jseliger 10y ago
  Academia expanded enormously between 1945 – 1975, when virtually everyone who got a PhD could get an academic job. Since then, time-to-degree for PhDs in all subjects has increased dramatically, post-docs have become the norm, and academic jobs have become scarce. I wrote about this in "What you should know BEFORE you start grad school / PhD programs in English Literature: The economic, financial, and opportunity costs" (http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-before-you-start-grad-school-in-english-literature-the-economic-financial-and-opportunity-costs/ http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befor...), but the overall point can be generalized to a large number of fields. As you note, academia has become increasingly exploitative, even when most individual professors remain well meaning. In addition, many people considering grad school or who have recently begun it seem not to know quite how bad the situation is, or quite how bad it can be to be in your 30s and to have effectively wasted the career part of your 20s.
  - carsongross 10y ago
    One of my most infuriating moments at Berkeley was when I attended a symposium on pursuing an academic career (I was interested in one at that point) and a professor complained that students were too concerned with academics and weren't spending enough time protesting, like she had. It was the academic equivalent of Old Economy Steven. Very triggering.
pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
waaaaaaahhhhh...... waaaaaaaaahhhh...... start your own school, lady. donald trump did it. you're worse than donald trump?
ptero 10y ago
Being out of an academic job is a painful experience. I have a PhD in math and, entering grad school, was aiming only for an academic career. However, it was very clear to everyone in my grad program (as well as to my friends doing physics PhDs across the street) that this requires 1-2 competitive postdocs (3-6 years at low salary) and a stiff competition to a tenure track. And you do not usually get a choice: i.e., if you get offered a position, you grab it, be it in Maine or Texas (I decided to avoid this race and went to the industry; there are pros and cons to both paths). IMO, the tenure system, at least in the US, is highly inefficient. Things are pretty top-heavy (older, tenured professors who originally were expected to retire by ~60, often do not) and graduating PhDs with decent, but not stellar results have a very hard time on the academic research track.
- secabeen 10y ago
  For many years, universities had mandatory retirement ages: >Until 1982, retirement of faculty members at many universities was mandatory at age 65. Because of amendments to the ADEA, in 1982 the minimum allowable mandatory retirement age was increased to age 70. In 1986 Congress made additional amendments to the ADEA, prohibiting any mandatory retirement ages for most workers in the United States. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737001/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737001/
searine 10y ago
The fun part of this article is where he never mentions his field...
- chinathrow 10y ago
  Why? Isn't that highly irrelevant to his story?
pmiller2 10y ago
I consider myself fortunate that I realized most of what was talked about in this article was true while I was about halfway through grad school. The fundamental realization that given the size of my classes, where my peers were competition for any academic job, combined with the fact that I would literally have to wait for someone to die before I could get one of those jobs, was enough to knock me right off of the academic track. I might've even put up with postdoc hell, and the "6 year job interview " that is the tenure process if I thought it would have come to something. But, when you have 50 people competing for the same three openings in a year, and only one chance per year to apply, the odds don't look very good.
- twblalock 10y ago
  Same here. Leaving grad school was the best decision I ever made. The year I left, there were only 2 or 3 positions in my field in the entire United States, and one of them went unfilled because the university didn't like any of the candidates.
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  Me too. Sort of. I think I realized this subconsciously before I was conscious of it. The result was two years of depression and anxiety before I got everything straight and quit. I don't know if it was wasted time or not. It was a long time to not be in the workforce, but I learned a lot of skills while working on what turned out to be dead end research projects. I have a job now that requires merely a fraction of those skills. But maybe I wouldn't have gotten the job without my half phd. Or maybe I'd have a better job if I finished. I'm still pretty frustrated by the fact that what was presented to me as a failsafe career path was anything but failsafe. This is pretty much the same problem with all of higher education and the current economy in miniature. Just as an undergrad degree no longer garuntees a good job a phd no longer garuntees a tenured job.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    > I think I realized this subconsciously before I was conscious of it. This is grad school in a nutshell, in a lot of fields. I've seen three common responses to this cognitive dissonance: 1. Deny the brutal reality of the job market. 2. "But I couldn't ever be happy doing anything else!" 3. Leave. One of the strangest things about my grad school experience was watching very intelligent people spend years of their lives, and sometimes borrowing money they could never pay back, to pursue a degree even though deep down, they understood that it was a really bad idea. The rationalizations they came up with were pretty transparent to anyone who wasn't also in the grad school bubble. I suppose I sound harsh, but when people ask me if they should go to grad school in the field I did, my answer is always "not unless you are already independently wealthy and never need to work again."
deleted 10y ago
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mccoyspace 10y ago
FWIW, this story parallels the reality that most professional artists have experienced for a long time: hyper competition, extremely limited grant opportunities, no direct commercial market, everything paid out-of-pocket. A "compulsory hobby" is a great phrase.
- dnautics 10y ago
  For STEM academes: The difference is that professional artists have long been aware of the "starving artist" stereotype aren't strongly sold a nationalism-backed narrative that "we need more scientists", followed by unsustainable, hierarchical organizational structures. Moreover, science typically holds itself to a different sort of accountability (empirical results and uncompromising honesty) as a professional ideal, whereas the actual nature of the beast, where funding is drawn to popular ideas and politically connected researchers instead of the most honest and productive.
smallnamespace 10y ago
My experience in finance was that 50% of quants (especially physics PhDs from the 90s, when all the Cold War-era funding dried up) were failed academics. Most of the rest were PhDs jumping straight to industry to avoid chasing tenure for years.
- gohrt 10y ago
  And the remaining few were successful academics who jumped to industry for astronomical pay raises.
- alasdair_ 10y ago
  It depends on how you define "failed". Even the best academics may think it rational to make millions of dollars as a quant over a more conventional salary as an academic. I am not a "failed mcdonalds cashier" if I choose to quit and something that pays more, even if I started out in that particular field.
  - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
    Sort of funny that the recently deposed McDonald's CEO was an EE. That demonstrates the true value of STEM jobs in our society rather than the phony "shortage" hype.
  - smallnamespace 10y ago
    Maybe I'm being blunt, but my definition is that I spoke to them personally and they told me they would still be in academia if they had managed to land a job. I asked, because at the time I was considering leaving to pursue a graduate degree myself. Of course, I didn't literally speak to every quant in on the street, but I sampled from the ones who were around me. Most people were quite open about the situation but glad they had left; some were still very bitter.
nikanj 10y ago
"I forked out over $2000 to attend two conferences [..] at the second I was cut off half-way into my paper." I have never seen this happen at any conference. It makes the author sound like a crackpot.
- exolymph 10y ago
  "I have never seen this happen" =/= "This has never happened"
  - nikanj 10y ago
    I'm not questioning whether it happened or not, I'm curious about the reasons their presentation was cut short. "There’s nothing quite like having an established academic decide that hearing eight minutes of the allotted twenty would be sufficient. As a self-funded under-employed contingent, I wasn’t going to say anything useful anyway." How would this established academic know they're self-funded and under-employed?
    - the_duck 10y ago
      The author's job title might have given this away. In Canada (assistant|associate|full) professors are tenured or tenure track, and hence higher status. Any other title could be assumed to mean non-tenure track and under-employed, hence lower status.
coldtea 10y ago
>I don’t need to start building a life from scratch in my late thirties. I definitely don’t need to do it for a nine—or three-month contract without benefits, or costs of moving. Well, it's not like the academic world, even when it was much better itself, has done much to protest and assist with the same and much worse situation in blue collar (and even office) jobs. First they came for the McDonalds burger flippers, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a McDonalds burger flipper... et al
- gohrt 10y ago
  Does McDonald's lay off staff every 9 months?
  - throw_away_777 10y ago
    McDonald's turnover is at least 44%, so basically yes. http://fistfuloftalent.com/2008/05/can-this-turnov.html http://fistfuloftalent.com/2008/05/can-this-turnov.html
    - Mtinie 10y ago
      The comparison doesn't hold up when rates of voluntary job separation and involuntary laid offs are being discussed.
      - coldtea 10y ago
        When you pay employees crap, and give them crap opportunities, "voluntary job separation" is mostly a euphemism.
        Mtinie 10y ago
        I don't disagree with that, but there's a difference between someone walking off a job after they quit and when a company terminates someone's employment.
danso 10y ago
I'm just an adjunct and will likely never break into the tenure track (not having a master's degree being one of many factors against me), but I was sad to see that even this purportedly slow and deliberate process be affected to some degree by ageism. A good friend of mine entered grad school (in the humanities) around 2004, when most folks he knew were easily finding tenure-track jobs after their PhDs. He found himself the runner-up for highly-contested jobs, and family events took him out of the hunt for a bit, but as the years went on and he was content to be hired by not top-tier schools, he ran into the "We'd love to hire you but your resumé is too prestigious for us and you might just use us as a stepping stone" and "If you haven't been snapped up despite such a great pedigree, then something must be wrong with you". He eventually got a tenure-track offer which he happily accepted, but he was close to giving up on his decade-long career path. I think these struggles are endemic to nearly all professions but it seems to me that in academia, there's fewer opportunities to get tenure-track (or non-tenure, but decently-paying) positions once you've deviated from the usual path, even before you factor in the scarcity.
- twblalock 10y ago
  It's commonly assumed in humanities disciplines that if you don't get a tenure-track job within a few years of graduation, you probably never will. It's also common for advisers to tell their students not to adjunct under any circumstances, because it makes you "damaged goods" on the job market. A lot of professors advise their students to take non-academic jobs and keep applying to tenure-track positions, rather than take adjunct jobs. Many older professors who have tenure, and who have great influence in their departments, entered academia when it was the case that "there are always jobs for good people." That's their worldview, and it's just not true anymore. But because they think that way, when they see a candidate who has been looking for a job for several years, they assume that candidate is not one of the good ones. It seems to me that the sciences are different, because postdoc positions seem to be a normal part of one's career progression after a PhD. But in the humanities, that's not the case.
- joeyo 10y ago
  > (not having a master's degree being one of many factors against me) I'm not sure that I understand this. In your field is having a PhD (but without a masters) considered a negative?
Fej 10y ago
Just an anecdote... a professor whose classes I've taken, which were fantastic, recently got tenured. In the liberal arts, too! I like to think that tenure isn't quite dead yet. Depends on the college, naturally. (I deliberately use the word "college" instead of "university"; I find that the liberal arts college at my university is more organized than the computer science department.) Eventually the college loan bubble will burst, and universities will no longer be able to be run like businesses.
- repsilat 10y ago
  > Eventually the college loan bubble will burst, and universities will no longer be able to be run like businesses. Can you explain this sentence? If you mean, "Students will be less likely to get crazy loans," I can only imagine that would encourage universities to "be run like businesses.)
eximius 10y ago
Many people have pointed to an overpopulation being the root cause for this, but I believe that ignores the increasingly inflating administrative staff at universities. That is, it is also a budget problem. The budget for the increase in professor staff is being diverted into additional administrative positions that do... something, apparently. I'm not convinced that the administrative bloat is worth a fraction of what it costs.
- deleted 10y ago
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- dharmon 10y ago
  You'd be appalled at how much overhead universities take out of research grants (from NSF, DARPA, NIH, etc.) to maintain these administrations (along with legitimate uses, like paying utility bills). 40-50% is not uncommon.
  - etendue 10y ago
    Harvard's common indirect rate is as high as 69%: http://osp.finance.harvard.edu/fa-cost-rates-federal-sponsors http://osp.finance.harvard.edu/fa-cost-rates-federal-sponsor... I've long been expecting someone like the NYT to do an exposé on the "dark money" of F&A. It would seem to be ripe given he current discussion of the cost of education.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    How in the heck do they get away with that? Each grant we have has an indirect rate that you cannot exceed and its not 40-50%.
    - luckluckgoosed 10y ago
      Probably just people not understanding what an indirect rate means. They think it means the % of the grant that the university takes. So when they hear an indirect rate of 65%, they think the university is taking 2/3 the money. When in fact, it's about 1/3 due to how it's calculated.
pascalxus 10y ago
Does anyone else see the contradiction: the amount students are spending on college keeps going up, but the budget for professors seems to keep going down. What accounts for the discrepancy?
- rschuetzler 10y ago
  Administration. More and more money going to committees for every little thing.
- cstejerean 10y ago
  Facilities and administrators. Schools get ranked based on their facilities and the types of programs and activities they offer so they keep outspending each other in this area to remain competitive. It's a tragedy.
  - luckluckgoosed 10y ago
    That's part of it. The other part is for private universities, they are admitting more and more lower income students. Each low income student receives tuition waiver, and often a living stipend. So it's a double whammy on the budget.
- cpitman 10y ago
  The belief that everyone should go to college. What the government spends on public schools has actually gone up over the decades, but a move to everyone going to college means that funding per student has dropped. Edit: Link to source: https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/total-and-student-state-funding-and-public-enrollment-over-time https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tabl...
  - intended 10y ago
    This is a more accurate response than most on this issue. To take it further, the underlying issue is that it is now compulsory for people to have a college degree in america to keep up with their expectation of a normal middle class life style. Decades ago, you didn't need to be college educated to live the American Dream. The collapse of those jobs has left citizens to scramble for what's left. this leads to all sorts of secondary effects such as the reduction of extra curricular activities, teaching the test, rote memmorization to survive tests, and cram schools. This pattern exsists already in many third world and developing world nations, and it is a shit show. Our worst scams when it comes to education are horrifying. (Search: vyapam for the most recent education related scam in india.) The education problems in america are a jobs/employment problem.
jerryhuang100 10y ago
It's interesting to see this story on the front page at the same time with another one titled "We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated". It's easy to solve both problems (killing two birds with one stone?) by implementing protocols of purging scientists with track records of non-repeatable results from "personal opinions" and fraudulent scholars gaming publishing systems, including titles, positions, degrees and/or grant money ever awarded. This should at least release some vacancy in the academia (given a 11% repeatable rate from the Amgen study).
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  The point of the Nautilus article was repeatability is a must before a scientific result is accepted. However pressure to publish new results often lead to scientists losing motivation in doing replicating studies. It's a bug in the scientific ecosystem, particularly in the allocation of rewards. A significant number of experiments will always fail to replicate for various random reasons. That doesn't mean the concerned scientist is at fault.
  - jerryhuang100 10y ago
    one or two publications without repeatable results might be acceptable - maybe he or she is just out of luck or some how choose the wrong hypothesis. but if there are five or six non-repeatable papers in the publication laundry list, esp some used for degrees, promotions to tenured positions, or grant applications, this makes him or her looks like fraud with a track record of publishing "personal opinions."
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  And while you're at it, hire some of those underemployed post-docs to reproduce new results full time.
  - jerryhuang100 10y ago
    I concur this with a proposition of a system named as repeatability evaluation and digital tracking, or r.e.d.d.i.t., with the crowd-sourcing efforts.
veddox 10y ago
As somebody looking to go into research (in a STEM field), this is a rather chilling article... And it's by far not the first time I have heard about this problem of getting a long-term job in academia. I'm just wondering: this guy was from Canada. What's the situation like in Europe? Especially Germany?
- sevensor 10y ago
  I'm not European, but I've heard the situation is hard there too, although not in the same way. The European academics I've met are, years after finishing the PhD, still quite dependent on their advisors for patronage. Those advisors likewise have to defer to their advisors. For decades. Until somebody dies. It's very feudal.
limbicsystem 10y ago
UK University chair of a STEM dept graduate school chipping in here: Every September during induction I point out to the PhD students that there are (around) ten of them in the room and our department advertised (around) 1 job last year. We also tell them this when they are applying for the PhD in the first place. They seem unfazed. Our PhD course lasts no longer than 4 years (good students are out in 3) and they appear to be highly employable at the end of it - both as postdocs and in industry. Having seen the US system at first hand as well, I'd say that the lower opportunity cost (time to finish) makes the whole process fairer on the students - graduating with a PhD at 25 still seems like a great opportunity. Doing the same at 32 is a very different prospect. I have no idea what the situation in the humanities is like. Finally - UK research councils (who often fund PhD students) are very open about the fact that PhD students must now be taught a host of 'transferrable skills' to equip them for non-academic jobs.
- Certhas 10y ago
  The problem isn't with PhD positions. PhDs after all are training positions. But each postdoc position makes one less employable. There really is little justification (other than exploitation) in my mind for having postdoc positions that don't lead to permanent positions. This is more of an issue in Germany (where I work now) than in the UK (where I did my PhD).
ilarum 10y ago
Does HN have any advice for those looking to get a PhD because they love the field (Computer Science)? And then follow up the PhD with a job at one of the tech companies' research arm?
- pjmorris 10y ago
  If you really love it, there's no sense in talking about reason. "And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays." - Bottom, Midsummer Night's Dream As for tech company research arms, look carefully at who recruits where you intend to go, and who your potential advisors publish with. If you land in a place with good connections, it increases your chances of landing a gig like that.
  - bachmeier 10y ago
    "If you really love it, there's no sense in talking about reason." Not getting a PhD does not prevent you from working in the field or from reading the literature. IMO the only reason to get a PhD is that it will open jobs that otherwise wouldn't be available.
- bachmeier 10y ago
  "get a PhD because they love the field" For the most part, loving the field is a terrible reason to get a PhD, especially in the humanities. I encourage students considering this decision to do so based on the job market - what options will be available, what is the pay, what will you be doing in that job. And make your decision assuming you are below average.
- audleman 10y ago
  My 2 cents: Get a Masters and go into industry. You will love the work you get to do in the field. Over time you'll learn what big unsolved problems are that we are currently facing. You might find one that particularly interests you and start thinking "man, I'd love to have a lot of time to really dig in and solve this problem, something my job never provides" Then you go back for the PhD where you get that time. The work ethic that you learned will be invaluable and you'll have something solid to pursue. In my opinion the two biggest wastes I saw when I was in my PhD program were: 1. most students had no work ethic. It was always "I fucked around all week and then rushed to do research before meeting with my professor" 2. not having any idea what kind of research the world needs. And why should you if you never go out and experience the world?
gravypod 10y ago
Can someone please explain to my why tenure is needed? I've had some professors attempt to do it to me in the past and I never got it. I maybe understand it for a humanities subject, but for STEM no chance for me. I don't have tenure when it comes to working in the industry. If I'm a good enough employee I'll stay on, if I'm a bad enough employee I'll be replaced. Tenure just seems to protect mediocrity. Can someone help paint this in a different light to me?
- cheez 10y ago
  Tenure is also a way to say "go do the crazy things you wouldn't be able to do otherwise".
  - gravypod 10y ago
    I thought that was a job in research and development? I know people in private companies that do this. If your work is so crazy that it is completely inexplicable to another person and you cannot articulate it's value, then how are you going to find people to help you? This seems like a really really uncommon situation. In my college, there are professors who are in a nontenured position who do this sort of work. The difference is they can communicate the value of their work, set milestones for their research, and explain to people why they have or have not reached them. If that cannot be done, or it falls on death ears, you have a much bigger problem at hand: the problem of academics not being able to recognize ground breaking research.
    - jccalhoun 10y ago
      I'm in the humanities and at least in my situation (and that of the people I know who are in similar situations) is that I have no time to do research. I'm paid to teach 5 classes a semester. Last semester I had 5 classes with 3 different topics, one I had never taught before, 3 classes with 24 students each, one with 32, and a lecture with 70. After the first couple weeks of the semester I got zero writing done. So this summer I spent nearly every day working on getting something submitted to a journal (and there's no guarantee it will get published. the paper I spent last summer working on got rejected). I enjoy teaching but I didn't get my phd so I could spend my entire career doing nothing but teaching entry level courses. So I need to get a tenure-track job so my teaching load is less and I will be able to teach higher-level courses. But to get a tenure-track job I need to get published. But to get published I need time to write which I don't have because I don't have a tenure-track job... So I'm giving it one more year before I give up on the career path I've been working towards for over 15 years at this point.
mrb 10y ago
Something doesn't add up. University education costs have been increasing over at least the last one or two decades. But universities keep reducing costs by hiring adjunct, sessional, or contract faculty who are presumably less well paid than full-time professors. So where is the universities' money going to? Are they losing it by mismanaging their endowment funds? Are they spending more in other areas?
- mbreese 10y ago
  For public (state-funded) universities, they receive a large percentage of their operating budget not from tuition or endowments, but directly from the state. In many cases, over the past 10+ years, this direct support has been slashed. So, for these institutions, even as tuition has been increasing, their total budget was likely dropping. Tuition hasn't been able to keep up with the loss of state funding, so the universities try to make the numbers work in a variety of ways... one of which is to limit the number of professors.
  - pkaye 10y ago
    Then why do they keep increasing the administrative staffing?
    - tomcam 10y ago
      Compliance. Massive amounts of federal regulations, plus empire building and things like deluxe dorms and insanely corrupt athletic programs.
- adamweld 10y ago
  They use it to pay administrators. My university has one admin for every two students and they make $150k on average...
kleiba 10y ago
This article has been posted and discussed on HackerNews before. I mean, not this exact same article, but the same narrative written by different authors. That shows on the one hand that a lot of people are unfortunately affected by the same problem, but it also means that it's not a new problem. Whether it's academia or industry, after working at the same place for some 8 years or so, I think it's only human that you get a feeling that your employer "owes you" for your commitment. And perhaps they really do? But people lose their jobs all the time, why would academia be any different to any other work place?
- audleman 10y ago
  > why would academia be any different to any other work place? If anything it should be worse. Companies realize a profit which the pay some of to their employees. Education, on the other hand, is a net loss operation.
  - Mtinie 10y ago
    At many institutions, but not all.
wyclif 10y ago
I don’t need to be dealing with signing religious codes of conduct or dealing with campuses where eighteen-year-olds can carry concealed guns Quelle horreur! So he wants tenure at a US university, but he won't go to the UK or Europe because...oh dear, that might involve sacrifice.
- semigroupoid 10y ago
  I understood this as a reference to US states in the midwest (maybe Texas?), not to Europe or the UK. In fact, in most of Europe an eighteen-year-old wouldn't be allowed to purchase a gun, much less carry it around.
Chinjut 10y ago
Every time one of these articles is posted, there are a number of comments about how we need to tighten the number of students accepted into PhD programs, to line up with the number of academic jobs realistically available to them. Of course, I understand where these comments come from. But if so many people are so keen to become researchers in a field they love and are clearly highly qualified to work in, I would hope we could instead find a way to broaden the number of people supported in doing such work. Attacking the problem from the more troubling end.

151 points by the_duck 10y ago

The author of the article never mentions what faculty or program they're in, or references any of their work. No doubt this is a real problem, but in this particular case they could just be a lousy researcher in a faculty that doesn't have a high demand for new professors. IOW the "psychology" / "liberal arts" over population. I'm not trying to knock any of those studies, but there is a large excess where I'm from.

mjevans 10y ago
Yet those programs would happily take on more than their replacement rate, while at the same time not being upfront about the actual chances of getting a job.
- ptero 10y ago
  In general, though, I think most grad programs should take more than their replacement rate. There should be a (sizeable) outflow to non-academic jobs in a healthy system. This also requires not having an institutional "tenure or failure" mentality, which is, sadly, not uncommon in many science grad schools.
  - pmiller2 10y ago
    Yes, there should be a sizable outflow to non-academic jobs, but that implies that the demand is there, and that the jobs hey sufficiently well to make up for the opportunity cost of not earning for eight years or more. These conditions do not really exist for a lot of fields. How many jobs outside academia are there where a PhD in medieval history is an advantage?
    - disgruntledphd2 10y ago
      It's those transferrable skills, yo. In general, a liberal arts PhD will be able to work independently with little supervision, plan a course of work and make headway without much feedback. In general, they can also communicate effectively through text. I totally get that people don't want to leave their speciality, but the PhD will normally give students a bunch of skills that are hard (but not impossible) to get elsewhere. I have a psychology PhD, and now work at a tech company (I always loved stats, and discovered coding during the PhD due to laziness, so may not be a typical case).
KingMob 10y ago
As a former neuroscientist, that's somewhat true, but it's pretty bad all across academia. Every department takes on more grad students than can possibly fill academic offices.
hooloovoo_zoo 10y ago
The author seems to think writing a book is necessary for tenure, so he isn't in a STEM field (obviously many STEM professors write books but the vast majority of STEM professors who receive tenure have not written a book).
- mturmon 10y ago
  A history grad student I knew (I was in STEM) remarked that if he couldn't get an adaptation of his dissertation published somewhere in book form, it would be a major career setback. Having graduated in 1992 with his PhD, his book came out in 1998, as he moved through a series of temporary positions. He's tenured at a major university now, but he does have to live in an out of the way and rather drab college town. It's no picnic.
pmiller2 10y ago
There's an overpopulation in virtually every field. Any graduate student can look to his or her left and right in class and realize that those people are his or her competition for a job that only one of them is going to get. The situation is only somewhat better in STEM fields, because there's more industry demand (where you can get paid more and have better mobility, but get looked down on by your academic brethren.)
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  > where you can get paid more and have better mobility, but get looked down on by your academic brethren And then 2 years later they will be asking you to find them a job. :)

mjevans 10y ago

I hate having to enable JavaScript just to read a website. It was worth it for this one though, just one main thing; still I almost didn't click it, I often don't. - I see that same mentality reflected in far too many places, no one wants to hire for a career anymore; and that's what 'tenure' is at a college. The 'contract' in society between the working class and those who employee them is beyond broken.

fsck--off 10y ago
You can read the site with JavaScript disabled if you also disable CSS.

Hermel 10y ago

An academic career should never be your only option. Make sure you study something that is useful in the real economy.

pm90 10y ago
I sincerely hope that people who are genuinely excited about research do not adopt this attitude. Our affluent society allows us to specialize in what we like; allowing the best of us to create art and mathematics and make discoveries in science is as important as being a "contributing member of society".
- ghaff 10y ago
  We all have to make choices between what we enjoy and have a passion for and what pays the bills. For many of us, there is a degree of overlap though likely not 100%. Our society is not so affluent that, if what you are genuinely excited about is medieval German poetry, you can reasonably expect to be supported with that passion unless you win a very specific academic track lottery (or have other sources of income).
  - pm90 10y ago
    I was thinking more about scientific research, such as funding for pure mathematics, theoretical computer science and such. These are skills that require years of dedicated effort to master the basics and reach a level of understanding that is rigorous enough to start making original contributions and yet offer very little financial compensation in industry. You are right in that a decision has to be made in what areas we consider important enough to allow a sustainable career from it. In your example, I would certainly not fund a person for studying Medieval German poetry only; but more funding for research into history? Sure thing.
    - Karrot_Kream 10y ago
      Who decides where "funding for research into history" goes? In our STEM graduate program (a fairly prestigious one), it was pretty widely argued that you basically had to attach yourself to one of the big name grants to try and get funded. I had a few friends who had some ideas but their professors weren't too happy with those. They found a way to incorporate some of the buzzwords for a giant grant our university had, pitched it to the professor, who submitted a grant application, and got them funded on the idea. Professor was happy (he had money), students were happy, but at the end of the day, the process was idiotic.

arcanus 10y ago

Saddening story. However, as an academic myself, some bits were misleading or odd: > funding regulations meant the grant couldn’t pay my salary as its lead researcher I've never, ever heard of anything like this occurring. The most I have seen are cost sharing pieces where a grant cannot more than a certain % of your salary. But these are often known upfront by the PI! > The two disclosed who had submitted a grant proposal and whose book was near publication—all of which are needed for tenure. I was the only one in the room with books, articles, and a recently awarded grant. This strikes me as a highly bitter position to take. There is far more to tenure than only the number of grants, books, articles, etc. Were the articles published in high impact journals? How much $$ was the grant for? A researcher 5 years younger might get a tenure-track position with no prior grants, but a hot research topic, a few good publications and an excellent pedigree. > My financial reality still makes it hard to keep up with conferences. I haven’t had access to professional development funds since 2010 The author states he has funding grants but these did not explicitly cover several conferences? I'm very surprised by this, and this is not at all consistent with my experience. I had funding to attend conferences as a first year graduate student. > There are jobs in the southern US and in the UK, which would take me away from family and a new relationship that I cherish. I don’t need to start building a life from scratch in my late thirties. I definitely don’t need to do it for a nine—or three-month contract without benefits, or costs of moving. And if we’re talking about the US, I don’t need to be dealing with signing religious codes of conduct or dealing with campuses where eighteen-year-olds can carry concealed guns. The sad truth of the matter is: if you want to get a tenure track job, 99% of us will not truly have a choice in location where you live. Expect to move across the country (or across countries!). That is quite apparent when you sign up. You take what you can get. A friend took a position in upstate NY, and he hates the cold...

scott_s 10y ago
I suspect the author is from the humanities, which have starkly different funding realities than what you and I are used to. (Your profile says you are a computational scientist, and while I work in industry, I still publish in computer science academic conferences.)
- 10y ago

throw_away_777 10y ago

Every student considering going to graduate school should read this article. Professors are very misinformed about how likely someone is to get tenure (most of them got it > 20 years ago, in a much better academic job market). This misinformation trickles down to students. The simple fact is that right now the average professor is graduating more than 10 phd students, only 1 of which can become a tenured professor at a research university. The job options in academia other than tenured professor are horrible and exploitative. I know many post-docs who have gone into industry after slaving away at temporary and low paying jobs for over 6 years. These post-docs were very bright and dedicated people, but the tenure track position requires lots of luck in addition to skill.

jseliger 10y ago
Academia expanded enormously between 1945 – 1975, when virtually everyone who got a PhD could get an academic job. Since then, time-to-degree for PhDs in all subjects has increased dramatically, post-docs have become the norm, and academic jobs have become scarce. I wrote about this in "What you should know BEFORE you start grad school / PhD programs in English Literature: The economic, financial, and opportunity costs" (http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-before-you-start-grad-school-in-english-literature-the-economic-financial-and-opportunity-costs/ http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befor...), but the overall point can be generalized to a large number of fields. As you note, academia has become increasingly exploitative, even when most individual professors remain well meaning. In addition, many people considering grad school or who have recently begun it seem not to know quite how bad the situation is, or quite how bad it can be to be in your 30s and to have effectively wasted the career part of your 20s.
- carsongross 10y ago
  One of my most infuriating moments at Berkeley was when I attended a symposium on pursuing an academic career (I was interested in one at that point) and a professor complained that students were too concerned with academics and weren't spending enough time protesting, like she had. It was the academic equivalent of Old Economy Steven. Very triggering.

pg_is_a_butt 10y ago

waaaaaaahhhhh...... waaaaaaaaahhhh...... start your own school, lady. donald trump did it. you're worse than donald trump?

ptero 10y ago

Being out of an academic job is a painful experience. I have a PhD in math and, entering grad school, was aiming only for an academic career. However, it was very clear to everyone in my grad program (as well as to my friends doing physics PhDs across the street) that this requires 1-2 competitive postdocs (3-6 years at low salary) and a stiff competition to a tenure track. And you do not usually get a choice: i.e., if you get offered a position, you grab it, be it in Maine or Texas (I decided to avoid this race and went to the industry; there are pros and cons to both paths). IMO, the tenure system, at least in the US, is highly inefficient. Things are pretty top-heavy (older, tenured professors who originally were expected to retire by ~60, often do not) and graduating PhDs with decent, but not stellar results have a very hard time on the academic research track.

secabeen 10y ago
For many years, universities had mandatory retirement ages: >Until 1982, retirement of faculty members at many universities was mandatory at age 65. Because of amendments to the ADEA, in 1982 the minimum allowable mandatory retirement age was increased to age 70. In 1986 Congress made additional amendments to the ADEA, prohibiting any mandatory retirement ages for most workers in the United States. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737001/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737001/

searine 10y ago

The fun part of this article is where he never mentions his field...

chinathrow 10y ago
Why? Isn't that highly irrelevant to his story?

pmiller2 10y ago

I consider myself fortunate that I realized most of what was talked about in this article was true while I was about halfway through grad school. The fundamental realization that given the size of my classes, where my peers were competition for any academic job, combined with the fact that I would literally have to wait for someone to die before I could get one of those jobs, was enough to knock me right off of the academic track. I might've even put up with postdoc hell, and the "6 year job interview " that is the tenure process if I thought it would have come to something. But, when you have 50 people competing for the same three openings in a year, and only one chance per year to apply, the odds don't look very good.

twblalock 10y ago
Same here. Leaving grad school was the best decision I ever made. The year I left, there were only 2 or 3 positions in my field in the entire United States, and one of them went unfilled because the university didn't like any of the candidates.
quantumhobbit 10y ago
Me too. Sort of. I think I realized this subconsciously before I was conscious of it. The result was two years of depression and anxiety before I got everything straight and quit. I don't know if it was wasted time or not. It was a long time to not be in the workforce, but I learned a lot of skills while working on what turned out to be dead end research projects. I have a job now that requires merely a fraction of those skills. But maybe I wouldn't have gotten the job without my half phd. Or maybe I'd have a better job if I finished. I'm still pretty frustrated by the fact that what was presented to me as a failsafe career path was anything but failsafe. This is pretty much the same problem with all of higher education and the current economy in miniature. Just as an undergrad degree no longer garuntees a good job a phd no longer garuntees a tenured job.
- twblalock 10y ago
  > I think I realized this subconsciously before I was conscious of it. This is grad school in a nutshell, in a lot of fields. I've seen three common responses to this cognitive dissonance: 1. Deny the brutal reality of the job market. 2. "But I couldn't ever be happy doing anything else!" 3. Leave. One of the strangest things about my grad school experience was watching very intelligent people spend years of their lives, and sometimes borrowing money they could never pay back, to pursue a degree even though deep down, they understood that it was a really bad idea. The rationalizations they came up with were pretty transparent to anyone who wasn't also in the grad school bubble. I suppose I sound harsh, but when people ask me if they should go to grad school in the field I did, my answer is always "not unless you are already independently wealthy and never need to work again."

deleted 10y ago

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mccoyspace 10y ago

FWIW, this story parallels the reality that most professional artists have experienced for a long time: hyper competition, extremely limited grant opportunities, no direct commercial market, everything paid out-of-pocket. A "compulsory hobby" is a great phrase.

dnautics 10y ago
For STEM academes: The difference is that professional artists have long been aware of the "starving artist" stereotype aren't strongly sold a nationalism-backed narrative that "we need more scientists", followed by unsustainable, hierarchical organizational structures. Moreover, science typically holds itself to a different sort of accountability (empirical results and uncompromising honesty) as a professional ideal, whereas the actual nature of the beast, where funding is drawn to popular ideas and politically connected researchers instead of the most honest and productive.

smallnamespace 10y ago

My experience in finance was that 50% of quants (especially physics PhDs from the 90s, when all the Cold War-era funding dried up) were failed academics. Most of the rest were PhDs jumping straight to industry to avoid chasing tenure for years.

gohrt 10y ago
And the remaining few were successful academics who jumped to industry for astronomical pay raises.
alasdair_ 10y ago
It depends on how you define "failed". Even the best academics may think it rational to make millions of dollars as a quant over a more conventional salary as an academic. I am not a "failed mcdonalds cashier" if I choose to quit and something that pays more, even if I started out in that particular field.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
  Sort of funny that the recently deposed McDonald's CEO was an EE. That demonstrates the true value of STEM jobs in our society rather than the phony "shortage" hype.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  Maybe I'm being blunt, but my definition is that I spoke to them personally and they told me they would still be in academia if they had managed to land a job. I asked, because at the time I was considering leaving to pursue a graduate degree myself. Of course, I didn't literally speak to every quant in on the street, but I sampled from the ones who were around me. Most people were quite open about the situation but glad they had left; some were still very bitter.

nikanj 10y ago

"I forked out over $2000 to attend two conferences [..] at the second I was cut off half-way into my paper." I have never seen this happen at any conference. It makes the author sound like a crackpot.

exolymph 10y ago
"I have never seen this happen" =/= "This has never happened"
- nikanj 10y ago
  I'm not questioning whether it happened or not, I'm curious about the reasons their presentation was cut short. "There’s nothing quite like having an established academic decide that hearing eight minutes of the allotted twenty would be sufficient. As a self-funded under-employed contingent, I wasn’t going to say anything useful anyway." How would this established academic know they're self-funded and under-employed?
  - the_duck 10y ago
    The author's job title might have given this away. In Canada (assistant|associate|full) professors are tenured or tenure track, and hence higher status. Any other title could be assumed to mean non-tenure track and under-employed, hence lower status.

coldtea 10y ago

>I don’t need to start building a life from scratch in my late thirties. I definitely don’t need to do it for a nine—or three-month contract without benefits, or costs of moving. Well, it's not like the academic world, even when it was much better itself, has done much to protest and assist with the same and much worse situation in blue collar (and even office) jobs. First they came for the McDonalds burger flippers, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a McDonalds burger flipper... et al

gohrt 10y ago
Does McDonald's lay off staff every 9 months?
- throw_away_777 10y ago
  McDonald's turnover is at least 44%, so basically yes. http://fistfuloftalent.com/2008/05/can-this-turnov.html http://fistfuloftalent.com/2008/05/can-this-turnov.html
  - Mtinie 10y ago
    The comparison doesn't hold up when rates of voluntary job separation and involuntary laid offs are being discussed.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      When you pay employees crap, and give them crap opportunities, "voluntary job separation" is mostly a euphemism.
      - Mtinie 10y ago
        I don't disagree with that, but there's a difference between someone walking off a job after they quit and when a company terminates someone's employment.

danso 10y ago

I'm just an adjunct and will likely never break into the tenure track (not having a master's degree being one of many factors against me), but I was sad to see that even this purportedly slow and deliberate process be affected to some degree by ageism. A good friend of mine entered grad school (in the humanities) around 2004, when most folks he knew were easily finding tenure-track jobs after their PhDs. He found himself the runner-up for highly-contested jobs, and family events took him out of the hunt for a bit, but as the years went on and he was content to be hired by not top-tier schools, he ran into the "We'd love to hire you but your resumé is too prestigious for us and you might just use us as a stepping stone" and "If you haven't been snapped up despite such a great pedigree, then something must be wrong with you". He eventually got a tenure-track offer which he happily accepted, but he was close to giving up on his decade-long career path. I think these struggles are endemic to nearly all professions but it seems to me that in academia, there's fewer opportunities to get tenure-track (or non-tenure, but decently-paying) positions once you've deviated from the usual path, even before you factor in the scarcity.

twblalock 10y ago
It's commonly assumed in humanities disciplines that if you don't get a tenure-track job within a few years of graduation, you probably never will. It's also common for advisers to tell their students not to adjunct under any circumstances, because it makes you "damaged goods" on the job market. A lot of professors advise their students to take non-academic jobs and keep applying to tenure-track positions, rather than take adjunct jobs. Many older professors who have tenure, and who have great influence in their departments, entered academia when it was the case that "there are always jobs for good people." That's their worldview, and it's just not true anymore. But because they think that way, when they see a candidate who has been looking for a job for several years, they assume that candidate is not one of the good ones. It seems to me that the sciences are different, because postdoc positions seem to be a normal part of one's career progression after a PhD. But in the humanities, that's not the case.
joeyo 10y ago
> (not having a master's degree being one of many factors against me) I'm not sure that I understand this. In your field is having a PhD (but without a masters) considered a negative?

Fej 10y ago

Just an anecdote... a professor whose classes I've taken, which were fantastic, recently got tenured. In the liberal arts, too! I like to think that tenure isn't quite dead yet. Depends on the college, naturally. (I deliberately use the word "college" instead of "university"; I find that the liberal arts college at my university is more organized than the computer science department.) Eventually the college loan bubble will burst, and universities will no longer be able to be run like businesses.

repsilat 10y ago
> Eventually the college loan bubble will burst, and universities will no longer be able to be run like businesses. Can you explain this sentence? If you mean, "Students will be less likely to get crazy loans," I can only imagine that would encourage universities to "be run like businesses.)

eximius 10y ago

Many people have pointed to an overpopulation being the root cause for this, but I believe that ignores the increasingly inflating administrative staff at universities. That is, it is also a budget problem. The budget for the increase in professor staff is being diverted into additional administrative positions that do... something, apparently. I'm not convinced that the administrative bloat is worth a fraction of what it costs.

deleted 10y ago
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dharmon 10y ago
You'd be appalled at how much overhead universities take out of research grants (from NSF, DARPA, NIH, etc.) to maintain these administrations (along with legitimate uses, like paying utility bills). 40-50% is not uncommon.
- etendue 10y ago
  Harvard's common indirect rate is as high as 69%: http://osp.finance.harvard.edu/fa-cost-rates-federal-sponsors http://osp.finance.harvard.edu/fa-cost-rates-federal-sponsor... I've long been expecting someone like the NYT to do an exposé on the "dark money" of F&A. It would seem to be ripe given he current discussion of the cost of education.
- protomyth 10y ago
  How in the heck do they get away with that? Each grant we have has an indirect rate that you cannot exceed and its not 40-50%.
  - luckluckgoosed 10y ago
    Probably just people not understanding what an indirect rate means. They think it means the % of the grant that the university takes. So when they hear an indirect rate of 65%, they think the university is taking 2/3 the money. When in fact, it's about 1/3 due to how it's calculated.

pascalxus 10y ago

Does anyone else see the contradiction: the amount students are spending on college keeps going up, but the budget for professors seems to keep going down. What accounts for the discrepancy?

rschuetzler 10y ago
Administration. More and more money going to committees for every little thing.
cstejerean 10y ago
Facilities and administrators. Schools get ranked based on their facilities and the types of programs and activities they offer so they keep outspending each other in this area to remain competitive. It's a tragedy.
- luckluckgoosed 10y ago
  That's part of it. The other part is for private universities, they are admitting more and more lower income students. Each low income student receives tuition waiver, and often a living stipend. So it's a double whammy on the budget.
cpitman 10y ago
The belief that everyone should go to college. What the government spends on public schools has actually gone up over the decades, but a move to everyone going to college means that funding per student has dropped. Edit: Link to source: https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/total-and-student-state-funding-and-public-enrollment-over-time https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tabl...
- intended 10y ago
  This is a more accurate response than most on this issue. To take it further, the underlying issue is that it is now compulsory for people to have a college degree in america to keep up with their expectation of a normal middle class life style. Decades ago, you didn't need to be college educated to live the American Dream. The collapse of those jobs has left citizens to scramble for what's left. this leads to all sorts of secondary effects such as the reduction of extra curricular activities, teaching the test, rote memmorization to survive tests, and cram schools. This pattern exsists already in many third world and developing world nations, and it is a shit show. Our worst scams when it comes to education are horrifying. (Search: vyapam for the most recent education related scam in india.) The education problems in america are a jobs/employment problem.

jerryhuang100 10y ago

It's interesting to see this story on the front page at the same time with another one titled "We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated". It's easy to solve both problems (killing two birds with one stone?) by implementing protocols of purging scientists with track records of non-repeatable results from "personal opinions" and fraudulent scholars gaming publishing systems, including titles, positions, degrees and/or grant money ever awarded. This should at least release some vacancy in the academia (given a 11% repeatable rate from the Amgen study).

maverick_iceman 10y ago
The point of the Nautilus article was repeatability is a must before a scientific result is accepted. However pressure to publish new results often lead to scientists losing motivation in doing replicating studies. It's a bug in the scientific ecosystem, particularly in the allocation of rewards. A significant number of experiments will always fail to replicate for various random reasons. That doesn't mean the concerned scientist is at fault.
- jerryhuang100 10y ago
  one or two publications without repeatable results might be acceptable - maybe he or she is just out of luck or some how choose the wrong hypothesis. but if there are five or six non-repeatable papers in the publication laundry list, esp some used for degrees, promotions to tenured positions, or grant applications, this makes him or her looks like fraud with a track record of publishing "personal opinions."
quantumhobbit 10y ago
And while you're at it, hire some of those underemployed post-docs to reproduce new results full time.
- jerryhuang100 10y ago
  I concur this with a proposition of a system named as repeatability evaluation and digital tracking, or r.e.d.d.i.t., with the crowd-sourcing efforts.

veddox 10y ago

As somebody looking to go into research (in a STEM field), this is a rather chilling article... And it's by far not the first time I have heard about this problem of getting a long-term job in academia. I'm just wondering: this guy was from Canada. What's the situation like in Europe? Especially Germany?

sevensor 10y ago
I'm not European, but I've heard the situation is hard there too, although not in the same way. The European academics I've met are, years after finishing the PhD, still quite dependent on their advisors for patronage. Those advisors likewise have to defer to their advisors. For decades. Until somebody dies. It's very feudal.

limbicsystem 10y ago

UK University chair of a STEM dept graduate school chipping in here: Every September during induction I point out to the PhD students that there are (around) ten of them in the room and our department advertised (around) 1 job last year. We also tell them this when they are applying for the PhD in the first place. They seem unfazed. Our PhD course lasts no longer than 4 years (good students are out in 3) and they appear to be highly employable at the end of it - both as postdocs and in industry. Having seen the US system at first hand as well, I'd say that the lower opportunity cost (time to finish) makes the whole process fairer on the students - graduating with a PhD at 25 still seems like a great opportunity. Doing the same at 32 is a very different prospect. I have no idea what the situation in the humanities is like. Finally - UK research councils (who often fund PhD students) are very open about the fact that PhD students must now be taught a host of 'transferrable skills' to equip them for non-academic jobs.

Certhas 10y ago
The problem isn't with PhD positions. PhDs after all are training positions. But each postdoc position makes one less employable. There really is little justification (other than exploitation) in my mind for having postdoc positions that don't lead to permanent positions. This is more of an issue in Germany (where I work now) than in the UK (where I did my PhD).

ilarum 10y ago

Does HN have any advice for those looking to get a PhD because they love the field (Computer Science)? And then follow up the PhD with a job at one of the tech companies' research arm?

pjmorris 10y ago
If you really love it, there's no sense in talking about reason. "And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays." - Bottom, Midsummer Night's Dream As for tech company research arms, look carefully at who recruits where you intend to go, and who your potential advisors publish with. If you land in a place with good connections, it increases your chances of landing a gig like that.
- bachmeier 10y ago
  "If you really love it, there's no sense in talking about reason." Not getting a PhD does not prevent you from working in the field or from reading the literature. IMO the only reason to get a PhD is that it will open jobs that otherwise wouldn't be available.
bachmeier 10y ago
"get a PhD because they love the field" For the most part, loving the field is a terrible reason to get a PhD, especially in the humanities. I encourage students considering this decision to do so based on the job market - what options will be available, what is the pay, what will you be doing in that job. And make your decision assuming you are below average.
audleman 10y ago
My 2 cents: Get a Masters and go into industry. You will love the work you get to do in the field. Over time you'll learn what big unsolved problems are that we are currently facing. You might find one that particularly interests you and start thinking "man, I'd love to have a lot of time to really dig in and solve this problem, something my job never provides" Then you go back for the PhD where you get that time. The work ethic that you learned will be invaluable and you'll have something solid to pursue. In my opinion the two biggest wastes I saw when I was in my PhD program were: 1. most students had no work ethic. It was always "I fucked around all week and then rushed to do research before meeting with my professor" 2. not having any idea what kind of research the world needs. And why should you if you never go out and experience the world?

gravypod 10y ago

Can someone please explain to my why tenure is needed? I've had some professors attempt to do it to me in the past and I never got it. I maybe understand it for a humanities subject, but for STEM no chance for me. I don't have tenure when it comes to working in the industry. If I'm a good enough employee I'll stay on, if I'm a bad enough employee I'll be replaced. Tenure just seems to protect mediocrity. Can someone help paint this in a different light to me?

cheez 10y ago
Tenure is also a way to say "go do the crazy things you wouldn't be able to do otherwise".
- gravypod 10y ago
  I thought that was a job in research and development? I know people in private companies that do this. If your work is so crazy that it is completely inexplicable to another person and you cannot articulate it's value, then how are you going to find people to help you? This seems like a really really uncommon situation. In my college, there are professors who are in a nontenured position who do this sort of work. The difference is they can communicate the value of their work, set milestones for their research, and explain to people why they have or have not reached them. If that cannot be done, or it falls on death ears, you have a much bigger problem at hand: the problem of academics not being able to recognize ground breaking research.
  - jccalhoun 10y ago
    I'm in the humanities and at least in my situation (and that of the people I know who are in similar situations) is that I have no time to do research. I'm paid to teach 5 classes a semester. Last semester I had 5 classes with 3 different topics, one I had never taught before, 3 classes with 24 students each, one with 32, and a lecture with 70. After the first couple weeks of the semester I got zero writing done. So this summer I spent nearly every day working on getting something submitted to a journal (and there's no guarantee it will get published. the paper I spent last summer working on got rejected). I enjoy teaching but I didn't get my phd so I could spend my entire career doing nothing but teaching entry level courses. So I need to get a tenure-track job so my teaching load is less and I will be able to teach higher-level courses. But to get a tenure-track job I need to get published. But to get published I need time to write which I don't have because I don't have a tenure-track job... So I'm giving it one more year before I give up on the career path I've been working towards for over 15 years at this point.

mrb 10y ago

Something doesn't add up. University education costs have been increasing over at least the last one or two decades. But universities keep reducing costs by hiring adjunct, sessional, or contract faculty who are presumably less well paid than full-time professors. So where is the universities' money going to? Are they losing it by mismanaging their endowment funds? Are they spending more in other areas?

mbreese 10y ago
For public (state-funded) universities, they receive a large percentage of their operating budget not from tuition or endowments, but directly from the state. In many cases, over the past 10+ years, this direct support has been slashed. So, for these institutions, even as tuition has been increasing, their total budget was likely dropping. Tuition hasn't been able to keep up with the loss of state funding, so the universities try to make the numbers work in a variety of ways... one of which is to limit the number of professors.
- pkaye 10y ago
  Then why do they keep increasing the administrative staffing?
  - tomcam 10y ago
    Compliance. Massive amounts of federal regulations, plus empire building and things like deluxe dorms and insanely corrupt athletic programs.
adamweld 10y ago
They use it to pay administrators. My university has one admin for every two students and they make $150k on average...

kleiba 10y ago

This article has been posted and discussed on HackerNews before. I mean, not this exact same article, but the same narrative written by different authors. That shows on the one hand that a lot of people are unfortunately affected by the same problem, but it also means that it's not a new problem. Whether it's academia or industry, after working at the same place for some 8 years or so, I think it's only human that you get a feeling that your employer "owes you" for your commitment. And perhaps they really do? But people lose their jobs all the time, why would academia be any different to any other work place?

audleman 10y ago
> why would academia be any different to any other work place? If anything it should be worse. Companies realize a profit which the pay some of to their employees. Education, on the other hand, is a net loss operation.
- Mtinie 10y ago
  At many institutions, but not all.

wyclif 10y ago

I don’t need to be dealing with signing religious codes of conduct or dealing with campuses where eighteen-year-olds can carry concealed guns Quelle horreur! So he wants tenure at a US university, but he won't go to the UK or Europe because...oh dear, that might involve sacrifice.

semigroupoid 10y ago
I understood this as a reference to US states in the midwest (maybe Texas?), not to Europe or the UK. In fact, in most of Europe an eighteen-year-old wouldn't be allowed to purchase a gun, much less carry it around.

Chinjut 10y ago

Every time one of these articles is posted, there are a number of comments about how we need to tighten the number of students accepted into PhD programs, to line up with the number of academic jobs realistically available to them. Of course, I understand where these comments come from. But if so many people are so keen to become researchers in a field they love and are clearly highly qualified to work in, I would hope we could instead find a way to broaden the number of people supported in doing such work. Attacking the problem from the more troubling end.