12 ms·

More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

• nikolayasdf123 2y ago
  looks about right, from anecdotal evidence
• decasia 2y ago
  I was in academia - I got a PhD, did a postdoc, got a lifetime faculty job. And I'm so much happier now working in professional software engineering than I was in academia.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • raegis 2y ago
    Did you give up a pension?
• dr_dshiv 2y ago
  Logic checks out. Not everyone should be a professor. The question is: should they have done a PhD and postdoc?
  • OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
    Sample of one: No regrets. It was a tough regimen and I got filtered out of academia. But, I grew immensely throughout the path and got to be around some exceptional minds. I shoulda/coulda have worked harder and been more daring.
  • bigbacaloa 2y ago
    It's like being a professional athlete. Until you get to the first division you don't know if you have what it takes and no one else does either.
    • OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
      I think that's generally true but I've noticed that there are a couple of people in every cohort who have the right stuff. They're good and everyone knows it, including themselves. Glad this post was revived after being dead for some reason.
      • bigbacaloa 2y ago
        That's true if the cohort is MIT grad students. It's probably not true if the cohort is Random Western State Institute of Technology. On the other hand the relatively high percentage of postdocs who survive according to the cited article probably reflects that in the analogy many of the hiring institutions are closer to second division clubs than to first division ones. The analogy breaks at this point because salary structures are quite different. The marginal difference between working at Research I and Research II is not so great, while the marginal salary difference between playing in Division I and Division II is huge.
• OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
  I would have expected a higher percentage. Few openings and a high bar for whatever there is. It was tough to get an assistant professor job 30 years ago and I can't imagine what it must be like now.
  • motorest 2y ago
    > I would have expected a higher percentage. This. A 60% stay rate evokes scenarios of academic inbreeding and a total disconnect between the real world and the small bubble where research groups operate.
    • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > A 60% stay rate evokes scenarios of academic inbreeding and a total disconnect between the real world and the small bubble where research groups operate Why?
      • dghlsakjg 2y ago
        Academia's current structure rewards behaviors that don't necessarily create value. The "publish or perish" mentality encourages quantity over quality, leading to the replication crisis where many published findings can't be reproduced. The system tends to reward those who conform to existing academic paradigms while marginalizing innovative outsider perspectives that might bring valuable real-world insights. When academics move directly from being students to faculty without external experience, it creates an echo chamber. This isolation from practical applications and market forces risks turning academic pursuit into a self-referential game - where success is measured by metrics like publication count and citation numbers rather than actual contribution to human knowledge or societal progress. This separation from real-world feedback mechanisms means we may be investing significant human capital into activities that optimize for academic metrics rather than meaningful outcomes. The challenge isn't just about individual careers, but about ensuring our research institutions remain connected to the practical problems they're meant to help solve.
        • 2y ago
• MattGaiser 2y ago
  I am surprised it is that low really, given what I hear about the competition for professor roles.
• astahlx 2y ago
  The question is: How many decide against doing a post doc, while considering it for some time during the PhD time. When you commit becoming a postdoc, you know how the game is played, you have a good network, you have a good topic to work on.
  • postdoc74 2y ago
    Not necessarily. A three or four year PhD in Europe is a short time to acquire a solid network (a lot of time is spent in training, unless the student is very proactive) and not all PhDs broaden their horizon to have a well differentiated topic to pursue after the degree. I would argue that true independence is actually acquired in the early postdoc years, but it requires a lot of work and a lot of luck. TBH, 40% attrition rate is less I expected. Since each academic can train more than one PhD and postdoc every few years, which is the case, some attrition is required because the system cannot grow exponentially. The desired outcome in this context is that this talent incorporates to industry or other sectors where this expertise or problem solving skills are not wasted.
  • bowsamic 2y ago
    > When you commit becoming a postdoc, you know how the game is played, you have a good network I wouldn't agree to those. I was perhaps overly supported during my PhD, not preparing me for the reality of being abandoned/expected to be totally independent in the postdoc
• CaptainFever 2y ago
  Does anyone have a link to the actual study? The linked DOI is a 404, and I'm confused by the phrasing of "more than 40%". Does the study not have a more exact number (with error)?
  • optionalsquid 2y ago
    I wonder if they published that article too early, because the paper itself does not seem to be public yet. But I think this is the pre-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03938 https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03938
• Davidbrcz 2y ago
  Can't read the article, but it's about postdoc. - Many people who did a PhD and didn't want to do research don't do a postdoc - I would say, "40% have left so far'. Following the same cohort for a few years might yield even higher numbers (because as long you haven't made your mind about quitting research, you are still a postdoc and not accounted for leaving, even it's your 10th year...).
• vv_ 2y ago
  I'm not sure about the situation elsewhere, but in Lithuania, it feels like professors produce articles or tackle topics solely to check a box. Most of the content generated by universities here seems completely irrelevant and ends up being discarded after completion. The courses are very bland and uninformative too.
  • vkazanov 2y ago
    Oh don't you worry, most of them are like that almost everywhere.
  • friendzis 2y ago
    There is a box to tick to keep tenure. Academics tick that box. System behaves as designed. Situation normal: all fucked up.
  • pca006132 2y ago
    I sometimes just wonder, a lot of professors are bad at teaching because they don't have to be good at it. Is it the same for universities? It feels like reputation for universities are quite detached from the courses they have or teaching quality. Rankings focus a lot on quantitative measures, but teaching quality is hard to measure quantitatively. The output of universities, i.e. the quality of their students, depend on both the teaching quality and "IQ" of their students before admission, which is mostly a feedback loop because universities with good reputation get the best students... Optimizing for teaching quality also means that professors spend more time on teaching and less on research, which may reduce their research output and reduce the ranking, which has a more immediate effect on the reputation than teaching quality.
    • krallistic 2y ago
      Teaching is not really relevant in the hiring process of professors. I saw several committees for prof position and teaching is treated like a checkmark. You should done it and provide a small sample lecture (which you prepare much more than your average lecture) and don't have to suck at it. After this checkbox, the differentiating factors are about citations and how much grant money you can/could/do have... (Western Europe, maybe somewhere else it's different).
• kurthr 2y ago
  I'm shocked it's that low. I suppose, it's limited by the number and motivations of people who apply for postdocs, but the amount of soul crushing disappointment and borderline abuse of postdocs is legendary.
• laurent_du 2y ago
  Hard to believe that there is 6 available seats in academia for every 10 postdoc.
  • Ekaros 2y ago
    Lot of seats are basic researchers. Chasing after grant after grand or doing some work for someone else.
  • levocardia 2y ago
    There are always plenty of adjuncting positions and contract-lecturer gigs to go around.
• qrsjutsu 2y ago
  Had a friend once who wanted to do research in an urgently necessary direction. Didn't get the money or academic support. Couple years later she told me that happens a lot but one is so focused on their work and the illusion that "once I'm there ..." so strong, that one ignores the hard evidence and much debated proof, despite, well, one's own training.
  • numpy-thagoras 2y ago
    "Once I'm there..." captures it so well. That attitude and reasoning is the mechanism for this entire self-perpetuating pyramid scheme.
• mjfl 2y ago
  how many transfer into a tenure track position? There must be a large contribution from people becoming 'research scientists' who are not tenure track professors but remaining in academia, at a subservient position, permanently.
• noobermin 2y ago
  Academia is one of those realms where I just wish things would collapse. Working conditions are terrible for the educational level they expect, yet there are always more and more graduate students and post-docs to exploit, so the wheels keep turning. A naive perspective is a glut of experts is a good thing because a society with more experts could produce more innovations and development but because of the pecularities of academia, you instead get extreme competition and little to no innovation really. You do get a lot of following and hyping trends for grant money. I'm not sure what the solution is.
  • wordpad25 2y ago
    isn't competition good for innovation?
    • noobermin 2y ago
      No, only if you have a narrow definition of innovation. Producing something actually new and actionable isn't always aligned with doing something that gets citations.
    • purplethinking 2y ago
      Too much competition is bad for innovation since it leaves no room for exploration.
    • pca006132 2y ago
      It depends on incentives. From what I can see in CS, a lot of young researchers are focused on short-term projects, disconnected from actual problems, and spend lots of effort to package the result to increase the chance of getting a paper in top conferences/journals, because they need this for their career. They will be forced to leave academia if they don't have enough results in time, from what I know. And even for established researchers, they have to do something similar, so their students can have enough results. And they need to try really hard to get funding, because institutions want researchers that can get lots of funding, so institutions can get money from that. This is probably not the complete story, and probably a bit too pessimistic, but I think this is true...
• jillesvangurp 2y ago
  Not surprising. I quit after about a year. I could have stayed on but I realized that it just wasn't right for me. By then I had figured out that most research is done by post docs and phd students and it doesn't pay very well. Not that I cared about the money but I started thinking about what is next and did not like the perspective. Professors are basically there to manage the process and haggle for funding. They tend to not be very hands-on with research for the simple reason that that's not their main job. They mostly delegate that to people in their team. And you can only become a professor by doing post docs, landing some tenured position and then maybe they'll make you a professor somewhere. It's a long, uncertain process and the failure modes are basically ending up with a teaching position or being otherwise stuck in some faculty mostly not doing research. Nothing wrong with that. But not what I was after. And a lot of teachers in university are basically people that dropped out of the process somehow. Anyway, the whole management thing had no appeal to me: I did not want to be a manager managing other people doing all the fun stuff (research) while basically dealing with a lot of bureaucratic shit. Not my idea of fun, at least. So, I left. It was the only logical thing to do. I worked for Nokia Research for a while after that. But the career paths there weren't a whole lot different there. And the whole thing started imploding a bit after the iphone launch. These days I do startups and a bit of consulting. Mostly as a CTO, and I'm very hands on which is just how I like it. Inevitably, there's a bit of management involved as well. But I like what I do.
  • gunian 2y ago
    sometimes I read posts like this and am awed. it feels like something out of a book to me never had a chance to go to college, no family, no friends, no social skills, mostly dumb except for basic computer skills my life except for like 1-2 years has been fighting to survive in horribly abusive situations currently unable to work with my own SSN being messed with by a bunch of human traffickers but I love computers my dream in life is to learn about them and built an integrated app kind of like the M1 but for software and I probably will die or be killed way before that happens but its cool to see there are people way smarter that care about building as much out there and computers will get better
  • universa1 2y ago
    Hmm this doesn't sound like what I experienced a professor doing... But this probably depends on the location and the discipline... Or well at least here in Germany you can more or less pick what you want to do: more being a people / project manager or more own research, or a mix of that... The uncertainty/low chances of getting a tenured position are not different though... And though it might suck, this is something you know, at the latest, after your PhD.
• buyucu 2y ago
  I expected this number to be higher. I guess more leave between postdoc and phd.
• michaelt 2y ago
  According to https://data.aaup.org/academic-workforce/ https://data.aaup.org/academic-workforce/ there are 270,000 tenured professors in the United States. Assuming a tenured professor holds that position from age 35 to age 65, that's 9000 tenured positions to be filled per year. According to https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2023 https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2023 there are 57,000 research doctorates granted per year. So 84% of people granted PhDs don't make it in academia.
  • jojobas 2y ago
    Many of them never wanted to be in academia in the first place, or at least shouldn't have wanted it. If you're in a class full of people who want to teach this same class, you might be questioning why you're there.
  • red_admiral 2y ago
    Yes, I expected the 40% to be much higher too. I guess once you go from PhD to postdoc it changes a bit, but again just looking at the numbers the pipeline gets a lot narrower at each transition.
  • mold_aid 2y ago
    Hi - please don't assume that retirements become job postings. Tenure lines have to be granted in many cases; if a dean is told by the provost to trim, then tenure lines are not granted after a retirement. My department has not matched its attrition rate for some time now.
    • xhkkffbf 2y ago
      I thought the 40% number seemed lower than my experiences suggest. But this is a solid point that suggests that even 84% is too low. I guess it could be as high as 90%.
  • geysersam 2y ago
    Sounds like a lot more than I'd expect, especially considering ~50% of those 57000 doctorates probably don't even want to continue in academia. It's starting to look like the odds of landing a tenured position are quite good.
• euroderf 2y ago
  Elite overproduction is a thing, you know. It might be a feature but it's also a bug.
• rednafi 2y ago
  My spouse is a molecular biologist pursuing her PhD in RNA therapy. She works ~2x longer and 10x harder than I do, with only a third of the yield. You can only sustain that for so long. She's in academia solely because she's good at it. However, there are a few things I've observed from the sidelines: - PIs can make your life absolutely miserable for no reason, and it's difficult to switch labs if you're otherwise making good progress. - The pay is poor, and professors often joke about how cheap PhD students and postdocs are. - A significant amount of time is wasted on internal politics, such as deciding whose name appears on a paper and in what order. - Pursuing irrelevant papers just to secure tenure is common. - Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit. - PIs often treat their subordinates like high school students, expecting them to work weekends for "research" and forgo vacations. - It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do. It's exhausting, and there are better ways to make a living. She plans to leave academia as soon as possible.
  • probably_wrong 2y ago
    With the exception of poor pay, I experienced all of those things while working as a software dev for a major company. And with the exception of irrelevant papers, a friend of mine went through all of those at a startup she joined after her PhD. I am doing a postdoc now - the pay sucks (still good compared to non-tech salaries) but I like what I do, I can choose my own tools, and I'm not longer contractually obligated to put my name in papers I don't like. The instability of the postdoc life sucks if and when you want to have a family, but it can also be very rewarding.
    • rednafi 2y ago
      > With the exception of poor pay, I experienced all of those things while working as a software dev for a major company. Same here. I've worked at grindy startups that made me want to leave the profession altogether—everything from gaslighting by small shop CEOs to firing threats, and even firing a colleague just to show "who's in charge." But switching companies is always an option, as is switching domains. I did that multiple times without much trouble. > The instability of the postdoc life sucks if and when you want to have a family. I thought stability was one of the reasons people choose academia. By stability, I mean a supervisor or program that guarantees a steady influx of cash for a certain period of time. Yeah, but it comes down to what gives you fulfillment. For me, I need challenging work with a reward in pay that matches the effort and academia doesn't seem to fit that curve.
• oefrha 2y ago
  I’m surprised the number is as low as 40%. You can’t help but question your existence when you, always the top of your class growing up and graduated college with distinctions, are making $50k a year (that was the postdoc salary at my very prestigious department at Princeton less than a decade ago) at a ripe old age of almost 30 and eyeing yet another term of postdoc.
• nurettin 2y ago
  > More than 40% of postdoctoral researchers leave academia Why is that construed as a negative? Isn't it great that they are finding jobs and applying their disciplines in the industry?
• puppycodes 2y ago
  what does it mean to "leave" acadamia? Like it somehow goes away if your not part of an institution?
  • esafak 2y ago
    You cut your ties with it. You go away, it stays.
    • puppycodes 2y ago
      my point is "it"s definition is harmful and exclusionary. "it" could be broader, more decentralized and we should consider acadamia as well beyond funded institions.
• TypingOutBugs 2y ago
  Hard work, poor pay, known perverse incentives, and awareness of the probably replication crisis in your field == burnout and tears. Half my friends are postdocs or associate professors (including my wife) at top universities and none of them are happy with how it’s going. Most apply for jobs every now and then to imagine escaping. And they’re the ones doing well in the system!
• ninalanyon 2y ago
  Is this actually a problem for society as a whole? Surely a lot of such people would be valuable in industry.
  • verzali 2y ago
    I think it is in a way, since postdocs are often bad preparation for industry. Postdocs usually learn skills that are useful in academia, not the skills that are useful in industry. And the knowledge they focus on is often hyperspecialised, and not necessarily valuable in industry (though that does vary by field). Essentially, postdocs can be a good way to waste the most valuable years of highly intelligent people...
    • voxl 2y ago
      Comments like these make me want to vomit with how out of touch industry people are. No, fiddling with AWS or writing some simple Go code is not beyond the capabilities of a postdoc... You really are not doing anything that complicated. Switch the roles and you would be completely useless.
      • jjk166 2y ago
        Glad to see self awareness is instilled by the academic process.
      • verzali 2y ago
        Hmm, I'm not a coder. In my field you do need some specialised knowledge you generally get through experience. And then you have the soft skills, like being able to work in a team, being able to run projects, understanding business needs vs doing what's technically interesting, etc. Postdocs do have some of those skills, but there is not much you get through a postdoc specifically vs doing a PhD or spending 7-10 years in an industry role. And, to be honest, your attitude is part of the problem - I sure wouldn't hire someone who will look down on the job or think they are too smart to do it, and neither should someone with 10 years experience be happy getting a job writing simple AWS code. The point I'm trying to make is more about the opportunity cost, not the skills you get out at the end.
• dotdi 2y ago
  More anecdotal evidence: while writing my Master's thesis it became clear that my advisor (the dept. head) was quite interested in the subject matter, and repeatedly asked me to shelve it, do a quick-and-dirty thesis to graduate and return to working on my original draft during a PhD. I was very open to the idea, since I was in love with research ever since childhood. We sat down and talked about what this meant in particular, the workload, compensation, options after graduating from the PhD program. It broke my heart, but I had to turn him down. It felt like everybody who wanted to have a shot at having a career in academia needed to put an insane (read: literally destructive) amount of effort into it, all while accepting that it was extremely easy to get stuck for good. There is extreme pressure on postdocs to produce results, with institutions and labs becoming very cautious about working with people in their 2nd or 3rd postdocs if they hadn't published in high-impact journals until then. Also, good luck finding any sort of tenured positions, with more and more universities switching to freelance "collaborators". I was not going to spend 80 hours a week investing in something where all odds are stacked against me. I was not going to put years of my life into a thing that can go 'poof' just because your stars didn't align, or because the faculty decided instead of hiring you on a professorship track, they would rather extort some more money and "let the contracts expire" when it was no longer convenient to have you there.
• nothacking_ 2y ago
  As they should. More often then not, going into academia means horrible working conditions and horrible pay... and there's job satisfaction when your instead of doing things you like or ones enrich society, you spend most of your time in a never ending fight for grant money. Leaving is completely logical for anyone that wants to actually do impactful research, or wants to make a living wage, and wants sane hours and sane management.
• raincom 2y ago
  That's why it is called "postdoctoral treadmill" by an old physics professor: https://yangxiao.cs.ua.edu/Don't%20Become%20a%20Scientist!.htm https://yangxiao.cs.ua.edu/Don't%20Become%20a%20Scientist!.h...
• neonate 2y ago
  https://archive.ph/E5aqe https://archive.ph/E5aqe
• karaterobot 2y ago
  This is only surprising if you expect that every postdoc should stay in academia, or would want to. Being in academia is not the only way to do research, and is not a prerequisite to using your degree. The private sector is a thing, and postdocs leaving academia can do perfectly good work in their field while actually making a grown up salary.
  • absolutelastone 2y ago
    These are good arguments about phd's not going into academia. But a postdoc at a university is an underpaid training position for the most part. Not a worthwhile sacrifice if you want to work in the private sector in my field. Maybe it's more important for industry jobs in biology or something. Personally I think it's a warped system that takes advantage of cheap labor from developing countries. And it feeds itself. The more temporary research staff professors can hire, the less permanent research staff universities need.
    • godelski 2y ago
      > But a postdoc at a university is an underpaid training position for the most part. That's not really true or fair. You're talking about a person who's done likely 4 years of undergraduate and between 4 and 8 (median 5?) years of graduate studies and gained a Ph.D. This person is without a doubt "an expert" in their field. Does that person still need training? Sure. But who doesn't? You're also talking about someone who is probably in their early to mid 30's. Eventually people want to start having a life. And you're expecting them to make pennies? I'm not joking. Here's a list of CS Post Doc stipends[0]. Go to Berkeley or Stanford and make $66k-$80k? I've gotten more money as a PhD Intern! You're going to get more than double that in industry before we talk about RSUs. I think this is something we need to take quite seriously here. There aren't really good reasons for people to choose this path, especially considering how disruptive it is to your life (have fun moving again in a few years :). Maybe we can hope that those who go are just really dedicated to research and following their passions. So dedicated that they are willing to put off normal human things like starting a family, maintaining relationships[1], or even just building one's net worth (or paying off student debt). Some people want to become a professor[2] so will do that. But the big thing I see is that there's nothing to attract the best people. (We can extend this to even just professorships[3]). So who are becoming the postdocs and professors? Who are becoming the people that educate the next wave of people? If you are at the top, you likely aren't going the professor route, you're likely going to industry where you'll likely get 2x-3x the pay AND more freedom in your research. Even if you're pretty mid you can get 2x-3x the pay in industry with an honestly less stressful life (but you may not be doing research or likely have more restriction of what research you can pursue). This, seems pretty disastrous. At best, unstable. There's not a lot of professor spots but I think we need to have some incentive system such that people at the top are encouraged to carry on their research for the public as well as educate future researchers. As a business you want to be greedy and capture top talent, but that's also because you should be thinking much shorter term. At social levels, we have to think generations. TLDR: So are we confident we are getting "cream of the crop" (even if shared with industry) in academic positions? Are we sure that's even true at highly prestigious institutions? I think the answer is "no", we should not be confident in that outcome. [0] https://vspa.berkeley.edu/faculty-staff/compensation/postdoc-compensation https://vspa.berkeley.edu/faculty-staff/compensation/postdoc... [1] Good chance you met your partner while doing a PhD and yay now you both need to find post docs but they are competitive and so good luck finding one in the same place? Hope you like long distance relationships or are willing to let one partner make a bigger sacrifice. [2] Which weird thing that we train someone to become an expert researcher and then as a professor we give them such high and diverse workloads that they will often have little time for research and instead will more be managers. The research skill degrades with time and only keeping up at a high level is not sufficient. [3] In CS a post doc is also often a way to elevate your status. Like you got your PhD from a lower tier university and so doing a Post Doc at a much higher tier can make you employable at a more prestigious university. Because prestige still matters a lot, especially since it is tightly coupled with things like equipment access. [side note]: I think with the competitiveness that it is a bit odd we still have these strong notions of prestige. Just to put things in perspective, if every graduating PhD at the number 1 school, they likely graduate enough people that you could fill all available faculty positions available. Given how prestige matters, it should be clear how high prestige graduates permeate into lower prestige positions. More clear when you start to consider things like how many top universities are in not the greatest living locations. https://drafty.cs.brown.edu/csopenrankings/placement-rank.html https://drafty.cs.brown.edu/csopenrankings/placement-rank.ht... https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/ https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/
• SubiculumCode 2y ago
  The whole empire of academia is broken, and although I have went through the whole things, and now in an assistant professor type position, it 1) took too long, 2) paid too little as a post-doc, and still pays too little for my level of expertise, 3) the grant process is a burden that doesn't enhance productivity; it doesn't leverage my expertise; it bogs me down and keeps me from using the scientific skills I've built in order to play grantsmanship to beg for money. Multiple tedious submissions and revisions. 4) professors increasingly just become managers, the least valuable activity of their training set.
• azhenley 2y ago
  How many come back? I stayed in my tenure-track position for 3.5 years, left for industry for 2.5 years, and am now back in academia :)
  • pknomad 2y ago
    Did you ever get asked why you came back to the academic world in the interviews? I'm curious how PhDs who've been in the industry are viewed from academia.
    • azhenley 2y ago
      Oh yes. But given that I am in a software engineering department, they really value industry experience. I actually published way more in industry than I did in academia!
      • pknomad 2y ago
        Little bit late to this reply... but how are self-funded candidates who have intent on going back to private sector (research, but still private sector) viewed by CS/SWE departments?
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• chollida1 2y ago
  Isn't this a good thing? We want to train highly skilled people and then unleash them in the private sector to create new companies or help push existing companies forward. I'm not sure what the right percentage would be for postdocs leaving academia, but i would have assumed it was around 90% if you made me guess. That just seems healthy.
  • openrisk 2y ago
    > We want to train highly skilled people After how many postdocs is one "highly skilled"? Postdocs are foremost a failure of the academic job market (supply of eager researchers much larger than available academic positions) that over time has become some sort of ingrained filtering mechanism.
    • jltsiren 2y ago
      There are different kinds of postdoc positions. Fellowships are generally the good ones. You get to explore research directions under the guidance of a more experienced researcher. Because you have independent funding, your mentor is not your boss, and you are relatively free to choose what to work on and how. On the other end of the spectrum, some postdocs are just people a PI has hired to work on a well-defined project. Either because the institute does not have more appropriate job titles or because postdocs are cheaper than professional researchers. These are fundamentally ordinary jobs, and like any job, they can be good or bad.
  • aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > We want to train highly skilled people and then unleash them in the private sector to create new companies or help push existing companies forward. Many of these people will become very frustrated in the private sector because they will very commonly talk to a brick wall with their ideas in the private sector. The private sector is commonly not the kind of environment where highly intelligent, novel, bright ideas are rewarded.
  • fastasucan 2y ago
    I think you are conflating postdoctor with degrees like masters and bachelors, surely?
• dekhn 2y ago
  my postdoc advisor (a tenured professor at berkeley) made us clean the air vents in the office by standing on a tall ladder with a vacuum as well as clean the floors. I didn't leave academia, but I did leave that lab. That's some sort of power-play I have no time for.
  • dcreater 2y ago
    Please name and shame. This is atrocious. Considering the fact that most graduate students/postdocs are immigrants on specific visas, this is tantamount to fraud.
  • selimthegrim 2y ago
    This sounds like visiting undergrad research at MIT where the grad students’ idea of a joke was to have me clean the microwave.
• hammock 2y ago
  Does the 40% include parents leaving the workforce to raise their children?
• __lbracket__ 2y ago
  [dead]
• NotAnOtter 2y ago
  There is no longer any incentive to stay in academia. Professorships are rare and not as lucrative as they once were. Staying in academia means living like a 19 yearold student well into your 40's.
• adamc 2y ago
  Yep. I left without even really trying to make it work. Academia has its good points, but the path to success is very grind-y.
  • moffkalast 2y ago
    I think it might be still easier to get to assistant professor than down a single tech tree in War Thunder.
• marcandre 2y ago
  Of course. The number of professors in academia remains more or less constant. So each university professor should have, over the course of all their career, a single student that will end up in academia. All the other students have to quit at some point.
• sega_sai 2y ago
  There are a lot of issues in academia, but that number (40%) is not one of them. Not everyone is suited for an academic job, and doing the PhD is not enough to understand what it is to do independent research/find your niche what you are good at/enjoy. I think in many universities now there are career development programs that help people transition to industry. Also now it is more openly discussed that many people will not get an permanent position, so postdocs are more prepared and that is healthy.
• ocschwar 2y ago
  Good! Academia is done growing. For every full professor, there will be ONE spot for a full professor when he retires. That's a lot of grad students and postdocs who need to find something else to do with their education. Most postdoc positions should not even exist.
• NotYourLawyer 2y ago
  That’s way too low. What are the other 60% thinking?
• tedk-42 2y ago
  I'd argue it's likely that there are _too many_ postdocs pursuing it in the first place.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• tiffanyh 2y ago
  I'm surprised to hear that 60% stay in academia.
• eviks 2y ago
  Likely not enough to incentivize reform?
• stevage 2y ago
  The headline figure is not at all surprising. Academia is by design a pyramid, from undergrad through to tenured professor.
• nothercastle 2y ago
  Why are 60% staying is the real question it’s almost always the sub optimal choice
• eleveriven 2y ago
  It might be a bit off-topic, but my friend, after receiving her PhD from the University of Leeds in England, decided to completely abandon the academic path and became an artist. And when asked why that happened, she can't give a clear answer...
• yhavr 2y ago
  Obviously. And much more leave on the previous stages. Because academic science doesn't have scientific proof of existance. People shouldn't stay there, because there are no anthro-/psycho-/socio-/etc- reasoning that this way of organising people to seek new knowledge actually works, and it's efficient in any way.
• niemandhier 2y ago
  I am in the academic circus since 20 years, in my opinion everything more than a masters degree is an expression of ones interests and a way of life: Its great and allows you to do things that only a few people on the planet are allowed to do and once you drop out you just get a normal job. It takes a few years to bridge the income gap between you and the people that went towards an industry career immediately, but you got to climb around in the large hadron collector when it was not running and have lots of stories about strange British professors.