4 ms·

My understanding is that scientific research has a dual problem, where the number of students needed to carry out existing professors' research is much larger t

by msteffen 10mo ago

My understanding is that scientific research has a dual problem, where the number of students needed to carry out existing professors' research is much larger than the number of junior faculty positions generally available. The result being that most trained PhDs must leave (US) academia because there are no jobs for them. In fact, I've heard scientists complain that universities owe it to students to provide more help finding a job in industry after they graduate. Given all that, where are professors supposed to find and hire students who don't want to stay in academia themselves? I think a lot of these students wind up being aspiring immigrants, and I'm not surprised that a lot of them would also have a hard time finding a place for themselves after graduating and that many of them would leave. Also, the abstract seems to argue that that US still benefits greatly from this arrangement: "though the US share of global patent citations to graduates' science drops from 70% to 50% after migrating, it remains five times larger than the destination country share."

materials4028 10mo ago
> much larger than the number of junior faculty positions generally available Expanding on this a bit, insight credited to bonoboTP: in a steady state the number of junior faculty positions will only open up at the same rate as current faculty retires. But each faculty member is expected to train dozens of students that are all in principle qualified for such jobs. Therefore, the vast majority, let's say 95%, of PhD graduates have to take industry jobs, there is no way around it. But this does not seem to be the goal of the 95%, hence the incredibly tight job market. Returning to their home country for a faculty job acts as another release valve, but sooner or later those will be filled as well, except in countries in the rapidly expanding phase in terms of university education. The tenure system is incredibly broken as a result. Ideally, I think there needs to be more non-faculty careers available for PhD graduates either outside or inside academia. After all, there is clearly some value in the work a PhD student does, otherwise they would not be paid. Perhaps we can have public or semi-public research institutions that hire these scientists for actual development. Most likely this will require an upstream incentive change so that grants are awarded to these newly minted organizations. Universities charge a large overhead in part to cover the "tuition" for the PhD students, which is really a meaningless number since it's taken out of the same check they give you the remainder of. If we just strip out this part and give most of it to the scientist, economically it should be a viable salary.
- analog31 10mo ago
  When I was a physics grad student ~35 years go, this was called "the birth control problem. I had every intention of going into industry. I described it to my dad who got his PhD in the 1950s and he said it was the same back then. But there's a perennial "this time it will be different."
  - PaulHoule 10mo ago
    It wasn't the same in the 1950s. When it became really clear to me how dire the long term job situation was when I getting my PhD in the 1990s I started combing through issues of Physics Today and noticed that the field and academia as a whole was explosively expanding from 1920-1968 or so and there was a sudden crisis in the late 1960s, with an echo in the late 1970s and also when I was in in the late 1990s. (Physics Today said I had 2% odds of getting a permanent job even coming from a top school) I had one day when I'd posted a Java applet to the web that got 100,000 impressions and getting so much attention for that and so little attention for papers that took me a year to write made me resolve to tell my thesis advisor that I was going to quit. Before I could tell him, he told me he had just a year of funding for me and I thought.. I could tough it out for a year. People were shocked when I did a postdoc when most of my cohort were going straight to finance. My mental health went downhill in Germany and I stomped away, in retrospect I was the only native English speaker at the institute and I could have found a place for myself for some time had I taken on the task of proofreading papers and I can easily imagine I could have made it in academia but heck, life on a horse farm doing many sorts of software development has been a blast.
    - analog31 10mo ago
      One big disruption in the job market was that mandatory age-based retirement was outlawed. This created a span of several years when there were virtually no retirements. I should have mentioned that my dad's degree was in chemistry, and it might have been a different vibe. But the production of PhDs at a rate faster than they could be absorbed by academic hiring was a thing. My dad (and mom, she got her master's in chemistry) went into industry too, so maybe I was lucky to have good role models.
MostlyStable 10mo ago
If the culture normalized such that a much larger proportion of research was conducted by permanent, non-faculty, research employees, this would both reduce the need for so many students and increase the jobs available for students, and create a new employment niche with a different balance of teaching/administration/research. It would basically be turning "post doc" into an actual career rather than a stop over. This would be better for everyone involved, at the admitted cost of being quite a bit more expensive. My guess is that the market would naturally converge on this equilibrium if the information of job placement rates on a per-program (or even per lab/advisor) were more readily available.
- j7ake 10mo ago
  Your suggestion would have fewer fresh eyes to look at the problem. If the scientific enterprise were just about churning out widgets, then yes it’s better to have permanent staff. But having a strong training pipeline for the globe is a huge plus for US prestige, and the top people are still offered jobs as faculty or industry within the country, so it still a net gain for USA. But it’s brutally competitive for the individual scientists
  - MostlyStable 10mo ago
    While I'm more skeptical than you are of the value of a string of new students coming through as opposed to just keeping the very best students, I'm also not suggesting we mandate this change or force it. I'm suggesting that we give people more information to make better informed decisions. If students decide that they are comfortable with a sub 20% job placement rate, then great, nothing needs to change. If they aren't satisfied with that, and we decide that actually they were performing a valuable service, then it behoovs society to pay them enough that they becoming willing to make that gamble again. The current information assymetry is exploitative. One of two things would happen under my proposed system: either nothing would change because students think they are getting a good deal as is or students don't think the deal is worth it which means that the current system only works because students are having the reality of the job market hidden from them.
Onavo 10mo ago
There's that and the fact that a lot of people who attain graduate degrees are immigrants who do so for the sake of immigration. The whole system essentially self selects for cheap labor and exploitation. If the feds put a high salary requirement on it like the E or O series visas, perhaps the system might change. The scientific minds of India, China, and Russia don't come to the US and slave away in the lab purely out of passion for advancing science, they do so because it's a path towards the green card. The PIs and laboratory heads all know damn well how the system works, they are no better than those bosses of H1B sweatshops, except perhaps they do their exploitation from ivy filled ivory towers rather than in Patagonia vests.
- aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
  > The PIs and laboratory heads all know damn well how the system works, they are no better than those bosses of H1B sweatshops, except perhaps they do their exploitation from ivy filled ivory towers rather than in Patagonia vests. In my observation there do exist quite some people among the PIs and laboratory heads who are quite highly idealistic for research, but have no other option than playing this rigged game of academia.
epolanski 10mo ago
Academia is a pyramid, like most organizations, eventually most PhDs cannot get a full time position. The fact that many PhDs leave is..normal..if you get few high impact publications you can find full time positions outside US, even as an associate professor and not just a researcher. And the reason why many go to universities around the world for PhDs is not because they want to stay in that place necessarily but because you're more likely to fund your PhD research and get a high impact publication.
cafebeen 10mo ago
To a large extent, I think this could be solved by labs having more long-term permanent research staff (technicians, data analysts, scientists) and reducing the number of PhD students. Many students would gladly stay on in that position instead of leaving, so it increases job opportunities. It would also improve the quality of the science because the permanent staff would have more historical knowledge, in contrast to the current situation where students constantly rotate in and out with somewhat messy hand-offs. The students could also then focus more on scholarly work, planning and overseeing research execution with the team. The problem is that the incentives are aligned to allocate students to doing all lab tasks, not long term staff. I think we could change this through changes to the requirements and structure of science funding mechanisms however, since ultimately that's the source of the incentives.
godelski 10mo ago
> where the number of students needed to carry out existing professors' research is much larger than the number of junior faculty positions generally available. This is definitely true, there are more physics PhDs graduating from the top 2 schools than there are total faculty positions listed each year. BUT you are missing that there is still demand for positions out in industry as well as government labs. But there's also a decline in that right now as we're going through a time of encouraging more engineering and less research. In reality there's a pipeline of research. If you haven't been introduced to it, I like to point to NASA's TRL (Technology Readiness Level) chart[0]. The pipeline is from very basic research to proven systems. Traditionally academia and government labs do the majority of work in the low TRL while industry research handles mid level (stuff that isn't quite ready for production). The reason for this is due to the higher rate of failure of low level research and so shifts risks away from industry. Not to mention that industry has different incentives and is going to be more narrowly focused. Academia and gov labs can research more long term projects that will have large revenue growths but may take decades to get those returns. I mean how much do we get from the invention of calculus? Or the creation of WWW? We'd also get far less growth and profits were these not more distributed. So while yes, getting a professorship is a challenge and highly competitive, it is far from the only path for these graduates. We can also do a lot to increase (or decrease) their options by increasing (or decreasing) funding for science. There's a lot of science that happens outside academic labs and they still depend on PhD graduates to be able to do most of that work. If you want these people to have jobs, fund more low level research[1] > I've heard scientists complain that universities owe it to students to provide more help finding a job in industry after they graduate. A big reason for this is that networking is still a big issue. I can tell you as someone who does not have a good relationship with my former advisor that this has made job hunting a much harder experience compared to other peers. While my credentials are better than some of those people they come in through a side door (often skipping things like LeetCode challenges) and instead I have to go through the standard applicant pool. I don't think they don't deserve those jobs (most of them do), but just pointing out that networking is still a critical part of hiring. I mean even one simple part is that when applying you might not even know what a group is doing and if that's what you want to do. Solicitations are often vague. Even if there were no advantage to the hiring process networking still provides a huge advantage to the filtering process. I mean even putting the personal experience to the side, don't we want to make the most use of the resources we have? Don't we want to get graduates connected to labs/work places where they will be most effective? This is still a surprisingly complex problem to resolve and even limiting the hiring problem to PhDs (where there's far less noise than general hiring) it is still a complicated problem. [0] https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/somd/space-communications-navigation-program/technology-readiness-levels/ https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/somd/space-communications-... [1] But I'd also say that we might be encouraging too many people to do PhDs. Doing a PhD "for a job" is a bit odd. A masters is better intended for that. But a PhD is more directed towards doing research work. That said, in the worst case a PhD says "this person can work on ill-defined tasks and has the diligence to see them through." Regardless of the industry, that is a pretty useful skill.
khannn 10mo ago
I was accepted into a PhD CS program despite applying for a masters. The advisor had something on his door about the limited number of slots open for people who graduate from grad school. Tried to discourage me from the program. Quit after two semesters.

materials4028 10mo ago

> much larger than the number of junior faculty positions generally available Expanding on this a bit, insight credited to bonoboTP: in a steady state the number of junior faculty positions will only open up at the same rate as current faculty retires. But each faculty member is expected to train dozens of students that are all in principle qualified for such jobs. Therefore, the vast majority, let's say 95%, of PhD graduates have to take industry jobs, there is no way around it. But this does not seem to be the goal of the 95%, hence the incredibly tight job market. Returning to their home country for a faculty job acts as another release valve, but sooner or later those will be filled as well, except in countries in the rapidly expanding phase in terms of university education. The tenure system is incredibly broken as a result. Ideally, I think there needs to be more non-faculty careers available for PhD graduates either outside or inside academia. After all, there is clearly some value in the work a PhD student does, otherwise they would not be paid. Perhaps we can have public or semi-public research institutions that hire these scientists for actual development. Most likely this will require an upstream incentive change so that grants are awarded to these newly minted organizations. Universities charge a large overhead in part to cover the "tuition" for the PhD students, which is really a meaningless number since it's taken out of the same check they give you the remainder of. If we just strip out this part and give most of it to the scientist, economically it should be a viable salary.

analog31 10mo ago
When I was a physics grad student ~35 years go, this was called "the birth control problem. I had every intention of going into industry. I described it to my dad who got his PhD in the 1950s and he said it was the same back then. But there's a perennial "this time it will be different."
- PaulHoule 10mo ago
  It wasn't the same in the 1950s. When it became really clear to me how dire the long term job situation was when I getting my PhD in the 1990s I started combing through issues of Physics Today and noticed that the field and academia as a whole was explosively expanding from 1920-1968 or so and there was a sudden crisis in the late 1960s, with an echo in the late 1970s and also when I was in in the late 1990s. (Physics Today said I had 2% odds of getting a permanent job even coming from a top school) I had one day when I'd posted a Java applet to the web that got 100,000 impressions and getting so much attention for that and so little attention for papers that took me a year to write made me resolve to tell my thesis advisor that I was going to quit. Before I could tell him, he told me he had just a year of funding for me and I thought.. I could tough it out for a year. People were shocked when I did a postdoc when most of my cohort were going straight to finance. My mental health went downhill in Germany and I stomped away, in retrospect I was the only native English speaker at the institute and I could have found a place for myself for some time had I taken on the task of proofreading papers and I can easily imagine I could have made it in academia but heck, life on a horse farm doing many sorts of software development has been a blast.
  - analog31 10mo ago
    One big disruption in the job market was that mandatory age-based retirement was outlawed. This created a span of several years when there were virtually no retirements. I should have mentioned that my dad's degree was in chemistry, and it might have been a different vibe. But the production of PhDs at a rate faster than they could be absorbed by academic hiring was a thing. My dad (and mom, she got her master's in chemistry) went into industry too, so maybe I was lucky to have good role models.

MostlyStable 10mo ago

If the culture normalized such that a much larger proportion of research was conducted by permanent, non-faculty, research employees, this would both reduce the need for so many students and increase the jobs available for students, and create a new employment niche with a different balance of teaching/administration/research. It would basically be turning "post doc" into an actual career rather than a stop over. This would be better for everyone involved, at the admitted cost of being quite a bit more expensive. My guess is that the market would naturally converge on this equilibrium if the information of job placement rates on a per-program (or even per lab/advisor) were more readily available.

j7ake 10mo ago
Your suggestion would have fewer fresh eyes to look at the problem. If the scientific enterprise were just about churning out widgets, then yes it’s better to have permanent staff. But having a strong training pipeline for the globe is a huge plus for US prestige, and the top people are still offered jobs as faculty or industry within the country, so it still a net gain for USA. But it’s brutally competitive for the individual scientists
- MostlyStable 10mo ago
  While I'm more skeptical than you are of the value of a string of new students coming through as opposed to just keeping the very best students, I'm also not suggesting we mandate this change or force it. I'm suggesting that we give people more information to make better informed decisions. If students decide that they are comfortable with a sub 20% job placement rate, then great, nothing needs to change. If they aren't satisfied with that, and we decide that actually they were performing a valuable service, then it behoovs society to pay them enough that they becoming willing to make that gamble again. The current information assymetry is exploitative. One of two things would happen under my proposed system: either nothing would change because students think they are getting a good deal as is or students don't think the deal is worth it which means that the current system only works because students are having the reality of the job market hidden from them.

Onavo 10mo ago

There's that and the fact that a lot of people who attain graduate degrees are immigrants who do so for the sake of immigration. The whole system essentially self selects for cheap labor and exploitation. If the feds put a high salary requirement on it like the E or O series visas, perhaps the system might change. The scientific minds of India, China, and Russia don't come to the US and slave away in the lab purely out of passion for advancing science, they do so because it's a path towards the green card. The PIs and laboratory heads all know damn well how the system works, they are no better than those bosses of H1B sweatshops, except perhaps they do their exploitation from ivy filled ivory towers rather than in Patagonia vests.

aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
> The PIs and laboratory heads all know damn well how the system works, they are no better than those bosses of H1B sweatshops, except perhaps they do their exploitation from ivy filled ivory towers rather than in Patagonia vests. In my observation there do exist quite some people among the PIs and laboratory heads who are quite highly idealistic for research, but have no other option than playing this rigged game of academia.

epolanski 10mo ago

Academia is a pyramid, like most organizations, eventually most PhDs cannot get a full time position. The fact that many PhDs leave is..normal..if you get few high impact publications you can find full time positions outside US, even as an associate professor and not just a researcher. And the reason why many go to universities around the world for PhDs is not because they want to stay in that place necessarily but because you're more likely to fund your PhD research and get a high impact publication.

cafebeen 10mo ago

To a large extent, I think this could be solved by labs having more long-term permanent research staff (technicians, data analysts, scientists) and reducing the number of PhD students. Many students would gladly stay on in that position instead of leaving, so it increases job opportunities. It would also improve the quality of the science because the permanent staff would have more historical knowledge, in contrast to the current situation where students constantly rotate in and out with somewhat messy hand-offs. The students could also then focus more on scholarly work, planning and overseeing research execution with the team. The problem is that the incentives are aligned to allocate students to doing all lab tasks, not long term staff. I think we could change this through changes to the requirements and structure of science funding mechanisms however, since ultimately that's the source of the incentives.

godelski 10mo ago

> where the number of students needed to carry out existing professors' research is much larger than the number of junior faculty positions generally available. This is definitely true, there are more physics PhDs graduating from the top 2 schools than there are total faculty positions listed each year. BUT you are missing that there is still demand for positions out in industry as well as government labs. But there's also a decline in that right now as we're going through a time of encouraging more engineering and less research. In reality there's a pipeline of research. If you haven't been introduced to it, I like to point to NASA's TRL (Technology Readiness Level) chart[0]. The pipeline is from very basic research to proven systems. Traditionally academia and government labs do the majority of work in the low TRL while industry research handles mid level (stuff that isn't quite ready for production). The reason for this is due to the higher rate of failure of low level research and so shifts risks away from industry. Not to mention that industry has different incentives and is going to be more narrowly focused. Academia and gov labs can research more long term projects that will have large revenue growths but may take decades to get those returns. I mean how much do we get from the invention of calculus? Or the creation of WWW? We'd also get far less growth and profits were these not more distributed. So while yes, getting a professorship is a challenge and highly competitive, it is far from the only path for these graduates. We can also do a lot to increase (or decrease) their options by increasing (or decreasing) funding for science. There's a lot of science that happens outside academic labs and they still depend on PhD graduates to be able to do most of that work. If you want these people to have jobs, fund more low level research[1] > I've heard scientists complain that universities owe it to students to provide more help finding a job in industry after they graduate. A big reason for this is that networking is still a big issue. I can tell you as someone who does not have a good relationship with my former advisor that this has made job hunting a much harder experience compared to other peers. While my credentials are better than some of those people they come in through a side door (often skipping things like LeetCode challenges) and instead I have to go through the standard applicant pool. I don't think they don't deserve those jobs (most of them do), but just pointing out that networking is still a critical part of hiring. I mean even one simple part is that when applying you might not even know what a group is doing and if that's what you want to do. Solicitations are often vague. Even if there were no advantage to the hiring process networking still provides a huge advantage to the filtering process. I mean even putting the personal experience to the side, don't we want to make the most use of the resources we have? Don't we want to get graduates connected to labs/work places where they will be most effective? This is still a surprisingly complex problem to resolve and even limiting the hiring problem to PhDs (where there's far less noise than general hiring) it is still a complicated problem. [0] https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/somd/space-communications-navigation-program/technology-readiness-levels/ https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/somd/space-communications-... [1] But I'd also say that we might be encouraging too many people to do PhDs. Doing a PhD "for a job" is a bit odd. A masters is better intended for that. But a PhD is more directed towards doing research work. That said, in the worst case a PhD says "this person can work on ill-defined tasks and has the diligence to see them through." Regardless of the industry, that is a pretty useful skill.

khannn 10mo ago

I was accepted into a PhD CS program despite applying for a masters. The advisor had something on his door about the limited number of slots open for people who graduate from grad school. Tried to discourage me from the program. Quit after two semesters.