19 ms·

I mean, isn't it clear, ever since the bulk creation / funding of so many colleges (and faculty positions) pre + post WW2, the US faculty job market has been on

I mean, isn't it clear, ever since the bulk creation / funding of so many colleges (and faculty positions) pre + post WW2, the US faculty job market has been on a decline ever since -- (that is, from the average postdoc's point of view of success % when seeking a faculty position). It is structurally not a growing, dynamic market where you're going to have an easy time. I would call it stagnant, or in the worst case, cutthroat. You do understand right, that the faculty system relies on a pyramid of people entering and leaving the system? And only a certain fraction getting to the top, and people having to vacate the top of the pyramid for anyone else to get there? (for stable, or in other words, stagnant fields) When the US was in a college-building phase (funded by economic stimulus / public programs), all these posts were new and empty, waiting to be filled. So it enabled a generation of new professors to fill those ranks. As that became stable, now instead of a fresh pyramid you fill with eager people (who think that's still how easy it is), you have grad students and postdocs seeing who can outlast each other (or publish more) to get to the top through attrition or publishing prowess. Certain fields, let's say, pure math, or history, until a professor retires or dies, there's just no spot for the people below even to compete for. That's why you see people going to Asia, Middle East, etc. where the new money and universities are. Follow the money. I mean this is pure population pyramid, demographic stuff that you can predict. You almost don't even need to know the student's thesis topic to say what chance he/she has of becoming a professor. Joining the climb up the ladder in a generally stable pyramid -- it's not going to end well for the bulk majority, or be enjoyable while you do it. Especially if you have visible proof of friend, etc. following much easier paths.

echelon 6y ago
It's suddenly dawned on me in the past month or so that the era of growth for many American ways of life is at an end. Not just academia. The post-war, post-energy boom should have been obvious. Millennials have been complaining about lack of job growth, housing, and affordable education. Their parents had lower-hanging fruit to pluck. (I'm assuming this isn't just some myth I've been told about the 60's - 90's.) The blame is sometimes placed on "bad Boomer policies", but I'm not so sure. It feels as though we burned through the "easy" years. In academia, international students aren't flocking to US institutions anymore. The playing field has been leveled. Asian tech is coming into prominence at full stride and is reminiscent of Japan's meteoric rise. The manufacturing story is obviously much different. Is this happening because the rest of the world caught up? Or did America put investments in the wrong places? What's causing this, and how do we get back to prosperity for all young Americans? Am I simply missing the areas where things have improved? Genuinely curious about thematic ideas / shifts, what we might change, or if my views are wrong.
- idrios 6y ago
  My take on it is this. As a whole, there are fewer jobs to be had because we've really upped efficiency by magnitudes. Things like coal mining used to be done by teams of people (it's what my grandpa did) but now can be mostly done by machines. Houses can be mass produced by a handful of orgs. And of course the US also used to do much more manufacturing before it was mostly outsourced. So we became a service economy. Except we automated the heck out of services too. Bookkeeping types of jobs have been mostly replaced by software tools. Likewise the kinds of jobs that connect people to other people like phone operators or marketing/advertising agencies have either been made obsolete or so efficient that a handful of companies (e.g. Google, Facebook, Amazon) can basically meet the needs of the entire nation. Nearly every industry has been disrupted now by tech, which means we've increased efficiency & reduced jobs in all those fields On top of all of this, we have had great success in bringing women and minorities into the workforce. The economic prosperity we had post-WW2 was primarily not shared with African Americans, so the vision of getting a good job and buying a house while young was not a possibility for that group. Probably the best time for economic opportunity for minorities in the US is right now. Most of the above is good. And I wouldn't even label what we have as "bad Boomer policies" so much as just outdated ones. We are sooo slow to adopt any sort of policy changes whatsoever. The free market is good at solving lots of problems, but it is utterly incapable of solving problems related to distribution of wealth, because companies only have the power to direct wealth inward (if the company were, on average, directing wealth outward it would very quickly go bankrupt and cease to exist). As for academia, a lot of low hanging fruit has been had across multiple disciplines, so testing new theories has become exponenially more expensive. Cutting edge research 100 years ago would have cost $10k to set up a bunch of mirrors to measure the speed of light. Now it costs in the $billions to measure the presense of certain kinds of matter. So the return value of scientific funding has gone down... so scientific funding has gone down. Despite this, the state of the job market in the US is not very appealing so more people than ever are pursuing / staying in academia. I have no idea what the fix is but I think a basic income policy would help
- bart_spoon 6y ago
  I’m reading Capital in the 21st Century, and Piketty notes that the growth rates that characterized the decades following the world wars were aberrations, not the norm. Growth has largely been very, very slow across most of human history. It’s also worth noting that the intense post-war growth followed by a return to earth has occurred in most countries around the world, regardless of domestic policies, with some, like China, being accelerated in a “catch up phase”. Much of the third world has yet to experience this catch up phase, but are likely to in the next 50 years. It seems entirely possible that there is no way to replicate what was a relatively short period of hyper-growth that has defined most of our lifetimes, and instead we need to base our policies and planning around the idea that what we’ve considered to be stagnant growth rates are actually the norm.
lostdog 6y ago
Think about this: If the number of faculty positions isn't growing, how many PhD's should a faculty member graduate in total? Probably around 1-2 in their entire career, otherwise there is a glut of PhD's with no faculty. But with so many faculty members adding 1-3 new PhD's _per-year_ there will be so many PhD's with nowhere to go. (Excluding fields with a good route to industry, of course, since there's plenty of "sterile" industry positions where the researcher is no longer spawning new researchers).
dgb23 6y ago
Reminds me of discworld’s unseen university.
mattkrause 6y ago
> there's just no spot for the people below even to compete This is often stated like a fact of life, but it’s really just a decision that we’ve collectively made. The NIH and NSF will happily give you $75,000 to train three grad students, but not to hire one experienced staff scientist, even though there may be few positions for the students at the end and the staff scientist may be more efficient.
- jpeloquin 6y ago
  Where extramural NIH competing grant application are concerned, I thought PIs were pretty much free to include a staff scientist, or anyone else, in the budget as "key personnel". Anecdotally, the NIH hasn't raised this as an issue in any of the grants I've been involved with. Would you mind clarifying the context in which you've seen / heard of the NIH requiring budget revisions to exclude staff? Overall I agree that the NIH & NSF extramural funding policy is designed with the sole goal of maximizing the number of tenure-track faculty. The messaging around sequestration, and the Grant Support Index mechanism, made it explicit that the main policy goal was to keep creating tenure-track faculty at the same rate. Even if this isn't sustainable. There are many programs to buoy the supply of (aspiring) tenure-track faculty, but few for any other career path. I'm just not aware of any policies to prevent grant recipients from hiring staff should they choose to do so.
  - mattkrause 6y ago
    It's not so much a policy itself so much as it is the entirely-foreseeable consequence of other policies. As far as I know, the NIH has only one mechanism for directly supporting staff scientists: the R50. I think the NCI is the only institute that does them, and there aren't many. You're right that staff scientist can, theoretically, be funded by research project grants...but it's tricky. Students and postdoc funding comes from many sources: institutional training grants to the program, individual fellowships from the NIH, NSF, and private foundations, and sometimes even internal money (either as a RAship or in exchange for TAing). Virtually all of these are limited to those within a few years of their PhD[0]. Anyone more senior needs to be paid from research funds. The "workhorse" grant of the NIH is an R01. Most labs have 1, maybe 2, and their standard "modular" budget is $250k/year [1]. Profs with soft money jobs typically have to cover much of their salary from these grants. Adding on another $75k + 25-30% fringe for a staff scientist therefore puts a pretty big hole in the budget, even before you've started to buy reagents, equipment, scan time, etc. This biases labs towards hiring trainees. Even if you are paying several of them them with grant money now, there's a decent chance that some of them can be moved onto a non-research grant funding stream later. In contrast, the staff scientist costs more now and will definitely cost even more later. Some places are also wary of letting staff scientists write grants[2], which makes it even harder for them to defray their own costs. [0] The CZI-funded "Imaging Scientist" is one notable exception, but for a fairly specific type of person. [1] You can do some extra paperwork to request more than this amount, but people's advice on whether this is wise is all over the map and depends on your study section, career stage, and the phase of the moon. [2] Ghostwriting one for the prof to submit is an option, but an unsatisfying one since it won't show up on your CV, which makes it harder to (eventually) move on.

echelon 6y ago

It's suddenly dawned on me in the past month or so that the era of growth for many American ways of life is at an end. Not just academia. The post-war, post-energy boom should have been obvious. Millennials have been complaining about lack of job growth, housing, and affordable education. Their parents had lower-hanging fruit to pluck. (I'm assuming this isn't just some myth I've been told about the 60's - 90's.) The blame is sometimes placed on "bad Boomer policies", but I'm not so sure. It feels as though we burned through the "easy" years. In academia, international students aren't flocking to US institutions anymore. The playing field has been leveled. Asian tech is coming into prominence at full stride and is reminiscent of Japan's meteoric rise. The manufacturing story is obviously much different. Is this happening because the rest of the world caught up? Or did America put investments in the wrong places? What's causing this, and how do we get back to prosperity for all young Americans? Am I simply missing the areas where things have improved? Genuinely curious about thematic ideas / shifts, what we might change, or if my views are wrong.

idrios 6y ago
My take on it is this. As a whole, there are fewer jobs to be had because we've really upped efficiency by magnitudes. Things like coal mining used to be done by teams of people (it's what my grandpa did) but now can be mostly done by machines. Houses can be mass produced by a handful of orgs. And of course the US also used to do much more manufacturing before it was mostly outsourced. So we became a service economy. Except we automated the heck out of services too. Bookkeeping types of jobs have been mostly replaced by software tools. Likewise the kinds of jobs that connect people to other people like phone operators or marketing/advertising agencies have either been made obsolete or so efficient that a handful of companies (e.g. Google, Facebook, Amazon) can basically meet the needs of the entire nation. Nearly every industry has been disrupted now by tech, which means we've increased efficiency & reduced jobs in all those fields On top of all of this, we have had great success in bringing women and minorities into the workforce. The economic prosperity we had post-WW2 was primarily not shared with African Americans, so the vision of getting a good job and buying a house while young was not a possibility for that group. Probably the best time for economic opportunity for minorities in the US is right now. Most of the above is good. And I wouldn't even label what we have as "bad Boomer policies" so much as just outdated ones. We are sooo slow to adopt any sort of policy changes whatsoever. The free market is good at solving lots of problems, but it is utterly incapable of solving problems related to distribution of wealth, because companies only have the power to direct wealth inward (if the company were, on average, directing wealth outward it would very quickly go bankrupt and cease to exist). As for academia, a lot of low hanging fruit has been had across multiple disciplines, so testing new theories has become exponenially more expensive. Cutting edge research 100 years ago would have cost $10k to set up a bunch of mirrors to measure the speed of light. Now it costs in the $billions to measure the presense of certain kinds of matter. So the return value of scientific funding has gone down... so scientific funding has gone down. Despite this, the state of the job market in the US is not very appealing so more people than ever are pursuing / staying in academia. I have no idea what the fix is but I think a basic income policy would help
bart_spoon 6y ago
I’m reading Capital in the 21st Century, and Piketty notes that the growth rates that characterized the decades following the world wars were aberrations, not the norm. Growth has largely been very, very slow across most of human history. It’s also worth noting that the intense post-war growth followed by a return to earth has occurred in most countries around the world, regardless of domestic policies, with some, like China, being accelerated in a “catch up phase”. Much of the third world has yet to experience this catch up phase, but are likely to in the next 50 years. It seems entirely possible that there is no way to replicate what was a relatively short period of hyper-growth that has defined most of our lifetimes, and instead we need to base our policies and planning around the idea that what we’ve considered to be stagnant growth rates are actually the norm.

lostdog 6y ago

Think about this: If the number of faculty positions isn't growing, how many PhD's should a faculty member graduate in total? Probably around 1-2 in their entire career, otherwise there is a glut of PhD's with no faculty. But with so many faculty members adding 1-3 new PhD's _per-year_ there will be so many PhD's with nowhere to go. (Excluding fields with a good route to industry, of course, since there's plenty of "sterile" industry positions where the researcher is no longer spawning new researchers).

dgb23 6y ago

Reminds me of discworld’s unseen university.

mattkrause 6y ago

> there's just no spot for the people below even to compete This is often stated like a fact of life, but it’s really just a decision that we’ve collectively made. The NIH and NSF will happily give you $75,000 to train three grad students, but not to hire one experienced staff scientist, even though there may be few positions for the students at the end and the staff scientist may be more efficient.

jpeloquin 6y ago
Where extramural NIH competing grant application are concerned, I thought PIs were pretty much free to include a staff scientist, or anyone else, in the budget as "key personnel". Anecdotally, the NIH hasn't raised this as an issue in any of the grants I've been involved with. Would you mind clarifying the context in which you've seen / heard of the NIH requiring budget revisions to exclude staff? Overall I agree that the NIH & NSF extramural funding policy is designed with the sole goal of maximizing the number of tenure-track faculty. The messaging around sequestration, and the Grant Support Index mechanism, made it explicit that the main policy goal was to keep creating tenure-track faculty at the same rate. Even if this isn't sustainable. There are many programs to buoy the supply of (aspiring) tenure-track faculty, but few for any other career path. I'm just not aware of any policies to prevent grant recipients from hiring staff should they choose to do so.
- mattkrause 6y ago
  It's not so much a policy itself so much as it is the entirely-foreseeable consequence of other policies. As far as I know, the NIH has only one mechanism for directly supporting staff scientists: the R50. I think the NCI is the only institute that does them, and there aren't many. You're right that staff scientist can, theoretically, be funded by research project grants...but it's tricky. Students and postdoc funding comes from many sources: institutional training grants to the program, individual fellowships from the NIH, NSF, and private foundations, and sometimes even internal money (either as a RAship or in exchange for TAing). Virtually all of these are limited to those within a few years of their PhD[0]. Anyone more senior needs to be paid from research funds. The "workhorse" grant of the NIH is an R01. Most labs have 1, maybe 2, and their standard "modular" budget is $250k/year [1]. Profs with soft money jobs typically have to cover much of their salary from these grants. Adding on another $75k + 25-30% fringe for a staff scientist therefore puts a pretty big hole in the budget, even before you've started to buy reagents, equipment, scan time, etc. This biases labs towards hiring trainees. Even if you are paying several of them them with grant money now, there's a decent chance that some of them can be moved onto a non-research grant funding stream later. In contrast, the staff scientist costs more now and will definitely cost even more later. Some places are also wary of letting staff scientists write grants[2], which makes it even harder for them to defray their own costs. [0] The CZI-funded "Imaging Scientist" is one notable exception, but for a fairly specific type of person. [1] You can do some extra paperwork to request more than this amount, but people's advice on whether this is wise is all over the map and depends on your study section, career stage, and the phase of the moon. [2] Ghostwriting one for the prof to submit is an option, but an unsatisfying one since it won't show up on your CV, which makes it harder to (eventually) move on.