5 ms·

I hate the trivialization of this. The solution is not obvious. Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from? At least in my areas o

I hate the trivialization of this. The solution is not obvious. Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from? At least in my areas of science (chemistry), most of this money comes from grants, which comes from the NIH, DOE, or NSF depending on the project. Ultimately it comes from taxpayers, and portioned out by Congress. So the solution is either to get Congress to really care about this (ha!) or re-architecture funding of all of higher education. Neither of these is simple.

maxerickson 4y ago
The fact that stakeholders don't like the solution doesn't make it complicated.
InefficientRed 4y ago
I hate the helplessness of this. You have agency. You also have responsibility. You have a chemistry phd. You don't have to build your career on other people's crushed financial futures. Either find a job where you can pay people well or find a job where you don't need to manage other people's labor to stay employed. I have A LOT of dubious pet projects I could convince NSF to fund and would love to work on if I had the moral stomach requires to convince highly educated broke 30 year olds to give me hundreds of thousands of dollars in free labor. But I don't. So instead I turned down TT offers and went to industry where I spend a lot of time convincing people with the money to actually pay living wages with good benefits to people who can work on slightly different things. I don't have a lab with my name on it. I don't have an office. I will never have tenure. No on calls me Professor or even Doctor. But I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds. My post-docs are paid $100k-$200k. Stop relying on broke kids to fund your dreams. Leave academia and find a company who will fund your work. Or stay in academia and don't hire people to help you unless you can pay them even close to what they're worth.
- cs137 4y ago
  You know, I agree with 90 percent of what you're saying, but on this... > I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds. ... I've got to say, you probably work for someone who is. It sounds like you're a decent human being and that's great--we need more of those--but the entire point of corporate capitalism (although this behavior exists in ostensibly noncapitalist organizations, too) is exploitation. Do you think CEOs care about whether they destroy the careers of people under them? There's no ethical consumption under capitalism, and there's no ethical production either, but ultimately, we have to survive.
  - InefficientRed 4y ago
    > you probably work for someone who is. This is actually a very fair point, so I'm not sure why you are downvoted (perhaps the last sentence comes across as inviting trolling). But I take my responsibility for not doing so to people under me seriously.
- sseagull 4y ago
  > Leave academia and find a company who will fund your work. This is the weakness in your argument. Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. I worked for a large company once that in the past had large labs for researching charge transfer and other fundamental physics. When I toured those labs, they were all empty, with broken and unused machines. I know this site focuses on computers and tech. But there is a large world of scientific disciplines out there that just aren’t useful to business. But useful to society as a whole. Lastly, postdocs typically make ~50-55kk in my neck of the woods. Underpaid, maybe depending on the field. But far from “broke”. Thats around the starting salary of school teachers and many other professions.
  - InefficientRed 4y ago
    > Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. More helplessness. My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing. I still do the most important bits of pushing advances in my field, but there's a lot of auxiliary work that has immediate value as well. It's less fun, it's CERTAINLY more humbling, and it's a lot more labor. But it provides both short-term and long-term value. BTW: if you want to do work no one will fund, that's fine. Just at least acknowledge that your largest funding source is the massively under-paid labor of 20-35 year olds. > Thats around the starting salary of school teachers and many other professions. Your post-docs are >= 28, have graduate degrees, and have several years of research experience. Also, "teachers and many other professions" almost NEVER sign fixed term contracts that require them to move all over the country/world. BTW, what is your university's pension plan like? Many teachers have great pension plans (that actually make sense to use since they have jobs that last more than 2-3 years). If comparing to industry, what's your 401K match and stock purchase program? You can't even beat the working conditions and wages that mediocre 22 year olds can get right out of college in a famously under-compensated field. "My PhD employees would be substantially better off as secondary school teachers" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
    - kaffee 4y ago
      >> Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. > My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing. I don't see the private sector funding ethnomusicology, philosophy, ecology, social history, ...
- katz_ 4y ago
  - katz_ 4y ago
- katz_ 4y ago
- katz_ 4y ago
- abdel_nasser 4y ago
Geonode 4y ago
We could reduce the population of college admin which has exponentially increased in the past 40 years.
cs137 4y ago
You're correct. On the other hand, college tuitions are ridiculous, and the modern university is literally a billion-dollar corporation. There's no excuse for the academic job market being this lousy when universities have so much money coming in from so many different sources. The problem is that they spend it all on administration. Paying a "Dean of Multiple-Choice Quantum Intersectionality" $600,000/year is a way for rich white elitists to pretend they care about things they actually don't.
- sseagull 4y ago
  Oh you have absolutely zero argument from me. One problem is the “professionalization” of universities, who are now run by admin “professionals", which removes power from the faculty. Although one part of this is regulatory burden by the state. This adds lots of overhead which the university would probably rather not have.
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
>Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from? Cut the number of postdoc positions in half, double the salaries of the remaining positions, and make it much more competitive to get a postdoc. The purpose of a postdoc is a final training step for someone to become faculty. Only people who are clearly faculty material after finishing their PhD should even attempt a postdoc. Unfortunately, many professors take on postdocs who have no shot of becoming faculty because their lab runs on the cheap, experienced labor they bring. Remember, the replacement rate for academia is exactly 1 postdoc with faculty aspirations per lifetime of each professor. Anything >1 and academia must grow exponentially to accommodate every single postdoc who desires a faculty position. Most professors have >>1 postdoc over the course of their careers, which means there are way too many postdoc positions in the world.
- analog31 4y ago
  Or train people to do research while in grad school. There are plenty of fields where people don't do post-docs before applying for faculty positions, e.g., all of the fields where there's no money for post-docs, and "hot" fields where people have better job prospects. I know two CS professors at a major research university, who went straight to faculty positions from their PhDs. The current structure is a holding pattern for absorbing the large population of PhDs who can't get jobs.
  - MontyCarloHall 4y ago
    >The current structure is a holding pattern for absorbing the large population of PhDs who can't get jobs. Indeed. When I originally wrote my parent comment [0], it was about overproduction of PhDs. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25082474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25082474
- amathres_info 4y ago
  Most professors do not have >>1 postdoc in their careers, because most of us teach at less research-intensive (or entirely teaching-focused) schools that have no postdocs at all. The way things work now, even to get a liberal arts school job requires you to do a postdoc first (at least in my corner of STEM). Anyway, professors at research-heavy postdoc-having schools could get away with more than one. But certainly the status quo is insane, you will hear no argument from me.
MrPatan 4y ago
> Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from? From defunding shit research. And don't give me that crap, you know exactly what kind of research you could cut without anything of value being lost. Start there.
microtonal 4y ago
Academia is a pyramid, for every PhD position, there are fewer post-doc positions, far fewer permanent staff positions, and even fewer professorships. For most people, an academic career is a dead end. So, reduce the number of PhD and post-doc positions and increase the wages. Universities have been doing the opposite. E.g. some Dutch universities stopped offering relatively well-compensated employee PhD positions and replaced them by bursary positions with far lower compensations. The primary motivation was that they could hire more PhDs for the same money. That maybe works when there is a recession, but when there is an ample supply of jobs, many good candidates will just choose an industry position instead. Besides that, universities have gained a lot of administrative staff over the past decades. Plus some universities spend hundreds of millions of Euros on fancy buildings. Sure, it looks nice in PR material, but they could've also built something functional and use the remaining money for better salaries.
- throwawayarnty 4y ago
  Which Dutch universities? Just curious. My perception was that phd students in Netherlands live quite comfortably.
pmyteh 4y ago
"longer" is comparatively easy: More staff scientists (moving from grant to grant within an institution but on open-ended contracts) and fewer postdocs. "Paying more" is harder, though one or more of reducing marginal grants and lowering the ceiling on institutional overhead on grants would seem a reasonable start. I've recently finished four years as a postdoc (and now have a permanent academic job and am applying for grants). It's the precarity of it which is a bigger killer than just the crappy salary. Fighting huge numbers of applicants for the chance to uproot your life (again) and move around the country for a contract that may be as short as 9 months, with every move having a good chance of being the end of your career (which you've invested years in training for). It's a grim position to put people into.
noslenwerdna 4y ago
The obvious solution is to have fewer graduate students. Why should one professor train N replacements, if the field isn't expanding?
bart_spoon 4y ago
Higher education gets an absurd amount of funding. Entire generations are being saddled with lifelong, insurmountable debt because of how much universities are charging to get an education. The costs of tuition have skyrocketed at rates far above inflation. Many universities are sitting on massive piles of cash reserves. The problem is that most of that money is getting sucked up by non-academic sinks like administration.
akomtu 4y ago
Administration. They've absorbed a big chunk of the academia's money. A simple law could fix it: expenses on admins can't exceed 5% of the budget, the chief admin's pay can't exceed 75%-tile of postdocs pay. Admins will scream, they will break walls and tables in fury, and they will quit, but it won't be a big loss for academia.
algoatecorn 4y ago
The money comes from the same place they use to pay administrative folk who often earn more than post docs. It's an allocation issue

maxerickson 4y ago

The fact that stakeholders don't like the solution doesn't make it complicated.

InefficientRed 4y ago

I hate the helplessness of this. You have agency. You also have responsibility. You have a chemistry phd. You don't have to build your career on other people's crushed financial futures. Either find a job where you can pay people well or find a job where you don't need to manage other people's labor to stay employed. I have A LOT of dubious pet projects I could convince NSF to fund and would love to work on if I had the moral stomach requires to convince highly educated broke 30 year olds to give me hundreds of thousands of dollars in free labor. But I don't. So instead I turned down TT offers and went to industry where I spend a lot of time convincing people with the money to actually pay living wages with good benefits to people who can work on slightly different things. I don't have a lab with my name on it. I don't have an office. I will never have tenure. No on calls me Professor or even Doctor. But I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds. My post-docs are paid $100k-$200k. Stop relying on broke kids to fund your dreams. Leave academia and find a company who will fund your work. Or stay in academia and don't hire people to help you unless you can pay them even close to what they're worth.

cs137 4y ago
You know, I agree with 90 percent of what you're saying, but on this... > I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds. ... I've got to say, you probably work for someone who is. It sounds like you're a decent human being and that's great--we need more of those--but the entire point of corporate capitalism (although this behavior exists in ostensibly noncapitalist organizations, too) is exploitation. Do you think CEOs care about whether they destroy the careers of people under them? There's no ethical consumption under capitalism, and there's no ethical production either, but ultimately, we have to survive.
- InefficientRed 4y ago
  > you probably work for someone who is. This is actually a very fair point, so I'm not sure why you are downvoted (perhaps the last sentence comes across as inviting trolling). But I take my responsibility for not doing so to people under me seriously.
sseagull 4y ago
> Leave academia and find a company who will fund your work. This is the weakness in your argument. Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. I worked for a large company once that in the past had large labs for researching charge transfer and other fundamental physics. When I toured those labs, they were all empty, with broken and unused machines. I know this site focuses on computers and tech. But there is a large world of scientific disciplines out there that just aren’t useful to business. But useful to society as a whole. Lastly, postdocs typically make ~50-55kk in my neck of the woods. Underpaid, maybe depending on the field. But far from “broke”. Thats around the starting salary of school teachers and many other professions.
- InefficientRed 4y ago
  > Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. More helplessness. My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing. I still do the most important bits of pushing advances in my field, but there's a lot of auxiliary work that has immediate value as well. It's less fun, it's CERTAINLY more humbling, and it's a lot more labor. But it provides both short-term and long-term value. BTW: if you want to do work no one will fund, that's fine. Just at least acknowledge that your largest funding source is the massively under-paid labor of 20-35 year olds. > Thats around the starting salary of school teachers and many other professions. Your post-docs are >= 28, have graduate degrees, and have several years of research experience. Also, "teachers and many other professions" almost NEVER sign fixed term contracts that require them to move all over the country/world. BTW, what is your university's pension plan like? Many teachers have great pension plans (that actually make sense to use since they have jobs that last more than 2-3 years). If comparing to industry, what's your 401K match and stock purchase program? You can't even beat the working conditions and wages that mediocre 22 year olds can get right out of college in a famously under-compensated field. "My PhD employees would be substantially better off as secondary school teachers" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
  - kaffee 4y ago
    >> Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. > My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing. I don't see the private sector funding ethnomusicology, philosophy, ecology, social history, ...
katz_ 4y ago
- katz_ 4y ago
katz_ 4y ago
katz_ 4y ago
abdel_nasser 4y ago

Geonode 4y ago

We could reduce the population of college admin which has exponentially increased in the past 40 years.

cs137 4y ago

You're correct. On the other hand, college tuitions are ridiculous, and the modern university is literally a billion-dollar corporation. There's no excuse for the academic job market being this lousy when universities have so much money coming in from so many different sources. The problem is that they spend it all on administration. Paying a "Dean of Multiple-Choice Quantum Intersectionality" $600,000/year is a way for rich white elitists to pretend they care about things they actually don't.

sseagull 4y ago
Oh you have absolutely zero argument from me. One problem is the “professionalization” of universities, who are now run by admin “professionals", which removes power from the faculty. Although one part of this is regulatory burden by the state. This adds lots of overhead which the university would probably rather not have.

MontyCarloHall 4y ago

>Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from? Cut the number of postdoc positions in half, double the salaries of the remaining positions, and make it much more competitive to get a postdoc. The purpose of a postdoc is a final training step for someone to become faculty. Only people who are clearly faculty material after finishing their PhD should even attempt a postdoc. Unfortunately, many professors take on postdocs who have no shot of becoming faculty because their lab runs on the cheap, experienced labor they bring. Remember, the replacement rate for academia is exactly 1 postdoc with faculty aspirations per lifetime of each professor. Anything >1 and academia must grow exponentially to accommodate every single postdoc who desires a faculty position. Most professors have >>1 postdoc over the course of their careers, which means there are way too many postdoc positions in the world.

analog31 4y ago
Or train people to do research while in grad school. There are plenty of fields where people don't do post-docs before applying for faculty positions, e.g., all of the fields where there's no money for post-docs, and "hot" fields where people have better job prospects. I know two CS professors at a major research university, who went straight to faculty positions from their PhDs. The current structure is a holding pattern for absorbing the large population of PhDs who can't get jobs.
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  >The current structure is a holding pattern for absorbing the large population of PhDs who can't get jobs. Indeed. When I originally wrote my parent comment [0], it was about overproduction of PhDs. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25082474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25082474
amathres_info 4y ago
Most professors do not have >>1 postdoc in their careers, because most of us teach at less research-intensive (or entirely teaching-focused) schools that have no postdocs at all. The way things work now, even to get a liberal arts school job requires you to do a postdoc first (at least in my corner of STEM). Anyway, professors at research-heavy postdoc-having schools could get away with more than one. But certainly the status quo is insane, you will hear no argument from me.

MrPatan 4y ago

> Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from? From defunding shit research. And don't give me that crap, you know exactly what kind of research you could cut without anything of value being lost. Start there.

microtonal 4y ago

Academia is a pyramid, for every PhD position, there are fewer post-doc positions, far fewer permanent staff positions, and even fewer professorships. For most people, an academic career is a dead end. So, reduce the number of PhD and post-doc positions and increase the wages. Universities have been doing the opposite. E.g. some Dutch universities stopped offering relatively well-compensated employee PhD positions and replaced them by bursary positions with far lower compensations. The primary motivation was that they could hire more PhDs for the same money. That maybe works when there is a recession, but when there is an ample supply of jobs, many good candidates will just choose an industry position instead. Besides that, universities have gained a lot of administrative staff over the past decades. Plus some universities spend hundreds of millions of Euros on fancy buildings. Sure, it looks nice in PR material, but they could've also built something functional and use the remaining money for better salaries.

throwawayarnty 4y ago
Which Dutch universities? Just curious. My perception was that phd students in Netherlands live quite comfortably.

pmyteh 4y ago

"longer" is comparatively easy: More staff scientists (moving from grant to grant within an institution but on open-ended contracts) and fewer postdocs. "Paying more" is harder, though one or more of reducing marginal grants and lowering the ceiling on institutional overhead on grants would seem a reasonable start. I've recently finished four years as a postdoc (and now have a permanent academic job and am applying for grants). It's the precarity of it which is a bigger killer than just the crappy salary. Fighting huge numbers of applicants for the chance to uproot your life (again) and move around the country for a contract that may be as short as 9 months, with every move having a good chance of being the end of your career (which you've invested years in training for). It's a grim position to put people into.

noslenwerdna 4y ago

The obvious solution is to have fewer graduate students. Why should one professor train N replacements, if the field isn't expanding?

bart_spoon 4y ago

Higher education gets an absurd amount of funding. Entire generations are being saddled with lifelong, insurmountable debt because of how much universities are charging to get an education. The costs of tuition have skyrocketed at rates far above inflation. Many universities are sitting on massive piles of cash reserves. The problem is that most of that money is getting sucked up by non-academic sinks like administration.

akomtu 4y ago

Administration. They've absorbed a big chunk of the academia's money. A simple law could fix it: expenses on admins can't exceed 5% of the budget, the chief admin's pay can't exceed 75%-tile of postdocs pay. Admins will scream, they will break walls and tables in fury, and they will quit, but it won't be a big loss for academia.

algoatecorn 4y ago

The money comes from the same place they use to pay administrative folk who often earn more than post docs. It's an allocation issue