5 ms·

That list is correct, but it's only half of the problem. The other other half of the problem is supply. In fields like mathematics, physics, computer science,

by Fede_V 10y ago

That list is correct, but it's only half of the problem. The other other half of the problem is supply. In fields like mathematics, physics, computer science, grad students have excellent non-academic options. There is an oversupply of PhD students with respect to the number of available positions, but the excess PhD students have fantastic career avenues. In fields like the humanities, and, to a lesser extent, the molecular biology/ecology, there is a huge excess of PhD students, and there is a very limited number of career options outside of research (for bio, there is pharma, for everything else, eh). This is compounded by the fact that for professors, postdocs are an absolute steal (http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2017/01/price-doing-postdoc http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2017/01/price-doing-postdo...). Professors get to pay 50-55k (and that's on the high very high end) a year for a PhD trained researcher who will often work themselves to the bone in the hope of getting the publications that will allow them to become a professor. Thus - the very people who have the power to change the system instead greatly benefit from the status quo. The real reform that has to take place is that PhD programs need to become way more selective. Not every PhD should have a guaranteed spot as a professor (that would be insane) but when less than 8% of postdocs become professors, the system is in crisis.

jessriedel 10y ago
> Not every PhD should have a guaranteed spot as a professor (that would be insane) but when less than 8% of postdocs become professors, the system is in crisis. There are lots of industries like this, e.g., corporate law, sports, acting, music. Are they all "in crisis"? http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/28/non-dual-awareness/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/28/non-dual-awareness/ [EDIT] Others: military officers, investment banking, organized crime, tech start-up, trade guilds, etc.
- zepto 10y ago
  Yes
- anoonmoose 10y ago
  Law is in crisis, the other three are all so (relatively speaking) small, unimportant, and gated by the genetic lottery that they're not worth discussing.
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    I could keep coming up with examples, both current and historical, because this is a general phenomenon. Anytime there is a large payoff for a small number of slots, along with an inability to instantly measure top performers, a filtering heirarchy is naturally constructed. Military officers (94% of commissioned officers do not retire with the military http://www.skyhinews.com/news/hamilton-military-retirement-83-percent-never-make-it/ http://www.skyhinews.com/news/hamilton-military-retirement-8...), tech start-ups (duh), organized crime, trade guilds, investment banking etc., etc. You can think such fields are a bad bet for newcomers, should be regulated, and so on, but it doesn't make sense to say that they are "in crisis". They can last for arbitrarily long times, and generally produce what they are expected to produce! There's also little reason to think that academics and law aren't just as much determined by genetics as musics, sports, and acting.
  - Paul-ish 10y ago
    Perhaps what is best for someone isn't what is best for the field as a whole. The field itself may be fine even if the individuals in seem to be struggling from a high level. For example in sports, if people weren't struggling to get into the NFL, it would probably be much less fun to watch (for those who watch it now) because the skill level would be much lower. Could this be the same in academia? We have a very competitive funnel that only lets the best into the top spots? If that is the case the field isn't struggling, the people are. The solution wouldn't be to make things less competitive, it would be to have alternatives for people who don't make it into one of the coveted positions. This is something I think a lot of specialized fields are struggling with. Over time (looking at century timescales) people have become increasingly specialized due to the nature of the economy. Specialization makes switching expensive. I think this is something we will have to grapple with as specialization continues.
- metaphorm 10y ago
  just because a pathology is widespread does it not mean it isn't pathological.
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    pathological != "in crisis". And in any case, if your only criticism of a field is a characteristic that is shared by many fields, then you should either assert that your preferred fix is general to all of them, or explain why it's specific to academia. (For instance, it is not enough so say that medicine should be socialized because of imperfect information alone since imperfect information exists in many other industries and we do not socialize them all.)
    - metaphorm 10y ago
      "in crisis" is the end state of a pathology, where it has gone untreated for far too long and begun to have ruinous consequences. Academy is in crisis. Other fields suffering from the same pathology are at different points in their breakdown. Some of them will never breakdown, others will enter their own crises sometime soon if they haven't already (and many of them already have). surely I'm allowed to criticize and highlight social issues without having a "preferred fix" that I'm promoting. I'm not nearly so arrogant as to think I even know what fix would work. there is a crisis in our society though, and it has many social pathologies underlying it, and it manifests variously in disparate fields that yet suffer from similar pathologies. in the case of academia I feel that it is acutely important to address because of the role the academy plays in shaping elite culture and practices. in the modern world we've elevated the academy to the place that used to belong to Bishops and church scholars. The shaping of beliefs and all of the cascading effects that has on society is now in a state of breakdown and malfunction.
      - jessriedel 10y ago
        > in crisis" is the end state of a pathology No, things can be pathological indefinitely. I'm not disputing pathology. Rather, no one has justified "crisis", i.e., some reason to think there will be abrupt change, or will not continue to produce as expected. > surely I'm allowed to criticize and highlight social issues without having a "preferred fix" I'm not saying that, I'm saying that it doesn't make sense to discuss academia specifically if one's comments apply to a million other fields. This applies to fixes or to just analysis of the pathology.
- naravara 10y ago
  With the exception of performances (sports, acting, music) you can make a decent living despite not being at the next level. It is generally not so with academia. And even with the stuff like acting and music, the advancemnet of society doesn't depend on the efforts of professional athletes and performers. So we tend to be a lot more tolerant of people falling out of that pipeline and winding up in more prosaic positions and honing their craft in community theater or open mic nights or whatever while making ends meet some other way. With research it's not the sort of thing you can do on the side after a day spent waiting tables.
  - neuromantik8086 10y ago
    > With research it's not the sort of thing you can do on the side after a day spent waiting tables. Depends on your level of engagement. Can you explore your own hypotheses and put together your own experiments? Probably not. Can you engage in citizen science projects like BOINC or Zooniverse (essentially performing drudge work that would otherwise be thrown at some hapless research assistant at the bottom of the totem pole)? Of course!
    - cr0sh 10y ago
      > Can you explore your own hypotheses and put together your own experiments? Probably not. Can you expand on this? I don't see why you couldn't, outside of the amount of money that may be needed for certain research.
      - neuromantik8086 10y ago
        My argument for why you couldn't is more one of pragmatism than anything else. After 8 hours slogging away in a cubicle, you're unlikely to have the energy to work with the laser-like precision necessary to tackle a scientific problem. Perhaps it is possible in some exceptional cases, but for the vast majority of people I don't see it happening. Plus, science is as much about your interactions with your peers as it is your work. Individuals that aren't highly embedded in a scientific clique are liable to miss important information that would have an impact on your research. You can't develop the same level of social capital as you'd need doing science part-time as a hobby.
- Fomite 10y ago
  Law is definitely in crisis
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
_delirium 10y ago
That's definitely a problem, but a fairly disjoint one. The fields with the worst oversupply problem oddly enough largely don't have the problem of this kind of metrics-based research micromanagement. It's hard to get a philosophy professorship, but when you do, nobody cares about your h-index. That's partly because there's less (almost no) grant money, so universities don't care that much about research metrics in those areas.
- Fede_V 10y ago
  Biology is at the intersection of those fields. There is an oversupply problem, and it is definitely the worst offender for metrics-based research micromanagenent.

by Fede_V 10y ago

jessriedel 10y ago

> Not every PhD should have a guaranteed spot as a professor (that would be insane) but when less than 8% of postdocs become professors, the system is in crisis. There are lots of industries like this, e.g., corporate law, sports, acting, music. Are they all "in crisis"? http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/28/non-dual-awareness/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/28/non-dual-awareness/ [EDIT] Others: military officers, investment banking, organized crime, tech start-up, trade guilds, etc.

zepto 10y ago
Yes
anoonmoose 10y ago
Law is in crisis, the other three are all so (relatively speaking) small, unimportant, and gated by the genetic lottery that they're not worth discussing.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  I could keep coming up with examples, both current and historical, because this is a general phenomenon. Anytime there is a large payoff for a small number of slots, along with an inability to instantly measure top performers, a filtering heirarchy is naturally constructed. Military officers (94% of commissioned officers do not retire with the military http://www.skyhinews.com/news/hamilton-military-retirement-83-percent-never-make-it/ http://www.skyhinews.com/news/hamilton-military-retirement-8...), tech start-ups (duh), organized crime, trade guilds, investment banking etc., etc. You can think such fields are a bad bet for newcomers, should be regulated, and so on, but it doesn't make sense to say that they are "in crisis". They can last for arbitrarily long times, and generally produce what they are expected to produce! There's also little reason to think that academics and law aren't just as much determined by genetics as musics, sports, and acting.
- Paul-ish 10y ago
  Perhaps what is best for someone isn't what is best for the field as a whole. The field itself may be fine even if the individuals in seem to be struggling from a high level. For example in sports, if people weren't struggling to get into the NFL, it would probably be much less fun to watch (for those who watch it now) because the skill level would be much lower. Could this be the same in academia? We have a very competitive funnel that only lets the best into the top spots? If that is the case the field isn't struggling, the people are. The solution wouldn't be to make things less competitive, it would be to have alternatives for people who don't make it into one of the coveted positions. This is something I think a lot of specialized fields are struggling with. Over time (looking at century timescales) people have become increasingly specialized due to the nature of the economy. Specialization makes switching expensive. I think this is something we will have to grapple with as specialization continues.
metaphorm 10y ago
just because a pathology is widespread does it not mean it isn't pathological.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  pathological != "in crisis". And in any case, if your only criticism of a field is a characteristic that is shared by many fields, then you should either assert that your preferred fix is general to all of them, or explain why it's specific to academia. (For instance, it is not enough so say that medicine should be socialized because of imperfect information alone since imperfect information exists in many other industries and we do not socialize them all.)
  - metaphorm 10y ago
    "in crisis" is the end state of a pathology, where it has gone untreated for far too long and begun to have ruinous consequences. Academy is in crisis. Other fields suffering from the same pathology are at different points in their breakdown. Some of them will never breakdown, others will enter their own crises sometime soon if they haven't already (and many of them already have). surely I'm allowed to criticize and highlight social issues without having a "preferred fix" that I'm promoting. I'm not nearly so arrogant as to think I even know what fix would work. there is a crisis in our society though, and it has many social pathologies underlying it, and it manifests variously in disparate fields that yet suffer from similar pathologies. in the case of academia I feel that it is acutely important to address because of the role the academy plays in shaping elite culture and practices. in the modern world we've elevated the academy to the place that used to belong to Bishops and church scholars. The shaping of beliefs and all of the cascading effects that has on society is now in a state of breakdown and malfunction.
    - jessriedel 10y ago
      > in crisis" is the end state of a pathology No, things can be pathological indefinitely. I'm not disputing pathology. Rather, no one has justified "crisis", i.e., some reason to think there will be abrupt change, or will not continue to produce as expected. > surely I'm allowed to criticize and highlight social issues without having a "preferred fix" I'm not saying that, I'm saying that it doesn't make sense to discuss academia specifically if one's comments apply to a million other fields. This applies to fixes or to just analysis of the pathology.
naravara 10y ago
With the exception of performances (sports, acting, music) you can make a decent living despite not being at the next level. It is generally not so with academia. And even with the stuff like acting and music, the advancemnet of society doesn't depend on the efforts of professional athletes and performers. So we tend to be a lot more tolerant of people falling out of that pipeline and winding up in more prosaic positions and honing their craft in community theater or open mic nights or whatever while making ends meet some other way. With research it's not the sort of thing you can do on the side after a day spent waiting tables.
- neuromantik8086 10y ago
  > With research it's not the sort of thing you can do on the side after a day spent waiting tables. Depends on your level of engagement. Can you explore your own hypotheses and put together your own experiments? Probably not. Can you engage in citizen science projects like BOINC or Zooniverse (essentially performing drudge work that would otherwise be thrown at some hapless research assistant at the bottom of the totem pole)? Of course!
  - cr0sh 10y ago
    > Can you explore your own hypotheses and put together your own experiments? Probably not. Can you expand on this? I don't see why you couldn't, outside of the amount of money that may be needed for certain research.
    - neuromantik8086 10y ago
      My argument for why you couldn't is more one of pragmatism than anything else. After 8 hours slogging away in a cubicle, you're unlikely to have the energy to work with the laser-like precision necessary to tackle a scientific problem. Perhaps it is possible in some exceptional cases, but for the vast majority of people I don't see it happening. Plus, science is as much about your interactions with your peers as it is your work. Individuals that aren't highly embedded in a scientific clique are liable to miss important information that would have an impact on your research. You can't develop the same level of social capital as you'd need doing science part-time as a hobby.
Fomite 10y ago
Law is definitely in crisis

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

_delirium 10y ago

That's definitely a problem, but a fairly disjoint one. The fields with the worst oversupply problem oddly enough largely don't have the problem of this kind of metrics-based research micromanagement. It's hard to get a philosophy professorship, but when you do, nobody cares about your h-index. That's partly because there's less (almost no) grant money, so universities don't care that much about research metrics in those areas.

Fede_V 10y ago
Biology is at the intersection of those fields. There is an oversupply problem, and it is definitely the worst offender for metrics-based research micromanagenent.