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>Postdoc salaries are frequently based on what the U.S. National Institutes of Health sets as its standard, “and that’s pretty low,” says Daniel Wolf Savin, a p

>Postdoc salaries are frequently based on what the U.S. National Institutes of Health sets as its standard, “and that’s pretty low,” says Daniel Wolf Savin, a physicist and senior research scientist at Columbia University who is currently struggling to fill five postdoc positions. When hiring, he competes with national labs that offer up to $20,000 more per year in salary. “If we put in a research grant with a postdoc salary that they pay at a national lab, the program office is going to look at it and say, ‘Look, I can’t give you this much money. It’s so out of line with what everyone else is asking for,’” he says. I never understood why there are salary guidelines in the first place. Why should a lab with $200k/year to spend on postdoc salaries be unable to hire a single postdoc at $200k/year? Current guidelines stipulate the lab must instead hire 4 postdocs at $50k/year. At the end of the day, research quality is what matters. The research output of a single excellent postdoc worth $200k/year could easily exceed the total output of four mediocre postdocs each worth $50k/year.

valarauko 4y ago
> Why should a lab with $200k/year to spend on postdoc salaries be unable to hire a single postdoc at $200k/year? Current guidelines stipulate the lab must instead hire 4 postdocs at $50k/year. The article pretty much answers this. It's impossible to convince the program office that a postdoc is worth $200K/year - that's substantially more than the PI himself probably makes. In reality, the program office will majorly push back if you ask for 10k more than the going rate. You can swing $5k more for a postdoc with some years of postdoc experience, but not more than that. Given the way the contractual relationship of postdocs are setup, it's actually hard to find mediocre postdocs that survive in the system. Mediocre postdocs would be fired soon enough and a bright fresh PhD from China or India would take their place who's willing to work at $50k/year. That bright Chinese or Indian postdoc cannot easily accept a better paying industry job due to the nature of work visas for those countries so will work as a postdoc for several years till they can finagle a green card.

valarauko 4y ago

> Why should a lab with $200k/year to spend on postdoc salaries be unable to hire a single postdoc at $200k/year? Current guidelines stipulate the lab must instead hire 4 postdocs at $50k/year. The article pretty much answers this. It's impossible to convince the program office that a postdoc is worth $200K/year - that's substantially more than the PI himself probably makes. In reality, the program office will majorly push back if you ask for 10k more than the going rate. You can swing $5k more for a postdoc with some years of postdoc experience, but not more than that. Given the way the contractual relationship of postdocs are setup, it's actually hard to find mediocre postdocs that survive in the system. Mediocre postdocs would be fired soon enough and a bright fresh PhD from China or India would take their place who's willing to work at $50k/year. That bright Chinese or Indian postdoc cannot easily accept a better paying industry job due to the nature of work visas for those countries so will work as a postdoc for several years till they can finagle a green card.