The main edge is freedom in research topic (at least to the extent of what granting agencies are willing to fund), and freedom in publishing your ideas and resu

The main edge is freedom in research topic (at least to the extent of what granting agencies are willing to fund), and freedom in publishing your ideas and results as you see fit. Tenure is a ridiculous gamble right now. Getting a tenure track position at a major research university in most fields if you do everything right is something like a 10% chance after multiple years of dreadfully paid and generally poorly treated postdoc. Then it's only 50/50 or so whether you get fired after ~5 years. You don't know if you will be tenured until you're pushing 40, and in bio you'd be lucky to know by then. The EV of going for tenure these days is fucking awful. Besides, almost anyone capable of getting tenure in a STEM department at UT is super employable in the corresponding industry and definitely does not need tenure to protect their job like a random grade school teacher. The only place it's helpful is if you start really questioning people or pushing buttons, but that just goes back to intellectual freedom being the real perk, not the job security. Might be different in something like ML where DeepMind and OpenAI can systematically take talent, but seriously the job market to get tenure track professorship currently is brutally competitive, to the point it is straining the whole academic system.