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The whys are obvious. What is not obvious is why we allow bodies like the NSF to continue advocating nonspecifically for careers in STEM when there is no domest

The whys are obvious. What is not obvious is why we allow bodies like the NSF to continue advocating nonspecifically for careers in STEM when there is no domestic market for most PHDs. It's also befuddling why most faculty are able to sleep at night knowing they are at the top of a pyramid scheme. It's worse than that they encourage young people to pursue a brutal career. They require what little money is allotted to research to be partially spent on making this problem worse. But most readers of nature wouldn't like to hear those things.

alpineidyll3 9y ago
Just to clarify, I am faculty. I just don't take students ;P
- deleted 9y ago
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- deleted 9y ago
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- tagrun 9y ago
  I'm guessing you're either tenured or emeritus, or you're a research professor. You don't have that luxury on tenure track almost anywhere.
  - munin 9y ago
    TT faculty at SLACs don't take graduate students (by and large) and still get tenure...
- _acme 9y ago
  Isn't teaching part of the definition of faculty? In other words, isn't it impossible to be 'faculty' if you don't take 'students' (i.e., 'teach')? At least anywhere I've ever heard of, this is true; someone who doesn't have students is considered 'staff'.
  - chrisseaton 9y ago
    > Isn't teaching part of the definition of faculty? No - I'm not sure where you got that definition from. You can be a researcher and be on the faculty of a department. It just means as opposed to the support members of staff.
pdfernhout 9y ago
Here is an explanation from 1994 by Dr. David Goodstein of Caltech, who testified to Congress on this back then, whose "The Big Crunch" essay concludes: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever." And see also "Disciplined Minds" from 2000 about some other consequences: http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ "In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy. Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society." Or Philip Greenspun from 2006: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science "This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias." Or the Village Voice from 2004 about how it is even worse in the humanities than sci/tech grad school: https://web.archive.org/web/20130115173649/http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-04-20/news/wanted-really-smart-suckers/1/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130115173649/http://www.villag... "Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off. Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air." The odd of success are probably even lower now with expanding use of adjuncts to replace tenured faculty. Of course, the irony is that US society now has more than enough wealth so that anyone who wanted to could live like a graduate student researching whatever they wanted on a basic income.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
I feel that could be said of higher edu in general. That is, it's being promoted and recommended to too many who just aren't the right fit. God forbid a parent with a degree have a kid without a degree. As if 25+ yrs ago is the same as now. It's not much different than the housing crisis / crash. The unaware are fueling the fire, only to find out they're stuck with a bill beyond their means. It's only a matter of time before higher edu implodes. It's not sustainable. It's not practical.
- nicoburns 9y ago
  Totally agree. And I would like to add that I don't even think a degree is the best way to learn even for many who excel at them.
  - chiefalchemist 9y ago
    Worse. A degree is no proxy for drive, ambition, creative thinking, problem solving, etc. Too many have come to believe a degree is the magic. In some cases it is. In plenty of others it's a curse. The time and money could have been better spent elsewhere.
    - noobly 9y ago
      It's certainly no proxy, but it is a standard metric to measure said qualities against. I hope we see a rise in autodidact accreditation and acceptance of non traditional paths, along with more decentralized and public research taking place.
  - nikofeyn 9y ago
    i agree with you. and most of the teaching in universities is absolutely pathetic. students primarily learn hopelessly alone through poor but overpriced books. the curriculum and professors are uninspiring, save for a few. it’s amazing what a good professor can do, but those are unfortunately rare. as someone who keeps thinking if i should go back to finish my ph.d., i can’t help but think of how dogmatic most graduate programs are in addition to being logistical nightmares. there’s basically no time or space for one to explore one’s own thoughts and program unless it specifically matches up with what someone else (namely an advisor) wants to do. there’s so much hand holding through required coursework (and homework) that one can’t hardly think deeply about anything actually original. the book disciplined minds touches upon this. that those born in institutions will carry that institutional conservatism with them. i have felt this. i went to talk about some of my ideas to a well known and respected researcher. before i could even finish my sentence that began with “i’m interested in...” he cut me off shaking his head and, literally, said “i don’t believe in it...”. goddamnit.
sova 9y ago
That's like asking why there was an aristocratic court in Heian Japan when their skills in prosody and haiku were clearly not viable as jobs. I don't think every degree has to land a job, and education in itself must be a strong goal for our nation, not just economic feasibility. Don't be ruled by the Almighty Dollar.
- jjeaff 9y ago
  I agree, but if we are going to agree to not be ruled by the almighty dollar, we have to stop giving so many almighty dollars to universities for degrees that will produce no almighty dollars after graduation. Let people study fine arts with a minor in Russian literature. But we shouldn't subsidize huge student loans so they can get those degrees.
  - Symbiote 9y ago
    > “The arts are essential to any complete national life. The State owes it to itself to sustain and encourage them…. Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the reverence and delight which are their due.” -- Churchill, 1938 We could debate how much subsidy should be allocated for arts vs. science, but I'd prefer that the wealthiest countries didn't restrict arts. They/we can afford it.
    - jjeaff 9y ago
      The arts won't go away if the US stops subsidizing it. Universities will just charge less for it.
- zanny 9y ago
  > education in itself must be a strong goal for our nation Too bad it isn't. Education is being used as a yardstick to isolate the poor from the economy. Don't have a BS? Guess you aren't qualified to work at McDonalds. And for those that do get those degrees, like you said, haikus aren't a viable job. For all the history and literature majors of the world a lot of them were spoon fed what their parents thought - "get a degree, any degree, and you are ahead in the world" just to find out that "ahead" didn't mean comfortable living. It just meant you had higher priority for the limited pie of work than those who didn't have that generic piece of paper. If you want people not to be ruled by the dollar, change society so your ability to be safe and secure in your day to day survival isn't bound so tightly to the pursuit and amassment of said dollar.
Eridrus 9y ago
I wonder if things are just as brutal when you take industry into account as a place to wind up post-PhD. There are research labs in industry that are interested in hiring PhDs. But maybe this is just the rose coloured glasses we have in CS.
solidsnack9000 9y ago
It's also befuddling why most faculty are able to sleep at night knowing they are at the top of a pyramid scheme. Maybe it's a selection thing -- the ones who can't sleep at night generally leave before they reach that point, as the realization dawns on them about what's expected of them. The process selects for the people who can maintain it.
- itronitron 9y ago
  I recall during undergrad that the stated goal of the professors was to 'unteach' us everything we learned in high school, and twenty years later I was thankfully finally able to unlearn everything I learned in undergrad. People that stay in a cult are unlikely to be fully honest with themselves and others about its shortcomings. Graduate school was a non-issue as I went through that as a means to an end and virtually all of the professors weren't wrapped up in academia.
  - prewett 9y ago
    What were you studying? How do you know that your professors were wrong (that what they taught should be unlearned)?
    - itronitron 9y ago
      Undergraduate in Art, I think they were right to unteach us what we learned in high school but that they were wrong in only teaching Art as it relates to the 'Art world' and that bias is a result of how colleges/universities hire Art professors.
- ImaCake 9y ago
  An anecdote is not a datapoint, but I left my PhD because I saw the pyramid scheme and that I didn't want (or even could) maintain the effort required to climb up the pyramid. Now I'm a research assistant, I still do science but I no longer face the insane pressure of academia.
- neltnerb 9y ago
skosuri 9y ago
I guess I sleep fine at night and I am faculty. It's only a pyramid scheme if you think everyone wants to become faculty.
- xbkingx 9y ago
  Talk about Being in the Bubble Exhibit A. People at the top of pyramid schemes get there by harming the people at the bottom and others outside the structure. One of the hardest lessons to learn in grad school was that those at the top can be incredibly nice, compassionate, affable people, but fantastically destructive. If this topic doesn't concern you, I feel incredibly bad for your students and post-docs. It isn't a problem because it pops up on occasion. It's a problem because it's everywhere and people with the power to change it soothe their conscience with straw men and pedantic aphorisms of tenuous relevance. The bias that helps you sleep at night allows the problems to fester
yashap 9y ago
Strongly agree. I got my MSc in Biological Oceanography, and it was mostly a waste of time and money. I’d imagine ~90% of my graduating class feel the same way. I transitioned into data analytics, then data engineering, and now customer facing software development, and love my career, but the MSc has contributed very little to it.
Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
It's also befuddling why most faculty are able to sleep at night knowing they are at the top of a pyramid scheme. I just tell prospective students the truth. That the probability of being able to stay in academia is very low. That they are going to learn and do cool things, but if they end up in industry, this is not going to be valued much (generally true in my country, it's better in others). Those that stay know what they should expect.
dominotw 9y ago
> when there is no domestic market for most PHDs. Isn't this common knowledge though. Isn't not like NSF is advocating people to not google search their career prospects before embarking on the journey.
- akvadrako 9y ago
  I have a feeling most people don't really accept it applies to them, if the general atmosphere differs from the stats.
DaveWalk 9y ago
Does this remind others of other enterprises, like beginning video game programmers? When your are ready to leave from abuse, there is always another new person happy to take over. The supply of new labor in the academic market seems endless. I have spoken to ~200 incoming grad students about careers, and never once did it sink in. My opinion is that it must be corrected earlier up the chain, in high school or early college.
cassowary37 9y ago
What makes you think 'most' faculty appreciate the pyramid scheme? Many of us spend a lot of time worrying about our postdocs' future, in no small part because we recognize that the struggle for funding never actually ends. Tenure is not the end of the rainbow, it's reassurance that your salary can't go all the way to zero - but your lab, your team, even your office space absolutely can go to zero. At least in CS there's a career path to success that skips indentured servitude. In biology, unless you want to be a lifelong lab tech, good luck trying to get somewhere in biotech without toiling in the academic trenches. I promise, even those of us a bit closer to the top of the pyramid wish it were otherwise.
- NPMaxwell 9y ago
  Unless you're amazingly talented at nurturing your postdocs, something like half of them will not have lasting careers in academia. I applaud your attention to their futures. It would help others in your position to understand what you envision for these non-academic-future postdocs and how you prepare them for their futures. What are you doing for them?
  - cassowary37 9y ago
    This is the right question to ask - not what NSF or NIH can do. I'm afraid I don't have a very satisfying answer, I'm still trying to figure it out myself. The first thing I tell my postdocs is that they can't put their life on hold and wait for adulthood to start after they finish this training (or more training). We need to be discussing career paths now, not 18 months from now. The second thing I tell them is that in my field (medicine) it's likely they can make a greater contribution on the industry side than in academia, because as important as fundamental (basic) research can be, industry is where most new treatments come from. For some I encourage entrepreneurship - harder in bio than CS but do-able for the right person. And some /can/ stay in academia as staff scientists - not responsible for running their own labs or generating their own funding, but acting mostly autonomously.
    - NPMaxwell 9y ago
sdfmxiid1 9y ago
So, as tenured faculty I don't know about NSF advocating for careers in STEM. Maybe that's a good thing maybe its a bad thing. What I do see driving this ultimately is something broader and more systemic, which is universities being underfunded, administrator heavy, and being run as for-profit businesses. In many ways, this all reduces to how grants are awarded and funded, and the history of grant funding. Through the 80s and 90s, and to some extent early 2000s, federal grant funding increased. There was sort of a heydey in that time, depending on field, where there was good funding opportunities, in general, for faculty. At the same time, state funding to universities started decreasing, and costs started increasing due to the higher ed bubble. Because of indirect costs on grants, which allow universities to charge the federal gov a blanket percentage of a grant, universities were able to skim off a profit almost automatically. It was a sort of win-win it seemed because faculty got to fund their research, unis got a cut to offset decreased funding. The problems are many, though. First, federal funding went down after a peak, so this money pool dried up. Second, this system sort of led to the pyramid scheme you mention, where grad students get recruited to maintain grants and research programs with nowhere to go, lest universities and faculty lose indirect funding. Third, it prioritizes research based on grant receipts rather than utility, which distorts research priorities in a perverse way (especially given nepotism in grant culture, which has been written about extensively elsewhere). Finally, because of the history of all of this, you kind of end up with a system in which those running the system are either beneficiaries of the 90s and 2000s, and don't realize what it is like now, or came up through that system and have a kind of survivorship bias. Agencies like NSF and NIH are basically just maintaining any semblance of research in the US at the moment, making up for all the deficiencies that are occurring at the state level. There are problems with NSF and NIH, but they're not with advocating for STEM grads. They're with how grants are funded. Basically, review panels need to randomly rotate in some kind of jury pool system almost; grants need to be awarded based on some kind of lottery system (proposed by former heads of NIH); indirect cost charges need to be eliminated or made line-item justified; some grants need to be awarded on the basis of publication record without regard to a specific proposal (ala Hungary); universities need to be adequately funded outside of the grant system; and tenure needs to be protected (I say this as someone who is probably going to step down from my tenured position soon). The problems facing grad students and postdocs are just the tip of the iceberg. They don't end, even when you get a tenure-track position, and even when you get tenure. The system is broken, it's a mess that favors hype and popularity over rigor. What you end up with is the current reproducibility crisis, academic fraud, people manipulating the system to overclaim credit, and many more problems that society is unaware of because they have a stereotyped idea of what happens in science--the sort of "great man in the lab with a eureka moment" which is a false model of scientific process.

alpineidyll3 9y ago

Just to clarify, I am faculty. I just don't take students ;P

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tagrun 9y ago
I'm guessing you're either tenured or emeritus, or you're a research professor. You don't have that luxury on tenure track almost anywhere.
- munin 9y ago
  TT faculty at SLACs don't take graduate students (by and large) and still get tenure...
_acme 9y ago
Isn't teaching part of the definition of faculty? In other words, isn't it impossible to be 'faculty' if you don't take 'students' (i.e., 'teach')? At least anywhere I've ever heard of, this is true; someone who doesn't have students is considered 'staff'.
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  > Isn't teaching part of the definition of faculty? No - I'm not sure where you got that definition from. You can be a researcher and be on the faculty of a department. It just means as opposed to the support members of staff.

pdfernhout 9y ago

Here is an explanation from 1994 by Dr. David Goodstein of Caltech, who testified to Congress on this back then, whose "The Big Crunch" essay concludes: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever." And see also "Disciplined Minds" from 2000 about some other consequences: http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ "In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy. Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society." Or Philip Greenspun from 2006: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science "This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias." Or the Village Voice from 2004 about how it is even worse in the humanities than sci/tech grad school: https://web.archive.org/web/20130115173649/http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-04-20/news/wanted-really-smart-suckers/1/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130115173649/http://www.villag... "Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off. Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air." The odd of success are probably even lower now with expanding use of adjuncts to replace tenured faculty. Of course, the irony is that US society now has more than enough wealth so that anyone who wanted to could live like a graduate student researching whatever they wanted on a basic income.

chiefalchemist 9y ago

I feel that could be said of higher edu in general. That is, it's being promoted and recommended to too many who just aren't the right fit. God forbid a parent with a degree have a kid without a degree. As if 25+ yrs ago is the same as now. It's not much different than the housing crisis / crash. The unaware are fueling the fire, only to find out they're stuck with a bill beyond their means. It's only a matter of time before higher edu implodes. It's not sustainable. It's not practical.

nicoburns 9y ago
Totally agree. And I would like to add that I don't even think a degree is the best way to learn even for many who excel at them.
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  Worse. A degree is no proxy for drive, ambition, creative thinking, problem solving, etc. Too many have come to believe a degree is the magic. In some cases it is. In plenty of others it's a curse. The time and money could have been better spent elsewhere.
  - noobly 9y ago
    It's certainly no proxy, but it is a standard metric to measure said qualities against. I hope we see a rise in autodidact accreditation and acceptance of non traditional paths, along with more decentralized and public research taking place.
- nikofeyn 9y ago
  i agree with you. and most of the teaching in universities is absolutely pathetic. students primarily learn hopelessly alone through poor but overpriced books. the curriculum and professors are uninspiring, save for a few. it’s amazing what a good professor can do, but those are unfortunately rare. as someone who keeps thinking if i should go back to finish my ph.d., i can’t help but think of how dogmatic most graduate programs are in addition to being logistical nightmares. there’s basically no time or space for one to explore one’s own thoughts and program unless it specifically matches up with what someone else (namely an advisor) wants to do. there’s so much hand holding through required coursework (and homework) that one can’t hardly think deeply about anything actually original. the book disciplined minds touches upon this. that those born in institutions will carry that institutional conservatism with them. i have felt this. i went to talk about some of my ideas to a well known and respected researcher. before i could even finish my sentence that began with “i’m interested in...” he cut me off shaking his head and, literally, said “i don’t believe in it...”. goddamnit.

sova 9y ago

That's like asking why there was an aristocratic court in Heian Japan when their skills in prosody and haiku were clearly not viable as jobs. I don't think every degree has to land a job, and education in itself must be a strong goal for our nation, not just economic feasibility. Don't be ruled by the Almighty Dollar.

jjeaff 9y ago
I agree, but if we are going to agree to not be ruled by the almighty dollar, we have to stop giving so many almighty dollars to universities for degrees that will produce no almighty dollars after graduation. Let people study fine arts with a minor in Russian literature. But we shouldn't subsidize huge student loans so they can get those degrees.
- Symbiote 9y ago
  > “The arts are essential to any complete national life. The State owes it to itself to sustain and encourage them…. Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the reverence and delight which are their due.” -- Churchill, 1938 We could debate how much subsidy should be allocated for arts vs. science, but I'd prefer that the wealthiest countries didn't restrict arts. They/we can afford it.
  - jjeaff 9y ago
    The arts won't go away if the US stops subsidizing it. Universities will just charge less for it.
zanny 9y ago
> education in itself must be a strong goal for our nation Too bad it isn't. Education is being used as a yardstick to isolate the poor from the economy. Don't have a BS? Guess you aren't qualified to work at McDonalds. And for those that do get those degrees, like you said, haikus aren't a viable job. For all the history and literature majors of the world a lot of them were spoon fed what their parents thought - "get a degree, any degree, and you are ahead in the world" just to find out that "ahead" didn't mean comfortable living. It just meant you had higher priority for the limited pie of work than those who didn't have that generic piece of paper. If you want people not to be ruled by the dollar, change society so your ability to be safe and secure in your day to day survival isn't bound so tightly to the pursuit and amassment of said dollar.

Eridrus 9y ago

I wonder if things are just as brutal when you take industry into account as a place to wind up post-PhD. There are research labs in industry that are interested in hiring PhDs. But maybe this is just the rose coloured glasses we have in CS.

solidsnack9000 9y ago

It's also befuddling why most faculty are able to sleep at night knowing they are at the top of a pyramid scheme. Maybe it's a selection thing -- the ones who can't sleep at night generally leave before they reach that point, as the realization dawns on them about what's expected of them. The process selects for the people who can maintain it.

itronitron 9y ago
I recall during undergrad that the stated goal of the professors was to 'unteach' us everything we learned in high school, and twenty years later I was thankfully finally able to unlearn everything I learned in undergrad. People that stay in a cult are unlikely to be fully honest with themselves and others about its shortcomings. Graduate school was a non-issue as I went through that as a means to an end and virtually all of the professors weren't wrapped up in academia.
- prewett 9y ago
  What were you studying? How do you know that your professors were wrong (that what they taught should be unlearned)?
  - itronitron 9y ago
    Undergraduate in Art, I think they were right to unteach us what we learned in high school but that they were wrong in only teaching Art as it relates to the 'Art world' and that bias is a result of how colleges/universities hire Art professors.
ImaCake 9y ago
An anecdote is not a datapoint, but I left my PhD because I saw the pyramid scheme and that I didn't want (or even could) maintain the effort required to climb up the pyramid. Now I'm a research assistant, I still do science but I no longer face the insane pressure of academia.
neltnerb 9y ago

skosuri 9y ago

I guess I sleep fine at night and I am faculty. It's only a pyramid scheme if you think everyone wants to become faculty.

xbkingx 9y ago
Talk about Being in the Bubble Exhibit A. People at the top of pyramid schemes get there by harming the people at the bottom and others outside the structure. One of the hardest lessons to learn in grad school was that those at the top can be incredibly nice, compassionate, affable people, but fantastically destructive. If this topic doesn't concern you, I feel incredibly bad for your students and post-docs. It isn't a problem because it pops up on occasion. It's a problem because it's everywhere and people with the power to change it soothe their conscience with straw men and pedantic aphorisms of tenuous relevance. The bias that helps you sleep at night allows the problems to fester

yashap 9y ago

Strongly agree. I got my MSc in Biological Oceanography, and it was mostly a waste of time and money. I’d imagine ~90% of my graduating class feel the same way. I transitioned into data analytics, then data engineering, and now customer facing software development, and love my career, but the MSc has contributed very little to it.

Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago

It's also befuddling why most faculty are able to sleep at night knowing they are at the top of a pyramid scheme. I just tell prospective students the truth. That the probability of being able to stay in academia is very low. That they are going to learn and do cool things, but if they end up in industry, this is not going to be valued much (generally true in my country, it's better in others). Those that stay know what they should expect.

dominotw 9y ago

> when there is no domestic market for most PHDs. Isn't this common knowledge though. Isn't not like NSF is advocating people to not google search their career prospects before embarking on the journey.

akvadrako 9y ago
I have a feeling most people don't really accept it applies to them, if the general atmosphere differs from the stats.

DaveWalk 9y ago

Does this remind others of other enterprises, like beginning video game programmers? When your are ready to leave from abuse, there is always another new person happy to take over. The supply of new labor in the academic market seems endless. I have spoken to ~200 incoming grad students about careers, and never once did it sink in. My opinion is that it must be corrected earlier up the chain, in high school or early college.

cassowary37 9y ago

What makes you think 'most' faculty appreciate the pyramid scheme? Many of us spend a lot of time worrying about our postdocs' future, in no small part because we recognize that the struggle for funding never actually ends. Tenure is not the end of the rainbow, it's reassurance that your salary can't go all the way to zero - but your lab, your team, even your office space absolutely can go to zero. At least in CS there's a career path to success that skips indentured servitude. In biology, unless you want to be a lifelong lab tech, good luck trying to get somewhere in biotech without toiling in the academic trenches. I promise, even those of us a bit closer to the top of the pyramid wish it were otherwise.

NPMaxwell 9y ago
Unless you're amazingly talented at nurturing your postdocs, something like half of them will not have lasting careers in academia. I applaud your attention to their futures. It would help others in your position to understand what you envision for these non-academic-future postdocs and how you prepare them for their futures. What are you doing for them?
- cassowary37 9y ago
  This is the right question to ask - not what NSF or NIH can do. I'm afraid I don't have a very satisfying answer, I'm still trying to figure it out myself. The first thing I tell my postdocs is that they can't put their life on hold and wait for adulthood to start after they finish this training (or more training). We need to be discussing career paths now, not 18 months from now. The second thing I tell them is that in my field (medicine) it's likely they can make a greater contribution on the industry side than in academia, because as important as fundamental (basic) research can be, industry is where most new treatments come from. For some I encourage entrepreneurship - harder in bio than CS but do-able for the right person. And some /can/ stay in academia as staff scientists - not responsible for running their own labs or generating their own funding, but acting mostly autonomously.
  - NPMaxwell 9y ago

sdfmxiid1 9y ago

So, as tenured faculty I don't know about NSF advocating for careers in STEM. Maybe that's a good thing maybe its a bad thing. What I do see driving this ultimately is something broader and more systemic, which is universities being underfunded, administrator heavy, and being run as for-profit businesses. In many ways, this all reduces to how grants are awarded and funded, and the history of grant funding. Through the 80s and 90s, and to some extent early 2000s, federal grant funding increased. There was sort of a heydey in that time, depending on field, where there was good funding opportunities, in general, for faculty. At the same time, state funding to universities started decreasing, and costs started increasing due to the higher ed bubble. Because of indirect costs on grants, which allow universities to charge the federal gov a blanket percentage of a grant, universities were able to skim off a profit almost automatically. It was a sort of win-win it seemed because faculty got to fund their research, unis got a cut to offset decreased funding. The problems are many, though. First, federal funding went down after a peak, so this money pool dried up. Second, this system sort of led to the pyramid scheme you mention, where grad students get recruited to maintain grants and research programs with nowhere to go, lest universities and faculty lose indirect funding. Third, it prioritizes research based on grant receipts rather than utility, which distorts research priorities in a perverse way (especially given nepotism in grant culture, which has been written about extensively elsewhere). Finally, because of the history of all of this, you kind of end up with a system in which those running the system are either beneficiaries of the 90s and 2000s, and don't realize what it is like now, or came up through that system and have a kind of survivorship bias. Agencies like NSF and NIH are basically just maintaining any semblance of research in the US at the moment, making up for all the deficiencies that are occurring at the state level. There are problems with NSF and NIH, but they're not with advocating for STEM grads. They're with how grants are funded. Basically, review panels need to randomly rotate in some kind of jury pool system almost; grants need to be awarded based on some kind of lottery system (proposed by former heads of NIH); indirect cost charges need to be eliminated or made line-item justified; some grants need to be awarded on the basis of publication record without regard to a specific proposal (ala Hungary); universities need to be adequately funded outside of the grant system; and tenure needs to be protected (I say this as someone who is probably going to step down from my tenured position soon). The problems facing grad students and postdocs are just the tip of the iceberg. They don't end, even when you get a tenure-track position, and even when you get tenure. The system is broken, it's a mess that favors hype and popularity over rigor. What you end up with is the current reproducibility crisis, academic fraud, people manipulating the system to overclaim credit, and many more problems that society is unaware of because they have a stereotyped idea of what happens in science--the sort of "great man in the lab with a eureka moment" which is a false model of scientific process.