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>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 pos

>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.
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  >even to get a liberal arts school job requires you to do a postdoc first That’s a great point that I neglected to consider. Regardless, the overall point still holds—the production rate of postdocs is much greater than the replacement rate of professors (at all institutions).
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    The research fields that seem require people to do many years of postdoc education also seem to be among the worst paying in industry.
pvaldes 4y ago
We live in a very strange world where everybody has brain tattooed the idea that economy must grow a 5% each year, at any cost, but nobody claims that science should grow a 5% each year also. Show me a single politic saying that science must grow, so we allocated more resources for it.

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.

MontyCarloHall 4y ago
>even to get a liberal arts school job requires you to do a postdoc first That’s a great point that I neglected to consider. Regardless, the overall point still holds—the production rate of postdocs is much greater than the replacement rate of professors (at all institutions).
- the_only_law 4y ago
  The research fields that seem require people to do many years of postdoc education also seem to be among the worst paying in industry.

pvaldes 4y ago

We live in a very strange world where everybody has brain tattooed the idea that economy must grow a 5% each year, at any cost, but nobody claims that science should grow a 5% each year also. Show me a single politic saying that science must grow, so we allocated more resources for it.