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Academia risks becoming another such field. Professorial salaries are not commensurate with the educational years, as there is little demand for published rese

• ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Paying for journals to publish your papers is a thing academia did to itself. Publish or perish, demanding papers in a few cherry-picked journals to continue your career, and basically funneling grant money into journals hands is something that can only be changed from within academia.
  • tannhaeuser 5y ago
    Somewhat comparable to F/OSS, except without the grants.
    • hiptobecubic 5y ago
      How is that similar to foss?
    • moffkalast 5y ago
      Ah yes just like every open source project must pay a grand to github to host their code. /s What are you even talking about?
    • matheusmoreira 5y ago
      I don't have to pay anything to publish code I wrote. Peer review only happens in Linux distributions.
  • dmix 5y ago
    A lot of industries make sense in the context of their time, I'm sure having a few papers with esteem and influence as primary status indicators made a lot sense back in the day. There's just some things that are stuck in rigid unchanging organizations/industries. Anything heavily government reliant or bureaucratic, which universities are probably the best example of, is going to be extremely slow at adapting to the world. Just like how lawyers still use fax machines. It's extremely hard to be different and make change/stand-out in those organizations. Which also relates back to the articles point about cultural insularity.
• HPsquared 5y ago
  This could be a reversion to the mean. Historically the arts, science and philosophy were mostly hobbies of the wealthy - either doing the work itself or sponsoring it. Not really a "money-making" activity but a hobby or clout-chasing activity.
  • ren_engineer 5y ago
    this is the answer, STEM could easily fund itself in a free market. The same can't be said of the many other college degrees that are now funded mainly by student loans. Government created a distorted market that ruined many people's lives by trapping them with debt for a degree that provided no real world value
    • ghaff 5y ago
      STEM covers a lot of ground. Undergraduate biology and mathematics degrees probably don't confer any great employment advantage other than as a generic degree that demonstrates you have some facility with technical stuff--which isn't necessarily that much better than an English-adjacent degree depending upon what you want to do.
      • dodobirdlord 5y ago
        Undergrad math degrees pay off pretty well. As a group math degrees are second after engineering degrees for highest median starting and lifetime salary for people with only an undergraduate education. Relevant graphs on pages 12, 13, and 19. Math, statistics, and computer science are lumped in together on pages 12 and 13, but the graph on page 19 shows that the median salary for all three is very similar. https://1gyhoq479ufd3yna29x7ubjn-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Economic-Value-of-College-Majors-Full-Report-web-FINAL.pdf https://1gyhoq479ufd3yna29x7ubjn-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...
        • ghaff 5y ago
          That makes sense I guess. Even if you don't go on to do grad-level math or physics, it's a good foundation and preparation for a lot of other quantitative occupations. Whereas chemistry and biology have often been considered being "pre-med" majors to a non-trivial degree. They're less of a foundation at the undergraduate level for well-paying jobs. >the median salary for all three is very similar. Though note that this data is almost 10 years old. It wouldn't surprise if computers rose more than the average.
• 3pt14159 5y ago
  Big time. I remember hanging out with the AI team here in Toronto before deep learning took off. Then it took off and Microsoft just bought the research team out from under UoT's feet. It was a sky high payout. Same thing for the government too. I'm civically minded, so I've taken a couple contracts here and there to help out the Government of Canada, but man is it a pay cut. But what are they going to do? Pay more than the Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court? Sometimes governments try to work around this with contracting companies so that they don't have to see the salaries directly. But this is just padding extra waste and cost. But this is what exponential tech is going to look like, at least until AI replaces us then who knows.
  • jonnycomputer 5y ago
    Here in the US, politicians, especially on the right, love to highlight and criticize public employees, especially if their salaries seem too large. But Federal employees salaries are not too large, barely competitive with the private sector. If you want government to work well, attract talent by paying them what they'd earn outside of it. But all that just comes from an ideological interest in shrinking government so they can drown it in a bathtub. If you make sure government doesn't work well, then you have an excuse for eliminating it.
    • yibg 5y ago
      I think the problem is the distribution. SOME government employees (at least in Canada) are seen as being paid too much because the pay is clustered really closely together and often don’t reflect market pay. You get software engineers that get paid 70k a year but also janitors that get paid 70k a year with the same number of years in.
  • everforward 5y ago
    From what I've heard, another part of why the government struggles to get good IT workers is that the processes for getting anything done are Kafkaesque, even compared to large enterprise roles. There are other things governments could do though. Coming from a US perspective, the biggest one would be to pass some kind of law that employment contracts can't prevent you moonlighting for the government. I'd probably be willing to pick up some contract work to do on the cheap, but I can't because of my employment contract. Another is that the government already has access to a lot of things I don't, and I'd be willing to trade my time for access to some of those things. Free flights on army cargo planes would be a great perk. I would totally do some work if they'd let me drive a tank for like 30 minutes and fire the cannon down the range a couple times. They probably have access to HPC clusters that would tempt some (I don't have the skills to have the interest, but I'm sure many do). Government pensions are another option, although they'd have to require less than 40 hours a week of work to qualify. It might end up being more expensive than just paying more. Tax breaks are another option. Someone would have to figure up the demand curve, but a 10% cut to my effective tax rate would be tempting depending on the amount of work required. Free education would be another option if they could offer it for part time work. I don't feel that the government has gotten particularly creative in trying to attract talent. The pay is bad, the job is a bureaucratic nightmare, and the perks kind of suck other than the pension. The downside is that a lot of those are likely to piss off the rest of the government employees.
• chrisseaton 5y ago
  > as there is little demand for published research in journals Not sure what you mean by this - for advancement in academia this is 90% of what hiring or promotion committees demand. > journals demand payment from the writers themselves From the institution, not the authors.
  • jbsimpson 5y ago
    > From the institution, not the authors. Typically the authors pay the journal out of their own funding.
    • chrisseaton 5y ago
      Well I'd call that institutional money. 'Writers have to pay' makes it sound like they're paying from their own personal cash.
      • derbOac 5y ago
        Sometimes they do. Regardless, if it's often coming from funding that implies the authors have to have grants or come from institutions that are willing to pay, which disadvantages individuals without resources (they often have discounts for those without resources but in my personal experience the discount is absurdly small, like 15%, which is a lot for someone who just doesn't have external resources to publish under that model, if they're asking for 2k+ per paper). Either way it creates a backward incentive structure, of pay to access.
  • derbOac 5y ago
    Nowadays though the research is secondary to grant funding, so hiring and promotion committees don't even care about that. I was on a promotion committee where someone had a large grant but was not publishing. This went on for years and the response from significant segments of the department every year was literally something like "they have a large grant, it's fine, of course they'll publish". Publications are seen as a dime a dozen, and open access and issues about replicability and so forth have just added to the sense they're not worth much. The attitude is more along the lines of "if your ideas are really that important and high impact, it will convince the federal government to pay for them." It's very much the classic betting market idea, that true value is revealed only when money is on the line. I'm not saying this is good or bad, just my experience, in the US. I personally think the current funding system creates distorted incentive and reward systems, and that the original idea of academics was to insulate from that a bit or at least provide an alternative to traditional for-profit models. If something doesn't change I think this trend will only accelerate. Journals will maybe become seen as irrelevant, with grant or funding receipt being seen as the actually rigorous form of peer review. Everything will become a form of seeking VC funding, either from private or public funders. Again, whether that's the best model for funding anything in the US, private or public, profit or nonprofit, is a different issue.
• soniman 5y ago
  There was an academic fellowship with something like a $40 application fee and it got like 1000 applicants so the fellowship was funded by the application fee! That is literally a circular prestige economy.
• chaosbutters314 5y ago
  just as a data point to this. I worked for a PepsiCo, massive company. The position requires a PhD and you have to live in metro NYC, pay was only 80k. So not just professors, but a lot of positions that "require" a PhD pay poverty wages when someone has given up any kind of earnings for 5-6 years developing skills getting a PhD. There is a big problem with east coast jobs (mid-atlantic to NYC) from "older" companies that require tech experience and a PhD but do not want to pay accordingly because theyre stuck in an 80s mindset.
  • fennecfoxen 5y ago
    As a PhD you might aspire to better but a position in NYC on $80k is hardly "poverty wages". For starters, there's this little thing called "commuting" you may have heard of. Ordinary people, without PhDs, do it plenty. The NYC Pepsi offices seem to be a medium-short walk from Christopher St. PATH; you would have no trouble living in Jersey City or Hoboken on the (computes) ~$2000/mo rent that would be 'affordable' at such pay. I bet you get tax-deductible transit benefits, too, and a monthly pass is around $100. There are people in New York working full time jobs to make $15/hr, $30k a year. That's a lot more like the "poverty wages" you name.
    • 999900000999 5y ago
      80k a year minus student loan payments. I couldn't imagine living in any HCOL city with less than 100k minimum. If others want to struggle, fine. But logically why not live in Chicago off that 80k, and take a 20 minute L ride to work.
• ebiester 5y ago
  However, professors were historically from the gentry. It was always a position of status and privilege, especially before World War 2. It was only when the demand for higher education surged (largely by the GI bill but also by the computer revolution that created the white collar jobs today) that this changed. Further, the amount of published research has also exploded as the supply of qualified applicants has surged. That said, I think eventually the journals problem will solve itself - people inside academia are trying to figure a way out already.
• derbOac 5y ago
  Not risks, has become.
• unemphysbro 5y ago
  Universities take a cut (30 - 50%) of grant money brought in by profs. The incentive structure for good science is broken. Academia is a racket.
  • asdff 5y ago
    They also charge tuition that doesn't exist for grad students. Your classes year 1 or two in most stem phd programs are going to basically be the professors from the department giving research talks trying to get you to join their lab. Then they end and you are doing research or TAing for the department for the next 3-however many years. Only the thing is, the school still makes you sign up for tuition units, for a special class that only has grad students in it, and when you look at your bill you are charged full tution for this nonexistant class that just exists on paper. Your funding, whether it be the from your professor in an RAship or from the department in a TAship or an outside fund like the NSF, has to pay for this nonexistant classes tuition. You might be a line item of 90k a year on the grant budget, but you only see 35k from the nonexistent tuition. The rest just poofs into smoke into the inner workings of the school bureaucracy. It's basically money laundering with extra steps, and there is no way out because literally every school does this and too many people on academia have Stockholm syndrome.
• asdff 5y ago
  Grad students are so terribly underpaid in Academia. Salaries should go up 3x at least across the board for stipends. Grant funding agencies are spending millions of dollars on scientists who are only seeing salaries of at most $35k in the highest cost of living areas to do things like study cancer or climate change. It's kind of an open secret, but usually grant aims are somewhat vague. It's up to the grad student saddled with those couple of aims for their thesis work to identify what exactly to do. To vet the literature for methods. To order equipment or reagents. To conduct the experiment or analysis. To write up and interperete the results. To outreach to collaborators and set up meetings. To draft up the results into a published paper. Sometimes grad students are even relied upon to pen the next grant. The big joke is by the time you are done with your PhD project, you know more about the topic than anyone in the department or your professor or your committee. I think that actually typically happens by third year. Professors are tied up with administerial duties, class, and several other projects they may be juggling, along with their personal lives. You are lucky if your professor has five hours a week to devote to your particular project. It is so shameful that grad students are the backbone of modern research yet we pay them competitive salaries with In n Out. It's no surprise how grad students are so likely to have significant mental health issues considering the workload doled upon them for pittance pay that they have to figure out how to make work over years of other costs rising, while they are often without a raise.
  • DiggyJohnson 5y ago
    Why should they increase? Please don't shoot the questioner, but is your thought that this would increase the quality of scientific output?
    • asdff 5y ago
      Yes, because people are depressed. People are committing suicide. People are opting to not go to grad school in the first place. Why put people through that pain when they don't have to be put through it if they were only paid more fairly for their responsibilities and the skills they bring to the table?