7 ms·

Besides the people in this thread bemoaning the state of research funding, international students, etc. (all of which are valid), a lot of people are becoming d

by jrflo 5mo ago

Besides the people in this thread bemoaning the state of research funding, international students, etc. (all of which are valid), a lot of people are becoming disillusioned with academia. Probably 80% of the recent PhD grads I know are looking to leave academia, despite the fact that they went into it to pursue a career in academia. The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market. MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union to try and combat the increasingly exploitative nature of academia. I can see how undergrads may look at how AI can do most of their homework assignments, and see how miserable grad students are, and decide that they don't want to continue down that path.

noosphr 5mo ago
That isn't new. My class from 10 year ago has zero people left in Academia.
paulmist 5mo ago
Can you give some context the grad student union and how it intends to fight the explotatiove nature of the academia?
- swiftcoder 5mo ago
  > how it intends to fight the explotatiove nature of the academia Not really "intends". They already have a negotiated contract with the university to ensure wages, healthcare, overtime protections, etc.
- SecretDreams 5mo ago
  The same ways the average Joe / Jane / Jon Bon Jovi are fighting their exploitation by big tech and the government. Silent weeping and lots of Reddit posts.
  - Retric 5mo ago
    Despite all the propaganda, unions work. In this case they got better pay and benefits.
    - SecretDreams 5mo ago
      I'm pro the concept of unions. They get a bad rep for 3 reasons: 1) They overly protect legitimately poor employees. This poisons the perception of unions. 2) Certain unions have too much power and probably shouldn't exist. E.g. police unions can grind a city to a halt if they don't consistently get a raise. Some teacher unions span a whole state/province - this gives them outsized power. I support these unions and want to see teachers paid well, but there's gotta be some balance. Likewise for government unions. 3) They are not always cognizant that their demands might genuinely just lead to the company folding or going overseas. I've seen unions shut a facility down that never opened up again. How to resolve? 1) Unions need to better balance their mandates and how they might extend to objectively not great union members. 2) We need an alternative to unions for government jobs. These workers need protections, but government jobs already afford a lot better protections than private sector in NA and shutting down a whole city or state over negotiating will always be an imbalance of power that then becomes an arms race (e.g. back to work legislation). I don't have an answer to this one, but I think it needs review. 3) I don't think this needs any intervention, but I think it's an insane thing to do.
      - 9x39 5mo ago
        What do you think about representative vs direct unions? Representative unions' incentive seems to be gathering the biggest bloc of members to represent, with their dues and bargaining power focused into a few union bodies for maximum leverage. This seems to be virtually all unions in the US. Direct unions - perhaps more accurately works councils? - seem to exist out there, but more in EU - just from what I can read, not firsthand. The huge unions enjoy more dues but the common denominator definitionally has to be substantially lower than smaller works councils to get the membership counts. Big general unions benefit unions themselves, while smaller unions specific to a company or protecting a professional standard benefit the skilled or specialized workers. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much of a marketplace in the US around that choice.
rfergie 5mo ago
> Probably 80% of the recent PhD grads I know are looking to leave academia, despite the fact that they went into it to pursue a career in academia Has this changed recently?
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- divbzero 5mo ago
  Not that I’m aware of? Most PhD grads not staying academia seems to be a long-running phenomenon. The number of permanent academic positions simply does not match up against the number of PhD grads.
  - intrasight 5mo ago
    Some disciplines are much better at managing the PhD admissions to match the job opportunities. Philosophy for example. But I don't think that's done with most science PhDs. Is that because of a culture of exploiting cheap labor?
    - buellerbueller 5mo ago
      Or perhaps because of the vast appetite for the benefits that accrue from scientific research, without wanting to truly fund science and education.
    - overfeed 5mo ago
      > Is that because of a culture of exploiting cheap labor? It's not just a culture; there is a lot of government and industry grant money funding (and enabling) the exploitation in the sciences. If applied philosophy is found to be productizable and/or beneficial to National Interest, the same exploitation would grow in Philosophy departments.
- spwa4 5mo ago
  Yes, in positivist sciences 20% intending to stay would be very high by historical standards. This paper https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/93208 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/93208 gives and estimate 87% PhD holders leave before becoming (tenured) faculty. And that's academia-wide. In the sciences more will be leaving. In exact sciences yet again more. Truth is most people leave before even getting a PhD, so it's even worse (and the advice is to think long and hard before doing a PhD, and certainly starting one because you can't find a job for a few months is sure to result in disappointment)
gNucleusAI 5mo ago
80% is high!
arenaninja 5mo ago
I was disillusioned with academia before I started. We had a candid talk during undergrad with a grad student who was a TA in our class and he laid it out for us: there wouldn't be enough jobs in the US for our small graduating class each year so if you needed a job to support yourself it would not make financial sense. I stopped then and there, maybe one or two classmates continued. That was almost 20 years ago. I'm thankful someone told us the truth and I made a career in a different field.
- gedy 5mo ago
  Yes similar, some time back I was in a grad program that I was really interested in and decent at, but by then married and child on the way. My Master's adviser was honest that it's better to just work somewhere vs go down PhD path as I was doing this for the job prospects. The folks who stayed with this were "family-funded" and well to do in their home countries. They basically were doing it for various reasons aside from "I need a job".
  - yardie 5mo ago
    While I was in uni, one of my friends was a young woman from a conservative East African family. She was pursuing multiple degrees and multiple majors. She got accepted to our school and it was the first taste of independence and freedom for her. Once she graduated she was culturally expected to get married and have children right away. Careers for women were not common. So as long as she was in school her family paid for it. We lost touch but I like to assume she is a multi-hyphenate post doc by now.
  - waterheater 5mo ago
    I knew a foreign student like that. He was a great guy and a friend, and we worked in the same building. One day, I told him that I purchased a condo to save money during the doctoral program (in my unique situation, my mortgage was less than basically all other grad student's rent, at least those I knew). A little while later, he told me that he also purchased a condo. I asked him about his mortgage rate, and he gave me a puzzled look. His well-off family paid >$250k, cash, for his condo. In general, pursing a doctoral degree requires a certain degree of financial stability. The successful doctoral students usually came from wealthy families, whereas the ones who struggled the most also struggled with finances. I believe it's essentially impossible to perform truly novel academic research when your personal finances are volatile. I also firmly believe that graduate student unionization is an elitist mentality that must be unilaterally opposed, as it is guaranteed to destroy any constructive academic culture.
andrepd 5mo ago
> Probably 80% of the recent PhD grads I know are looking to leave academia, despite the fact that they went into it to pursue a career in academia. The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market. Is any of this news though? This is the status quo for decades. What is new are massive cuts in funding and the current administration's hostility to foreigners and to universities. > MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union It definitely isn't :) many universities have unions for grad students
dfxm12 5mo ago
grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market Is the grass generally greener though?
buran77 5mo ago
> Probably 80% of the recent PhD grads I know are looking to leave academia, despite the fact that they went into it to pursue a career in academia. I think this was always the case. The disillusionment isn't new and not all who are disillusioned will act on it. The rest just put their PhD where the money is, as always.
- exegete 5mo ago
  The trend is somewhat new if we look long term. The gap between PhD’s and number of openings in academia has gotten a lot worse.
  - noosphr 5mo ago
    Between 2010 to 2015 my top 20 ranked university had 1 permanent job per 50 graduated PhDs in physics and maybe 1 in 30 for mathematics.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
jimt1234 5mo ago
> The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay ... ... in a highly politicized and volatile environment. If you're in a PhD program at a university and its president says something that hurts the US president's feelings, well, all your funding gets cut and, best case, your work is stalled for some time.
biophysboy 5mo ago
It is a real shame too, because industry is completely incapable of doing basic research. Universities make the fuzzy ideas, and companies turn them into widgets. The only exceptions in history to this are the monopolies, which have their own obvious problems. They cannot produce non-rival, non-excludable goods - stuff that's hard to patent.
- onetimeusename 5mo ago
  Sometimes. I've seen researchers who just churn out useless junk for citation mining and I don't see a lot of overlap between their work and what industry does. That's probably one of the most demoralizing things about academia in my opinion. You sometimes have to be obsequious to people whose goal is just citation farming and whose papers are useless junk filled with buzzwords. I see this a lot in systems and security research. But I also know some researchers who do amazing work and whose research directly gets used in industry.
  - biophysboy 5mo ago
    Yes, I hear you on how academia chases metrics. I would argue this phenomena is not worse than Company Z making a boilerplate AI chat tool that is no more useful than the flagship popular products. I think the fairest comparison is comparing the best researchers in academia/industry. I think they accomplish different things because they have different goals/incentives.
- ricksunny 5mo ago
  Vaswani, A., et al. (2017) Attention Is All You Need. Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Long Beach, 4-9 December 2017, 6000-6010. Generally understood to be an output of Googlers.
  - biophysboy 5mo ago
    Transformers are an applied science: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10740433B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10740433B2/en Basic research would be something like optimal control theory, which came well before the transformer design. I'm not trying to be evasive; I can see how my distinction could be seen as conveniently just outside industry's purview. Put it this way: I think companies, particularly small ones, are incentivized to pursue well-known methods/materials. Innovation modulates and optimizes.
j2kun 5mo ago
> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union University of Illinois at Chicago (my alma mater) had a graduate student union in 2011, and I don't think a grad student union was so uncommon at the time...
- dhosek 5mo ago
  The card check election was in 2004. I was part of the drive at the time (although I graduated before the union began—that was one of the challenges in the drive: a lot of us were essentially working for the benefit of those who came after us and wouldn’t be able to enjoy the fruits of our labors). It wasn’t the first, but it was still a relatively new thing at the time.
ransom1538 5mo ago
"get a grad student union to try and combat the increasingly exploitative nature of academia" Lol. Well you should introduce MIT to the concept of supply and demand. I am confident you can find people to pay MIT to work there.
micromacrofoot 5mo ago
This isn't really new, I've heard complaints about academia for decades. What is new is that grant funding has been completely eviscerated.
jmyeet 5mo ago
So I’m not in academia but even I’ve known for 20+ years how horrendous the job prospects are. I liken it to a game of musical chairs where everybody sat down in 1972. Academia is full of baby boomers who refuse to retire or die. And the number of positions just isn’t growing anywhere near to the demand. I know somebody who somehow landed a tenure track position in the humanities where a PhD can take 10 years and there are 200-300 applicants for 10 positions. Any field with an imbalance like this leads to low pay, unpaid work, the importance of politics and petty grievances. I don’t understand the appeal. I’d really love to know why people pursue this career knowing all this in advance. Is it the belief that they’ll beat the odds? So hubris?
Shalomboy 5mo ago
My fiancee left a lovely stats PhD program at Maryland after two years and entered the workforce instead. She started the fall before the COVID-19 quarantine in the US, and while the shift to online only exacerbated her feelings, there was plenty worrying her to make the decision palpable. Her stiped was meager, her advisor was functionally absent and _would not_ use their computer, and the thought of coming out the other end six years later with debt from her undergrad and no job - or worse, a job she would need to spend more money to accept and move for than she had on hand - was terrifying. To the best of my knowledge, I don't think she regrets her decision. I'm sure she wishes the conditions were different, but the value of a PhD today has been dragged down so thoroughly that it only makes sense for a privileged few.
- computerdork 5mo ago
  Ah, makes sense, good for her:) And just a side question, it's incredible that her advisor would not use their computer (especially since they were in an analytical field, would think computers were essential for statisticians). What were their reasons? One obvious thought was were they just much older and didn't learn how to use them?
wasabi991011 5mo ago
> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union Is this really true for the US? There's a grad student union which represents me where I'm at (non-US), was not aware this was so rare.
- krastanov 5mo ago
  It is recent and still uncommon that private universities have a grad student union. The US also has many great public universities that have had grad student unions since forever
  - ijk 5mo ago
    Yeah, private universities being unionized is more recent.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  - mswphd 5mo ago
    it was illegal for private schools to have grad student unions until ~2016, as (private) graduate students were not classified as employees. https://www.aaup.org/brief/columbia-university-364-nlrb-no-90-august-23-2016 https://www.aaup.org/brief/columbia-university-364-nlrb-no-9...
- ijk 5mo ago
  It's not. In the US, public university graduate student unions started in the 1970s. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unionization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio... Which is not to say that conditions in graduate schools (or academia as a whole) are great. But the unionization process is entangled in the legal framework around unions in the United States.
- DaSHacka 5mo ago
  My university apparently doesn't have one either, just a "graduate student government"
Ar-Curunir 5mo ago
That does not explain a 20% YoY drop
tasty_freeze 5mo ago
I used to work with a brilliant and humble guy. He got accepted to MIT at 14, but his parents made him go to community college for a year to give him a little more time to mature. He then went to MIT and graduated after three years, then went to Berkeley and got a masters in one year, then went to Stanford and it took six years to get his PhD? Why? Because his advisor milked him for his work. She had a pile of papers to peer review ... hand it off to the grad studends. Have a talk to give? Give the grad students the task for writing up first drafts, collecting data, generating graphs etc. My friend said that nothing in the first five years of his PhD work contributed to his dissertation. I'm amazed that behavior like that of the advisor is allowed.
- 19skitsch 5mo ago
  yeah I do feel like the PhD system is not uniform in terms of students’ experiences. some get out quite quickly if their advisor is chill while others are stuck being stack ranked in their labs or doing grunt work. your fate is basically in the hands of your advisor..
  - genxy 5mo ago
    Which is why you should shop for the advisor and then tailor yourself to the labs you want to apply to. Interview current and former students. Go to conferences where that lab is presenting papers, etc. Have some solid blue collar academic skills like cleaning data, doing instrumentation, hell even making bad ass slide decks will get you noticed. Getting a PhD is similar to landing the job you want. Also showing up with a problem you want to solve that aligns with the lab AND the skills to pull it off, boom! During undergrad a bunch of us got good enough at electronics and the machine shop that we had grad students asking US for help. We didn't realize it at the time, but just the instrumentation work could have landed us many a phd program, we were just having fun.
- jasonhong 5mo ago
  Speaking as someone who has graduated over a dozen PhD students in computer science... Yes, it is possible to complete a PhD in 3-4 years, but it's not really good for your career. The bar our department sets for a PhD is that at the end of it, you should be a world expert in your specific topic. A PhD is more like an apprenticeship, where you develop and refine your skills, your background knowledge in your area of specialization, your ability to write and do presentations, and your taste in research problems. These are all things take a lot of time to mature. The problem with graduating fast is that (a) you wouldn't be able to do internships, (b) you would severely limit your ability to grow your social network (via workshops, conferences, internships, department service, etc), (c) you would limit your ability to deepen and broaden your portfolio of research, and (d) you limit the time your ideas have to percolate out into the rest of the research community and industry. While I can't speak directly about your friend's experiences, learning how to do peer review and learning how to write first drafts are really important skills that can indirectly help with coming up and executing on a dissertation idea.
tamimio 5mo ago
The squeeze is not worth the juice. The pay is bad, the sector is heavily regulated that you could lose your job for a post you made online, dealing with student is pain (I have been there), expensive tuition, the titles are saturated too, the other day I saw a 24yo a “phd student”, plus the AI making education less valuable in general, at least from average person view. All that plus other factors just make it useless to waste time in anything beyond bachelor, even in engineering, a master degree is usually substituted by few years experience.
vatsachak 5mo ago
I have solved open problems of fields medalists and can't get a job in academia. I currently make 4800 a month after taxes as a lecturer in San Diego, pivoting to SWE. Math PhDs are having a hard time
moregrist 5mo ago
> Besides the people in this thread bemoaning the state of research funding, international students, etc. (all of which are valid), a lot of people are becoming disillusioned with academia. This is not disconnected. It is also not new. People have been disillusioned with academia since there were students. > Probably 80% of the recent PhD grads I know are looking to leave academia, despite the fact that they went into it to pursue a career in academia. It’s very hard to make a sweeping statement like this. PhDs are segmented by field and subfield. Almost everyone entering a Ph.D. program does it to have the option of going to academia. It’s a _research_ degree. Unlike a JD or an MD it doesn’t lead to a licensed profession. Or even a job. But in some fields (eg: chemistry and many areas of biology), 80% of grads have ended up in industry for decades. There’s also a long tradition of Nobel Prizes going to people in industry, so it’s not viewed as a second-rate choice. > The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market. It’s true that the pay is (relatively) bad. I liked to think of it as an incentive to graduate, but then I did a postdoc for similarly bad pay before leaving for industry, so maybe it wasn’t enough of an incentive. But the length has been 6ish years in a good portion of the physical and biological sciences for a couple of decades. I wouldn’t call the work “grueling.” In most fields you’re doing lab work or desk work, not manual labor, and while the hours can be long, at the end of the day it’s driven a lot by the a startup-like mentality: this is your career and you get what you put into it. > MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union to try and combat the increasingly exploitative nature of academia. MIT is not a thought leader here. Unions have been a thing since at least the mid 2010s at a number of Ivy’s, and various University of California schools have had a union since the early-to-mid 2000s. > I can see how undergrads may look <things> and decide that they don't want to continue down that path. It’s a valid choice. It’s been a valid choice. This has nothing to do with AI. You start a PhD to pursue original research (fsvo original), and that’s _hard_. It’s always been hard. It didn’t get hard last year. Depending on the field, the job market has been bad for decades, too. Humanities fields are always a bear market. There used to be blogs about leaving for industry in history in the 2000s. In the 90s you’d hear cautionary tales about someone’s uncle had a PhD in physics and was now managing an Arby’s. Departments could do a much better job with prepping graduates for industry. Successfully completing a PhD comes with a lot of hard-won skills that transfer to industry. And it would help if faculty didn’t view it as “giving up.” But this is a long-running problem. I don’t think the undergrad zeitgeist has changed. I think the current administration has cut funding and closed off the immigration pipeline. We’ll be feeling those effects for a long time.
dheera 5mo ago
Everyone in tech is uncertain about the future of software, engineering, and science jobs. I'm deep in the weeds and literally everyone around me has a "make as much money as you can while it lasts and maybe you'll have enough to retire in some remote village if the job market goes to shit" attitude. So yeah I can imagine people taking that $150-250K entry level silicon valley job over the $30K/year PhD and risking having nearly zero savings and no job prospects at graduation time.
throwawaypath 5mo ago
My cousin dropped out freshmen year of college and went to a coding bootcamp. He makes more than my brother and his wife (both PhDs, both professors at a decent state college) combined. They're both looking at leaving academia soon.
- whatever1 5mo ago
  If money is what you are after the PhD offers one of the worst (effort / probability of becoming rich) ratio .
  - throwawaypath 5mo ago
    "Money" is subjective. Professors are paid a pittance (barely middle-class in some areas), are no longer generally respected, and are abused by their students and leadership at rates that have never been seen. There aren't many pros to academia.
fortran77 5mo ago
I saw those videos of horrible people at MIT disrupting classes last year, with the school doing nothing. I'd rather spend the first two years cheaply at a local community college and then finish my undergrad degree at a nice State school than suffer through all that.
vonneumannstan 5mo ago
>Probably 80% of the recent PhD grads I know are looking to leave academia, despite the fact that they went into it to pursue a career in academia. Sad if true, they should have known that was a long shot, it's extremely well known that the number of postdoc and tenure track openings in any given year is far exceeded by the number of PhD grads each year.
gowld 5mo ago
A professor has many more than 5 PhD students. Why would you be surprised to concerned that most PhDs go on to get jobs in industry?
b00ty4breakfast 5mo ago
There are simply too many candidates and not enough roles to fill and certainly not enough money for research. This is great for the universities but it's awful for grad students and assorted post-grads/docs/whatever. Now you have a bunch of assistant professorships and adjunct spots where you get paid like shit and you have no chance of tenure. There is nothing an employer likes more than a pool of candidates willing to debase themselves for every morsel and crumb.
- EvgeniyZh 5mo ago
  There can't be enough roles unless we either grow academia indefinitely or reduce grad school spots to like 1 per tenured faculty
  - b00ty4breakfast 5mo ago
    There are too many grad students, is my point. Like, obviously, not all grad students go into academia, but that is the main career track for a graduate degree in a lot of fields.
    - EvgeniyZh 5mo ago
      What I'm saying is that it can't be qualitatively different. You can't guarantee every IC they will become a manager (which a professor essentially is) in any area and academia is no different. Larger number of students is what allows both the scientific progress and better filtering of potential professors.
scuppernong 5mo ago
MIT is not close to one of the first universities with a grad student union, the UC has been unionized since the 90s.
NoImmatureAdHom 5mo ago
The idea of a union for graduate students seems silly to me (and I was one for six years). The idea that you're exchanging labor for money is insane: any grad student at MIT could 10x their $/hr by taking a job in the private sector. And they could get those jobs easily. They're students, they're getting training. Student unions like MIT's GSU should be banned.
Balgair 5mo ago
https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-to-grad-school-in-the-academic-humanities/ https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-... This is a timeless entry. It's aimed at humanities, but every STEMy person I have shown it to agrees with it. TLDR: Only get a PhD under 2 conditions: 1 - You are rich and otherwise very bored. 2 - If by Christmas in your first year in grad school, you are absolutely certain that you and your PI get along so well that nothing could hold you back from carrying that coffin at their funeral. If either condition is not met stringently, you're wasting yours and everyone else's time.
- mold_aid 5mo ago
  2 is key. omg the number of students who are like "I want to be a professor" and can barely name a program they're targeting much less the people in it
  - Balgair 5mo ago
    undergrad or grad students?
EthanHeilman 5mo ago
I'm not arguing against anything you have said, but there is an important connection here that I want to make between disillusionment and funding. > Besides the people in this thread bemoaning the state of research funding, international students, etc. (all of which are valid), a lot of people are becoming disillusioned with academia. ... grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market. If there was more research funding and more jobs for researchers in academia this would result in both better pay for PhD students and more academic jobs post-PhD. The disillusionment is related to the funding. Imagine if the US currently had a new massive project for physics research, you would get a lot more people doing physics Phds and much faster progress in physics. We know this because Edward Teller tricked Reagan into pumping billions of dollars into optics research and that resulted in optics being one of few areas in physics to see breakthrough after breakthrough.
_carbyau_ 5mo ago
I love the work they do. I think it is vital for progressing humanity. They are not quite as important as sanitation workers and yet their career is about as enticing...

by jrflo 5mo ago

noosphr 5mo ago

That isn't new. My class from 10 year ago has zero people left in Academia.

paulmist 5mo ago

Can you give some context the grad student union and how it intends to fight the explotatiove nature of the academia?

swiftcoder 5mo ago
> how it intends to fight the explotatiove nature of the academia Not really "intends". They already have a negotiated contract with the university to ensure wages, healthcare, overtime protections, etc.
SecretDreams 5mo ago
The same ways the average Joe / Jane / Jon Bon Jovi are fighting their exploitation by big tech and the government. Silent weeping and lots of Reddit posts.
- Retric 5mo ago
  Despite all the propaganda, unions work. In this case they got better pay and benefits.
  - SecretDreams 5mo ago
    I'm pro the concept of unions. They get a bad rep for 3 reasons: 1) They overly protect legitimately poor employees. This poisons the perception of unions. 2) Certain unions have too much power and probably shouldn't exist. E.g. police unions can grind a city to a halt if they don't consistently get a raise. Some teacher unions span a whole state/province - this gives them outsized power. I support these unions and want to see teachers paid well, but there's gotta be some balance. Likewise for government unions. 3) They are not always cognizant that their demands might genuinely just lead to the company folding or going overseas. I've seen unions shut a facility down that never opened up again. How to resolve? 1) Unions need to better balance their mandates and how they might extend to objectively not great union members. 2) We need an alternative to unions for government jobs. These workers need protections, but government jobs already afford a lot better protections than private sector in NA and shutting down a whole city or state over negotiating will always be an imbalance of power that then becomes an arms race (e.g. back to work legislation). I don't have an answer to this one, but I think it needs review. 3) I don't think this needs any intervention, but I think it's an insane thing to do.
    - 9x39 5mo ago
      What do you think about representative vs direct unions? Representative unions' incentive seems to be gathering the biggest bloc of members to represent, with their dues and bargaining power focused into a few union bodies for maximum leverage. This seems to be virtually all unions in the US. Direct unions - perhaps more accurately works councils? - seem to exist out there, but more in EU - just from what I can read, not firsthand. The huge unions enjoy more dues but the common denominator definitionally has to be substantially lower than smaller works councils to get the membership counts. Big general unions benefit unions themselves, while smaller unions specific to a company or protecting a professional standard benefit the skilled or specialized workers. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much of a marketplace in the US around that choice.

rfergie 5mo ago

> Probably 80% of the recent PhD grads I know are looking to leave academia, despite the fact that they went into it to pursue a career in academia Has this changed recently?

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
divbzero 5mo ago
Not that I’m aware of? Most PhD grads not staying academia seems to be a long-running phenomenon. The number of permanent academic positions simply does not match up against the number of PhD grads.
- intrasight 5mo ago
  Some disciplines are much better at managing the PhD admissions to match the job opportunities. Philosophy for example. But I don't think that's done with most science PhDs. Is that because of a culture of exploiting cheap labor?
  - buellerbueller 5mo ago
    Or perhaps because of the vast appetite for the benefits that accrue from scientific research, without wanting to truly fund science and education.
  - overfeed 5mo ago
    > Is that because of a culture of exploiting cheap labor? It's not just a culture; there is a lot of government and industry grant money funding (and enabling) the exploitation in the sciences. If applied philosophy is found to be productizable and/or beneficial to National Interest, the same exploitation would grow in Philosophy departments.
spwa4 5mo ago
Yes, in positivist sciences 20% intending to stay would be very high by historical standards. This paper https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/93208 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/93208 gives and estimate 87% PhD holders leave before becoming (tenured) faculty. And that's academia-wide. In the sciences more will be leaving. In exact sciences yet again more. Truth is most people leave before even getting a PhD, so it's even worse (and the advice is to think long and hard before doing a PhD, and certainly starting one because you can't find a job for a few months is sure to result in disappointment)

gNucleusAI 5mo ago

80% is high!

arenaninja 5mo ago

I was disillusioned with academia before I started. We had a candid talk during undergrad with a grad student who was a TA in our class and he laid it out for us: there wouldn't be enough jobs in the US for our small graduating class each year so if you needed a job to support yourself it would not make financial sense. I stopped then and there, maybe one or two classmates continued. That was almost 20 years ago. I'm thankful someone told us the truth and I made a career in a different field.

gedy 5mo ago
Yes similar, some time back I was in a grad program that I was really interested in and decent at, but by then married and child on the way. My Master's adviser was honest that it's better to just work somewhere vs go down PhD path as I was doing this for the job prospects. The folks who stayed with this were "family-funded" and well to do in their home countries. They basically were doing it for various reasons aside from "I need a job".
- yardie 5mo ago
  While I was in uni, one of my friends was a young woman from a conservative East African family. She was pursuing multiple degrees and multiple majors. She got accepted to our school and it was the first taste of independence and freedom for her. Once she graduated she was culturally expected to get married and have children right away. Careers for women were not common. So as long as she was in school her family paid for it. We lost touch but I like to assume she is a multi-hyphenate post doc by now.
- waterheater 5mo ago
  I knew a foreign student like that. He was a great guy and a friend, and we worked in the same building. One day, I told him that I purchased a condo to save money during the doctoral program (in my unique situation, my mortgage was less than basically all other grad student's rent, at least those I knew). A little while later, he told me that he also purchased a condo. I asked him about his mortgage rate, and he gave me a puzzled look. His well-off family paid >$250k, cash, for his condo. In general, pursing a doctoral degree requires a certain degree of financial stability. The successful doctoral students usually came from wealthy families, whereas the ones who struggled the most also struggled with finances. I believe it's essentially impossible to perform truly novel academic research when your personal finances are volatile. I also firmly believe that graduate student unionization is an elitist mentality that must be unilaterally opposed, as it is guaranteed to destroy any constructive academic culture.

andrepd 5mo ago

> Probably 80% of the recent PhD grads I know are looking to leave academia, despite the fact that they went into it to pursue a career in academia. The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market. Is any of this news though? This is the status quo for decades. What is new are massive cuts in funding and the current administration's hostility to foreigners and to universities. > MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union It definitely isn't :) many universities have unions for grad students

dfxm12 5mo ago

grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market Is the grass generally greener though?

buran77 5mo ago

> Probably 80% of the recent PhD grads I know are looking to leave academia, despite the fact that they went into it to pursue a career in academia. I think this was always the case. The disillusionment isn't new and not all who are disillusioned will act on it. The rest just put their PhD where the money is, as always.

exegete 5mo ago
The trend is somewhat new if we look long term. The gap between PhD’s and number of openings in academia has gotten a lot worse.
- noosphr 5mo ago
  Between 2010 to 2015 my top 20 ranked university had 1 permanent job per 50 graduated PhDs in physics and maybe 1 in 30 for mathematics.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]

jimt1234 5mo ago

> The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay ... ... in a highly politicized and volatile environment. If you're in a PhD program at a university and its president says something that hurts the US president's feelings, well, all your funding gets cut and, best case, your work is stalled for some time.

biophysboy 5mo ago

It is a real shame too, because industry is completely incapable of doing basic research. Universities make the fuzzy ideas, and companies turn them into widgets. The only exceptions in history to this are the monopolies, which have their own obvious problems. They cannot produce non-rival, non-excludable goods - stuff that's hard to patent.

onetimeusename 5mo ago
Sometimes. I've seen researchers who just churn out useless junk for citation mining and I don't see a lot of overlap between their work and what industry does. That's probably one of the most demoralizing things about academia in my opinion. You sometimes have to be obsequious to people whose goal is just citation farming and whose papers are useless junk filled with buzzwords. I see this a lot in systems and security research. But I also know some researchers who do amazing work and whose research directly gets used in industry.
- biophysboy 5mo ago
  Yes, I hear you on how academia chases metrics. I would argue this phenomena is not worse than Company Z making a boilerplate AI chat tool that is no more useful than the flagship popular products. I think the fairest comparison is comparing the best researchers in academia/industry. I think they accomplish different things because they have different goals/incentives.
ricksunny 5mo ago
Vaswani, A., et al. (2017) Attention Is All You Need. Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Long Beach, 4-9 December 2017, 6000-6010. Generally understood to be an output of Googlers.
- biophysboy 5mo ago
  Transformers are an applied science: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10740433B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10740433B2/en Basic research would be something like optimal control theory, which came well before the transformer design. I'm not trying to be evasive; I can see how my distinction could be seen as conveniently just outside industry's purview. Put it this way: I think companies, particularly small ones, are incentivized to pursue well-known methods/materials. Innovation modulates and optimizes.

j2kun 5mo ago

> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union University of Illinois at Chicago (my alma mater) had a graduate student union in 2011, and I don't think a grad student union was so uncommon at the time...

dhosek 5mo ago
The card check election was in 2004. I was part of the drive at the time (although I graduated before the union began—that was one of the challenges in the drive: a lot of us were essentially working for the benefit of those who came after us and wouldn’t be able to enjoy the fruits of our labors). It wasn’t the first, but it was still a relatively new thing at the time.

ransom1538 5mo ago

"get a grad student union to try and combat the increasingly exploitative nature of academia" Lol. Well you should introduce MIT to the concept of supply and demand. I am confident you can find people to pay MIT to work there.

micromacrofoot 5mo ago

This isn't really new, I've heard complaints about academia for decades. What is new is that grant funding has been completely eviscerated.

jmyeet 5mo ago

So I’m not in academia but even I’ve known for 20+ years how horrendous the job prospects are. I liken it to a game of musical chairs where everybody sat down in 1972. Academia is full of baby boomers who refuse to retire or die. And the number of positions just isn’t growing anywhere near to the demand. I know somebody who somehow landed a tenure track position in the humanities where a PhD can take 10 years and there are 200-300 applicants for 10 positions. Any field with an imbalance like this leads to low pay, unpaid work, the importance of politics and petty grievances. I don’t understand the appeal. I’d really love to know why people pursue this career knowing all this in advance. Is it the belief that they’ll beat the odds? So hubris?

Shalomboy 5mo ago

My fiancee left a lovely stats PhD program at Maryland after two years and entered the workforce instead. She started the fall before the COVID-19 quarantine in the US, and while the shift to online only exacerbated her feelings, there was plenty worrying her to make the decision palpable. Her stiped was meager, her advisor was functionally absent and _would not_ use their computer, and the thought of coming out the other end six years later with debt from her undergrad and no job - or worse, a job she would need to spend more money to accept and move for than she had on hand - was terrifying. To the best of my knowledge, I don't think she regrets her decision. I'm sure she wishes the conditions were different, but the value of a PhD today has been dragged down so thoroughly that it only makes sense for a privileged few.

computerdork 5mo ago
Ah, makes sense, good for her:) And just a side question, it's incredible that her advisor would not use their computer (especially since they were in an analytical field, would think computers were essential for statisticians). What were their reasons? One obvious thought was were they just much older and didn't learn how to use them?

wasabi991011 5mo ago

> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union Is this really true for the US? There's a grad student union which represents me where I'm at (non-US), was not aware this was so rare.

krastanov 5mo ago
It is recent and still uncommon that private universities have a grad student union. The US also has many great public universities that have had grad student unions since forever
- ijk 5mo ago
  Yeah, private universities being unionized is more recent.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- mswphd 5mo ago
  it was illegal for private schools to have grad student unions until ~2016, as (private) graduate students were not classified as employees. https://www.aaup.org/brief/columbia-university-364-nlrb-no-90-august-23-2016 https://www.aaup.org/brief/columbia-university-364-nlrb-no-9...
ijk 5mo ago
It's not. In the US, public university graduate student unions started in the 1970s. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unionization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio... Which is not to say that conditions in graduate schools (or academia as a whole) are great. But the unionization process is entangled in the legal framework around unions in the United States.
DaSHacka 5mo ago
My university apparently doesn't have one either, just a "graduate student government"

Ar-Curunir 5mo ago

That does not explain a 20% YoY drop

tasty_freeze 5mo ago

I used to work with a brilliant and humble guy. He got accepted to MIT at 14, but his parents made him go to community college for a year to give him a little more time to mature. He then went to MIT and graduated after three years, then went to Berkeley and got a masters in one year, then went to Stanford and it took six years to get his PhD? Why? Because his advisor milked him for his work. She had a pile of papers to peer review ... hand it off to the grad studends. Have a talk to give? Give the grad students the task for writing up first drafts, collecting data, generating graphs etc. My friend said that nothing in the first five years of his PhD work contributed to his dissertation. I'm amazed that behavior like that of the advisor is allowed.

19skitsch 5mo ago
yeah I do feel like the PhD system is not uniform in terms of students’ experiences. some get out quite quickly if their advisor is chill while others are stuck being stack ranked in their labs or doing grunt work. your fate is basically in the hands of your advisor..
- genxy 5mo ago
  Which is why you should shop for the advisor and then tailor yourself to the labs you want to apply to. Interview current and former students. Go to conferences where that lab is presenting papers, etc. Have some solid blue collar academic skills like cleaning data, doing instrumentation, hell even making bad ass slide decks will get you noticed. Getting a PhD is similar to landing the job you want. Also showing up with a problem you want to solve that aligns with the lab AND the skills to pull it off, boom! During undergrad a bunch of us got good enough at electronics and the machine shop that we had grad students asking US for help. We didn't realize it at the time, but just the instrumentation work could have landed us many a phd program, we were just having fun.
jasonhong 5mo ago
Speaking as someone who has graduated over a dozen PhD students in computer science... Yes, it is possible to complete a PhD in 3-4 years, but it's not really good for your career. The bar our department sets for a PhD is that at the end of it, you should be a world expert in your specific topic. A PhD is more like an apprenticeship, where you develop and refine your skills, your background knowledge in your area of specialization, your ability to write and do presentations, and your taste in research problems. These are all things take a lot of time to mature. The problem with graduating fast is that (a) you wouldn't be able to do internships, (b) you would severely limit your ability to grow your social network (via workshops, conferences, internships, department service, etc), (c) you would limit your ability to deepen and broaden your portfolio of research, and (d) you limit the time your ideas have to percolate out into the rest of the research community and industry. While I can't speak directly about your friend's experiences, learning how to do peer review and learning how to write first drafts are really important skills that can indirectly help with coming up and executing on a dissertation idea.

tamimio 5mo ago

The squeeze is not worth the juice. The pay is bad, the sector is heavily regulated that you could lose your job for a post you made online, dealing with student is pain (I have been there), expensive tuition, the titles are saturated too, the other day I saw a 24yo a “phd student”, plus the AI making education less valuable in general, at least from average person view. All that plus other factors just make it useless to waste time in anything beyond bachelor, even in engineering, a master degree is usually substituted by few years experience.

vatsachak 5mo ago

I have solved open problems of fields medalists and can't get a job in academia. I currently make 4800 a month after taxes as a lecturer in San Diego, pivoting to SWE. Math PhDs are having a hard time

moregrist 5mo ago

> Besides the people in this thread bemoaning the state of research funding, international students, etc. (all of which are valid), a lot of people are becoming disillusioned with academia. This is not disconnected. It is also not new. People have been disillusioned with academia since there were students. > Probably 80% of the recent PhD grads I know are looking to leave academia, despite the fact that they went into it to pursue a career in academia. It’s very hard to make a sweeping statement like this. PhDs are segmented by field and subfield. Almost everyone entering a Ph.D. program does it to have the option of going to academia. It’s a _research_ degree. Unlike a JD or an MD it doesn’t lead to a licensed profession. Or even a job. But in some fields (eg: chemistry and many areas of biology), 80% of grads have ended up in industry for decades. There’s also a long tradition of Nobel Prizes going to people in industry, so it’s not viewed as a second-rate choice. > The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market. It’s true that the pay is (relatively) bad. I liked to think of it as an incentive to graduate, but then I did a postdoc for similarly bad pay before leaving for industry, so maybe it wasn’t enough of an incentive. But the length has been 6ish years in a good portion of the physical and biological sciences for a couple of decades. I wouldn’t call the work “grueling.” In most fields you’re doing lab work or desk work, not manual labor, and while the hours can be long, at the end of the day it’s driven a lot by the a startup-like mentality: this is your career and you get what you put into it. > MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union to try and combat the increasingly exploitative nature of academia. MIT is not a thought leader here. Unions have been a thing since at least the mid 2010s at a number of Ivy’s, and various University of California schools have had a union since the early-to-mid 2000s. > I can see how undergrads may look <things> and decide that they don't want to continue down that path. It’s a valid choice. It’s been a valid choice. This has nothing to do with AI. You start a PhD to pursue original research (fsvo original), and that’s _hard_. It’s always been hard. It didn’t get hard last year. Depending on the field, the job market has been bad for decades, too. Humanities fields are always a bear market. There used to be blogs about leaving for industry in history in the 2000s. In the 90s you’d hear cautionary tales about someone’s uncle had a PhD in physics and was now managing an Arby’s. Departments could do a much better job with prepping graduates for industry. Successfully completing a PhD comes with a lot of hard-won skills that transfer to industry. And it would help if faculty didn’t view it as “giving up.” But this is a long-running problem. I don’t think the undergrad zeitgeist has changed. I think the current administration has cut funding and closed off the immigration pipeline. We’ll be feeling those effects for a long time.

dheera 5mo ago

Everyone in tech is uncertain about the future of software, engineering, and science jobs. I'm deep in the weeds and literally everyone around me has a "make as much money as you can while it lasts and maybe you'll have enough to retire in some remote village if the job market goes to shit" attitude. So yeah I can imagine people taking that $150-250K entry level silicon valley job over the $30K/year PhD and risking having nearly zero savings and no job prospects at graduation time.

throwawaypath 5mo ago

My cousin dropped out freshmen year of college and went to a coding bootcamp. He makes more than my brother and his wife (both PhDs, both professors at a decent state college) combined. They're both looking at leaving academia soon.

whatever1 5mo ago
If money is what you are after the PhD offers one of the worst (effort / probability of becoming rich) ratio .
- throwawaypath 5mo ago
  "Money" is subjective. Professors are paid a pittance (barely middle-class in some areas), are no longer generally respected, and are abused by their students and leadership at rates that have never been seen. There aren't many pros to academia.

fortran77 5mo ago

I saw those videos of horrible people at MIT disrupting classes last year, with the school doing nothing. I'd rather spend the first two years cheaply at a local community college and then finish my undergrad degree at a nice State school than suffer through all that.

vonneumannstan 5mo ago

>Probably 80% of the recent PhD grads I know are looking to leave academia, despite the fact that they went into it to pursue a career in academia. Sad if true, they should have known that was a long shot, it's extremely well known that the number of postdoc and tenure track openings in any given year is far exceeded by the number of PhD grads each year.

gowld 5mo ago

A professor has many more than 5 PhD students. Why would you be surprised to concerned that most PhDs go on to get jobs in industry?

b00ty4breakfast 5mo ago

There are simply too many candidates and not enough roles to fill and certainly not enough money for research. This is great for the universities but it's awful for grad students and assorted post-grads/docs/whatever. Now you have a bunch of assistant professorships and adjunct spots where you get paid like shit and you have no chance of tenure. There is nothing an employer likes more than a pool of candidates willing to debase themselves for every morsel and crumb.

EvgeniyZh 5mo ago
There can't be enough roles unless we either grow academia indefinitely or reduce grad school spots to like 1 per tenured faculty
- b00ty4breakfast 5mo ago
  There are too many grad students, is my point. Like, obviously, not all grad students go into academia, but that is the main career track for a graduate degree in a lot of fields.
  - EvgeniyZh 5mo ago
    What I'm saying is that it can't be qualitatively different. You can't guarantee every IC they will become a manager (which a professor essentially is) in any area and academia is no different. Larger number of students is what allows both the scientific progress and better filtering of potential professors.

scuppernong 5mo ago

MIT is not close to one of the first universities with a grad student union, the UC has been unionized since the 90s.

NoImmatureAdHom 5mo ago

The idea of a union for graduate students seems silly to me (and I was one for six years). The idea that you're exchanging labor for money is insane: any grad student at MIT could 10x their $/hr by taking a job in the private sector. And they could get those jobs easily. They're students, they're getting training. Student unions like MIT's GSU should be banned.

Balgair 5mo ago

https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-to-grad-school-in-the-academic-humanities/ https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-... This is a timeless entry. It's aimed at humanities, but every STEMy person I have shown it to agrees with it. TLDR: Only get a PhD under 2 conditions: 1 - You are rich and otherwise very bored. 2 - If by Christmas in your first year in grad school, you are absolutely certain that you and your PI get along so well that nothing could hold you back from carrying that coffin at their funeral. If either condition is not met stringently, you're wasting yours and everyone else's time.

mold_aid 5mo ago
2 is key. omg the number of students who are like "I want to be a professor" and can barely name a program they're targeting much less the people in it
- Balgair 5mo ago
  undergrad or grad students?

EthanHeilman 5mo ago

I'm not arguing against anything you have said, but there is an important connection here that I want to make between disillusionment and funding. > Besides the people in this thread bemoaning the state of research funding, international students, etc. (all of which are valid), a lot of people are becoming disillusioned with academia. ... grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market. If there was more research funding and more jobs for researchers in academia this would result in both better pay for PhD students and more academic jobs post-PhD. The disillusionment is related to the funding. Imagine if the US currently had a new massive project for physics research, you would get a lot more people doing physics Phds and much faster progress in physics. We know this because Edward Teller tricked Reagan into pumping billions of dollars into optics research and that resulted in optics being one of few areas in physics to see breakthrough after breakthrough.

_carbyau_ 5mo ago

I love the work they do. I think it is vital for progressing humanity. They are not quite as important as sanitation workers and yet their career is about as enticing...