16 ms·

Goodbye Academia

• it_learnses 13y ago
  It is indeed sad what's going on in the U.S. with regards to Research funding. Maybe you can go directly to the public who sympathises, for example maybe a kickstarter of sorts for researchers?
  • delinquentme 13y ago
    https://experiment.com/ https://experiment.com/
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• naterator 13y ago
  These kinds of things are daily discussions in laboratories all over the world. Everyone knows there's no future in academia, and so everyone is looking for an exit plan. I actively discourage people from doing a PhD. Academia is a horrible feudalistic system that doesn't pay well enough to keep the bright minds it attracts. There is no sense in being a post-doc for life. Much better to take that hedge fund job. The really concerning potential consequence of this is that it could result in a dearth of innovation in cures for diseases, and we won't see the affect of losses until 5 or 10 years down the road. No one will fund a biotech startup that's not backed by MDs or PhDs and academia-approved proof-of-concept results. Good luck getting that when everyone is running for the lifeboats.
  • asgard1024 13y ago
    Are you sure it's feudalism? It seems to me that the problem is in the modern management methods and always expecting results and publications, and tying finance to that, which is very shortsighted. But maybe you could explain better what you mean and what's more feudal about current system than what it always had been.
  • shas3 13y ago
    > I actively discourage people from doing a PhD. Academia is a horrible feudalistic system that doesn't pay well enough to keep the bright minds it attracts. There is no sense in being a post-doc for life. Much better to take that hedge fund job. Underlying your comment is the assumption that every one wants the hedge fund (or other) job. One of the allures of academia is the prospect of doing fundamental research. You ignore that many people derive satisfaction from doing fundamental research that has the potential to be widely used across the research community (and possibly, for product development, e.g. industry labs, some government labs). It is simplistic to dismiss academia as a feudalistic system. There are merits, demerits, and other nuances. Also, there are, figuratively speaking, thousands of academic fields, each with its own system and culture. For example, academic jobs are plentiful for PhD graduates in these areas (in my experience): information technology/information systems (as opposed to computer science), management, accounting, finance, organizational behavior, etc. A summary dismissal of academia as 'feudal', especially when such an assessment underlies 'advice' is an unnecessary exaggeration.
    • jseliger 13y ago
      One of the allures of academia is the prospect of doing fundamental research It's also a false allure: the problem is that fundamental research requires funding, and the OP is pointing out that he can't get it. He'll be in essence locked out of research and not make a lot of money at it. This is like saying, "One of the allures of acting is the prospect of being famous and sleeping with lots of fans." On the one hand it's true; on the other, it's very unlikely.
      • shas3 13y ago
        The analogy does not make sense. I know many colleagues who got into academia and were able to find plenty of funding. It wasn't a lucky break that helped them, but hard work and talent. The system is far from perfect, but it is not 'feudal', etc. as the parent comment claims. Systematic hard work can get you results in academia. From what I understand about show-biz, it requires a lot more than just talent and hard work. Also, your comment ignores the fact that OP is in just one nook of academia. Further, OP is one data point in that one nook of academia. That he is the top institutes doesn't 'weight' his opinion either way, in the grand scheme of things.
  • newaccountfool 13y ago
    I think you completely miss the point of why a lot of people do a PHD. The love of the subject. Also, the pay after gaining a PHD in a certain field is most certainly worth it.
    • john_b 13y ago
      The love of the subject is a given. The article states as much. The whole point of the article is that the rewards of an academic life are not presently commensurate with the risks and sacrificies it entails. The pay "in a certain field" is irrelevant; the article is about pay and working conditions in academia.
    • pekk 13y ago
      People say this kind of thing when they don't have experience of what it's actually like. A PhD is not a continuation of undergraduate or independent study in a subject. It is a career with the tedium of other careers, and then some because so many other people are trying to do the same thing you are. You may love the subject now, but that doesn't mean you are going to be able to do the research you want. At various points in your career you have to do what your adviser wants, manage departmental politics, get funding and crank out publications. Maybe love of the subject helps you stick to it, but more likely it doesn't make a lot of practical difference once it's a tedious job you do every day. The pay after spending an equal amount of time in any other career with the same background is likely to be better.
      • Brashman 13y ago
        I wish we would stop referring to doing a PhD as "school" and the people doing it as "students". Call it what it is. They're junior researchers. I get that doing a PhD is also meant to be a training process, but working in industry also involves training and learning.
        • analog31 13y ago
          Kind of like "student" athletes, with presumably the same outcomes?
  • rjzzleep 13y ago
    i wish it was just the money. when i went into the university i was hoping to find people like me. it attracts bright minds, but it doesn't encourage them in any sort of way. a bright mind in that system is worth "almost" the same as the average joe who studied enough to pass through the system. so we're there, scattered, with no means to find each other. some of them do so anyway, it's what keeps them put up with the rest of the bs. some of them end up like me, pretty much alone, and then eventually lose interest. i'm not saying the average joe shouldn't get into the university, i'm not even saying the others should get preferential treatment, but what benefit is it to be packed in basics classes that you don't need to anyway? you don't get to skip classes you already know, you have to sit through them, and waste your time. you take away time that could be used to teach the less gifted. you fill a spot which is valuable in the beginning, at the end not so much, because most will have dropped out by then. i believe that we need to get away from the notion that everyone should study exactly the same. i don't see how it makes sense at all. and the same goes for phd's. which is essentially a pretty static period of underpaid work. but that would take effort wouldn't it?
    • kd0amg 13y ago
      but what benefit is it to be packed in basics classes that you don't need to anyone? you don't get to skip classes you already know, you have to sit through them, and waste your time When I chose where to study (for undergrad), a major factor in the decision was minimizing the amount of coursework I would have to repeat.
      • XorNot 13y ago
        This is exactly what I'm doing now for my electrical engineering degree (following on from a Masters in Chemistry). The big advantage is pretty much all of what I'm doing now is new and relevant material, and its great!
    • pekk 13y ago
      The underpaid work is different for each PhD candidate
  • skosuri 13y ago
    After my Ph.D., I went to a startup doing biofuels (Joule Unlimited), and then came back to academia to do a postdoc, and again it was difficult to decide between industry and academia. In the end, I chose to stay in academia because many of my goals in biotech will require a lot of fundamental research before they are able to attract angel/venture funding. As a new assistant professor (as of two months ago), I do have to apply for lots of grants, but in the end, the funding is not so bleak that it's hopeless (got our first grant last week). It does however require me to pick and choose only the most promising projects that can produce results in the near-ish term (2-3 years) and apply technologies we are developing for the larger end-goals to problems in human health and disease. I think that's a fair tradeoff for now. I think we will be able to do the longer-term projects more slowly on the side as well as interface with startups and companies to attack commercial problems where it makes sense. The problems we face today are because we hit a steady-state in funding, rather than continuing to grow as we've done over previous decades. One can argue we should continue to grow, but at some point we are going to hit a steady-state again and the situation will be the same. There are many interesting proposals on how best to reach a better structure for steady-state funding, but in the end, hard decisions like the one the OP made are going to continue being just that; hard decisions. I think the positive of the whole thing is that there are other options that grad students/post-docs can now consider in biology that aren't a tenure-track position, and that overall is a good thing.
    • DaveWalk 13y ago
      I wanted to give you kudos for stating the level-headed answer that isn't brought up often in these doom and gloom articles: >...funding is not so bleak that it's hopeless. [It] does however require me to pick and choose only the most promising projects I feel part of the reason for the anger shown in this conversation is the definition of "academic freedom." Academia is more free than other avenues of research, but it isn't completely free; your grants have to be convincing enough to get funded, and this is how the system was built. This distinction can be subtle, but can only be seen with a certain degree of level-headedness.
  • yodsanklai 13y ago
    "Much better to take that hedge fund job." Unfortunately, not every PhD student can expect to get a well-paid job outside academia.
  • FD3SA 13y ago
    Absolutely correct. The beauty of capitalism is that it is a blind mouse running through a maze. We won't know what the impacts of a decline in research funding will be, but there's only one way to find out! Will it be another Dark Age? Or will it be Galt's Gluch? Stay tuned! Inspected rationally, this sort of national gamble is the definition of insanity. It wasn't "American Exceptionalism" that made the U.S.A what it is, but an unprecedented leve of concerted investment by the state into science and technology over the past century. Let's see where this grand experiment leads us. Relevant HN post from earlier, where I elaborate on this issue further: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7321660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7321660
  • prirun 13y ago
    The medical / pharma industry is not interested in cures for diseases; they only want lifelong treatments. True capitalists, seeking maximum profit.
    • cma 13y ago
      What's the distinction? Whether they sell a thousand symptom suppression pills over a lifetime at $20 or 1 cure pill at $20,000 what does it matter? Are you saying people literally pay by pill count? Patents are monopolies, they don't charge the marignal production cost of one pill while they hold a patent, they charge what the market will pay.
      • porlw 13y ago
        It makes it easier to price discriminate between rich and poor customers.
      • deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
    • tsotha 13y ago
      Do you have any evidence for this whatsoever, or is this just casual slander?
  • return0 13y ago
    The need for innovation exists regardless of whether there are researchers working in the publicly-funded sector. And, let's face it, much of the research coming out is the result of 'publish or perish' rather than genuine curiosity. Many great things in the past came from private research. Today's technology companies will probably be forced to invest more in their in-house research rather than acquiring competitors at sky-high prices.
  • mathattack 13y ago
    Here's the open question... If people are really forced to work on 2 year time horizons, should this investment really be happening in the private sector rather than the government? I get the idea of funding basic science with 20+ year time horizons to benefit humanity, but tactical solutions? Separately - is this an issue with just new scientists, or existing ones too? The useful data would be "Total NIH funding" and "Per scientist funding." My anecdotal (and quite possibly unrepresentative!) data is that the total pie is staying the same size, but going to a set of existing researchers in a "Winner Takes All" manner. It's not conducive to new independent researchers, but perhaps we are creating too many for a fixed pie of research money. Alternatively, should tuition be funding research if we are now in the business of producing researchers for the private sector? It just seems to me that long term science as a group of scientists begging for government funding is no longer sustainable.
  • mathattack 13y ago
    This may be a stupid question, but is the unintended consequence of too many Phds not enough MDs? http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2014/03/04/americas-painful-doctor-shortage-is-threatening-healthcare-reform/ http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2014/03/04/americas-pa... It sounds like when the free market competes with the NIH for talent, the NIH wins. Perhaps the slowdown in NIH growth can incent folks with that skillset to go into medicine.
• singingfish 13y ago
  It's not just the US, it's internationally. Last time I was interviewed for an academic position the interview feedback I got made no sense whatsoever. A different (ivy league) position doing some really interesting work fell through for bureaucratic reasons around the same time. It was around that time that I FYIQ'ed myself. If you're technically minded, open source software developer provides many of the good things about academic work without many of the downsides.
• gjuggler 13y ago
  This is a really thoughtful post highlighting many of the deeply-rooted problems in securing funding as an early-stage academic. It's depressing for bright young scientists to be looking forward to lives as assistant professors submitting grant after grant with an expected ~10% success rate. But what surprised me most was that at the end of the essay, after having described his fear of facing such uncertainty in NIH funding, the author mentions that he left academia to co-found a startup making software for life scientists. Wait a minute — don't small software startups have equally poor success rates? (e.g. http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-truth-behind-9-out-of-10-startups-fail http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-truth-behind-9-out-of-10-st...) If uncertainty of success was his major concern, hasn't the author chosen a pretty poor next step in life?
  • newyorklenny 13y ago
    Indeed, I left academia for a startup. Securing funding for ZappyLab is by no means easy (http://anothersb.blogspot.com/2014/03/hello-startup-sequel-t... http://anothersb.blogspot.com/2014/03/hello-startup-sequel-t...) But as hard as it is, there are many VCs, angels, and there is crowd funding (we are running a Kickstarter campaign now). Certainly not easy, but there are more options. You run a genetics lab and lose your NIH grant - where do you go?
    • ForHackernews 13y ago
      Do VCs not fund biotech startups? Or are they only interested in social media iOS apps?
    • daniel_reetz 13y ago
      Wherever you go, whatever you do, do this: quadruple your effort and input into your relationship with your wife.
  • parkaboy 13y ago
    At least with a start-up your fate is much much, much, more in your own hands. It's really pretty astounding nowadays how many grants get rejected over the the tiniest things. I just had an application rejected (with high marks) due to it (1) focusing too heavily on what the call for applications primarily asked for, and (2) not numbering the pages.
• zenbowman 13y ago
  On the one hand, it is sad that good, forward-looking academics are being denied funding. On the other hand, during my time as a PhD student doing research for a top tier university, I saw quite a few projects where I was disturbed by the fact that we were contributing any taxpayer dollars to the project at all. I think the existing academic model is unfair to both professors and especially to undergraduate student. Allowing the very top professors to focus on research, while making the rest take teaching seriously could remedy the situation.
  • doktrin 13y ago
    > I saw quite a few projects where I was disturbed by the fact that we were contributing any taxpayer dollars to the project at all. Research has to happen somewhere. Where research happens, there will always be bunk projects. Some will fail despite good intentions, some due to negligence. Given that there will always be some waste, you can do a lot worse than putting the $ towards academia. The alternative being a research institution, where researchers are paid actual living wages. There are pros and cons to both models, but academia is undeniably cheaper. Thus, the cost of failure is lower. I didn't mention the third alternative, which is to remove public funding from research altogether. I don't think this is a good idea.
• newyorklenny 13y ago
  Indeed, I left academia for a startup. Securing funding for ZappyLab is by no means easy (http://anothersb.blogspot.com/2014/03/hello-startup-sequel-to-goodbye-academia.html http://anothersb.blogspot.com/2014/03/hello-startup-sequel-t...) But as hard as it is, there are many VCs, angels, and there is crowd funding (we are running a Kickstarter campaign now). Certainly not easy, but there are more options. You run a genetics lab and lose your NIH grant - where do you go?
• eykanal 13y ago
  This is almost exactly my story as well. One point he doesn't mention is that there are many interesting problems in the "real world". Lots of academics just point to industry in general and say, "no freedom, no thanks." I've held a few jobs and all of them presented with unique, interesting, and challenging problems. I've had the freedom to choose my own approach to solving problems and met up with other academic-minded people to have good lab-meeting style discussions about how to tackle a project. Industry positions can be pretty attractive.
  • burntsushi 13y ago
    I'm currently in the middle of a PhD, and you've touched on the exact fear I have. I intend on finding a job in industry after I graduate, and the biggest fear I have is a restriction on freedom. I totally get that there are jobs out there that still give you some amount of freedom to pick your own tools and/or approach a problem in your own way. Every now and then, I casually leaf through job ads and I have no idea how to tell which are which. I think that's what scares me. I get this feeling that when it comes time to join industry, it's just going to be a crapshoot---maybe I'll get lucky and maybe I won't. (Note that this isn't a criticism lodged in comparison to academia. I've already made up my mind that I'll be leaving once I graduate.)
    • a_bonobo 13y ago
      Ask your supervisor if (s)he supports you doing an industry project for a month, (s)he might even get you a position with collaborators. I worked with a huge crop science company for four weeks and got some valuable insights (mostly, I had to justify every little step, and the local boss was a huge fan of micromanagement: meetings, meetings a few a day. But they did have a lot of money and were willing to throw it at possibly not profitable projects; and people did proper 9-5, not 9-5678910 like academia)
  • timr 13y ago
    I spent the better part of a decade doing academic research, and now have spent the better part of a decade doing startups and software. If I could choose to do anything while also being assured of a stable living, I'd do the research again. The thing about the software industry is that "interesting" tends to be defined down -- for example, you'll be working on a CRUD app, but the "interesting" part is that you're doing it "at scale". Or you'll be doing some "interesting" refactor of a hard piece of software, that isn't interesting in any other way. Or most insidious of all...there's nothing really "interesting" in your job, and you just get inured to the day-to-day nature of the work, which always tends to look the same. The difference is in the big picture, and for most software jobs, the big picture just drains your soul. I'm pretty lucky in that the project I'm working on now has a truly "interesting" technical component, but it still doesn't compare with the idea that I could be working on an interesting technical problem that also might lead to a new antibiotic or vaccine...or just discovering something new. I miss that part.
• Create 13y ago
  "How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper Indeed, even while giving complete satisfaction, they have no forward vision about the possibility of pursuing a career at CERN. This lack of an element of social responsibility in the contract policy is unacceptable. Rather than serve as a cushion of laziness for supervisors, who often have only a limited and utilitarian view when defining the opening of an IC post, the contract policy must ensure the inclusion of an element of social justice, which is cruelly absent today. http://staff-association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-contract-policy http://staff-association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-... In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting. This has particularly been the case when the requirements of the CERN supervisor conflict with the expected time dedicated to a doctoral student’s thesis. http://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2013/27/News%20Articles/1557868 http://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2013/27/News%20Artic...
• k2enemy 13y ago
  It isn't just that research funds are drying up. There's also a growing number of Ph.D.s fighting over the shrinking pot of money [0]. I usually advise students not to pursue a Ph.D. because the life of the median academic is pretty awful. But at the same time the general job market for new grads (in most fields) isn't all that great either, meaning that in relative terms the Ph.D. route hasn't fallen too far in the rankings of post-graduate plans. [0] http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/sed/2012/data_table.cfm http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/sed/2012/data_table.cfm
• 6cxs2hd6 13y ago
  Not to sound like some crazy person with the word SOCIALIST written on the inside of my forehead in neon colors, but: It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax. That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.
  • yetanotherphd 13y ago
    Funding science with taxes raised by income tax is socialist for me. Economic theory shows that income tax is the least distortionary kind of tax, What you are advocating is populism. You see a large transaction, and say "we could use some of that!", without thinking about the relative efficiency of different kinds of taxation.
  • 6cxs2hd6 13y ago
    Fastest. Downvote. Ever. \o/
    • skybrian 13y ago
      Why? What would be the problem with taxing large acquisitions? It seems relatively painless and with little dead-weight loss compared to other taxes.
      • gnoway 13y ago
        I don't know what the parent's reasoning is, but the problem I have with "let's just tax it!" is that there's probably already taxes being taken from that money somewhere along the line. The next response is usually "well that's fine" - no, it isn't always - or "well we'll stop some or all of those others," which doesn't necessarily happen. Finally, while a tax may ostensibly exist to pay for x, there's usually nothing stopping existing funding y from being reappropriated for z once the new tax is in place. So there can be a new tax to increase funding but there's no net gain. I don't have any sources but I firmly believe that this happens. So, short answer: because politics.
      • 13y ago
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  • blt 13y ago
    Some people can't produce any output when sleep deprived.
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
• curveship 13y ago
  My own theory is that it will take academia another generation to figure out what it has done to itself. With entry-level conditions becoming more and more terrible, the best students will increasingly seek careers outside the academy, and academia will become populated by the second tier. At that point, it will have lost a prestige which will take another century to repair.
  • deong 13y ago
    One reason that may not happen is that unless something drastic happens, supply for faculty positions will continue to outpace demand by a couple of orders of magnitude. The average professional baseball player spends his life in the minor leagues, never making much, never seeing any real security. But the upside of being one of the lucky ones is such that you'll never have a lack of talented people trying to play in the big leagues. Academia's upsides are not financial, but the dynamics are basically the same.
• smartiq 13y ago
  not sure why such a mundane story got such a huge outpouring
• academocrat 13y ago
  Can someone post some numbers please? How many people are getting doctorates (probably increasing)? How many faculty positions are there over time (probably increasing much less)? How much money per researcher is out there (probably shrinking RAPIDLY)? How can we measure if we are getting more lenient with giving out PhD's? Shouldn't only the cream of the crop get to do research, not just the ones who claim to love it.
  • Create 13y ago
    The numbers make the problem clear. In 2007, the year before CERN first powered up the LHC, the lab produced 142 master's and Ph.D. theses, according to the lab's document server. Last year it produced 327. (Fermilab chipped in 54.) That abundance seems unlikely to vanish anytime soon, as last year ATLAS had 1000 grad students and CMS had 900. In contrast, the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics, currently lists 124 postdocs worldwide in experimental high-energy physics, the sort of work LHC grads have trained for. The situation is equally difficult for postdocs trying to make the jump to a junior faculty position or a permanent job at a national lab. The Snowmass Young Physicists survey received responses from 956 early-career researchers, including 343 postdocs. But INSPIRE currently lists just 152 "junior" positions, including 61 in North America. And the supply of jobs isn't likely to increase, says John Finley, an astrophysicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who is leading a search to replace two senior particle physicists.
    • jpwagner 13y ago
      The numbers make the problem clear Right, so the problem is that there are way too many students. Is the burden on the upcoming students to discontinue their track or on the universities (etc) to slow admissions and hiring postdocs?
      • Create 13y ago
        Ensures too great a flexibility to the Organization and imposes too much precariousness and insecurity on the upcoming students. In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting. Let's not confuse students and fellows with missing staff. http://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2013/27/News%20Articles/1557868 http://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2013/27/News%20Artic...
• eranki 13y ago
  Trying to become a successful academic seems about as insane as trying to become a rock star. Here's Peter Higgs on the subject of how academics today compares to the past: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-b... Most people I know who went down the academic route have left the world or are seriously thinking about leaving. I know a couple people with positions at top universities, and around the age of 30 their careers are just starting, with tenure being potentially a coin flip. And it always traps the most brilliant people. That's the worst part.
  • kissickas 13y ago
    Great article, thanks.
  • gammarator 13y ago
    Here's a contrary point of view: by his own admission in that article, Higgs has published "fewer than 10" papers in the last 50 years! What has he been doing since 1964? Raw metrics like papers and citations are easily gamed, and not great ways to evaluate productivity, but surely there are limits... (And before you say, "but he gave us the Higgs!", several other researchers did closely related work at the same time [1], so humanity would still know about a mass-producing scalar boson.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_PRL_symmetry_breaking_papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_PRL_symmetry_breaking_pap...
• slamdesu 13y ago
  Many of the recent 'goodbye acadaemia' that I've come across seem to be from people in molecular biology, which has a reputation for being a particularly competitive field for funding. I wonder whether academics in other fields are dropping out at a similar rate..?
• WestCoastJustin 13y ago
  It's worth noting that this guy is running a kickstarter campaign re: "A free, up-to-date, crowdsourced protocol repository for the life sciences". If we are sending tons of traffic his way, maybe we should send some to his kickstarter too. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1881346585/protocolsio-life-sciences-protocol-repository https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1881346585/protocolsio-...
• plg 13y ago
  Yet another worrying sign is that at my university (and I've heard similar stories from colleagues at others) is now deciding that instead of hiring 2 or 3 junior faculty positions (new academics straight out of a postdoc into their first faculty job), instead the priority is to spend the same money on one mid-career "poach" from a competing institution. Double the salary, and bigger startup package. Their rationale is that mid-career scientists will bring larger and more research grants (and will do so faster after arriving) than junior scientists. Essentially, let someone else take on the "risk" of the new faculty members and we poach the proven ones. It's a jungle out there people. If you care about salary and upward mobility for god's sake don't go into academia. PS I am a full professor at a large research oriented university in north america. Most of my contemporaries from high school and undergrad who have spent similar numbers of years amassing expertise in their chosen fields, but in the private sector, are now making approximately 5x to 7x my annual salary (not including their annual bonuses).
  • Create 13y ago
    Add a Scandinavian example to the collection.
  • mynewwork 13y ago
    Most are making 5x to 7x? If we estimate that a professor in a low-paid field makes maybe $60k (ignoring the possibility of grants to pay for additional salary during the summer) this would mean most of your high school friends are now making $300k to $420k. It's rare that most of a high school or college's students go on to become 1 percenters.
    • santaclaus 13y ago
      OP might have graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy.
    • amark 13y ago
      He said contemporaries, not friends. Meaning that other successful PHDs/Scientists that put in the same amount of work that he did, but in the private sector, are making that much money.
• DanAndersen 13y ago
  I'm curious about what areas of academia are more or less affected by these trends. I'm planning on starting a PhD program this year in computer science (emphasis on graphics research), and I had been under the impression that the state of funding was not so dire in CS as it is in the other sciences (the sciences that are more science than engineering), but I'd certainly be interested in any perspectives about academia in my field in particular.
• dnautics 13y ago
  I quit my second postdoc to launch a nonprofit research institute (we did not get funding, and are retrying later this year). I currently drive for lyft - and make more money than I did as a postdoc, with far fewer hours and better working conditions. This makes economic sense; it's not clear to me that what I was doing as a scientist was really doing society any good, at least as a late night driver I'm 1) giving people what they want and 2) keeping drunk people off the streets (a social good). My Academic path has been tortured; graduated from a really good undergrad, went to an even better grad school (my cohort is basically placed as faculty at places like Berkeley, Stanford, UCSD, TSRI, etc). But in grad school I lost time cleaning up after an irresponsible grad student (who, btw, is faculty at UW) and only published two papers that aren't flashy but are solid, and in second-tier journals. Did an amazing first postdoc actually possibly helping the world (pushing forward a drug candidate), at a third-tier school - since due to the economic collapse, was hard to get a job/good position in 2009. One publication, second-tier journal. Did a more amazing second "postdoc" (actually hired as a BS biologist, via craigslist) under a nobel laureate, at an institution where publishing isn't a priority, and the resources available are somewhat orthogonal to doing the comprehensive set of experiments necessary to get a cell/nature/science paper. My efforts resulted in improving an enzyme - three times (there are very few people who can claim to have done that even once), again, second-tier journals (two are papers-in-work, even though I've quit, i'm still going over there to get them written up). I'm not really ever going to get a faculty position (tried, two years running). I see crappier postdocs and grad students get their run, but you know what? I don't care anymore.
  • irollboozers 13y ago
    The question is - would you continue to do science if you could remove all of the current broken system? Is doing science what you love? Is it possible that there can be a way to continue doing science without being a part of that machine?
    • dnautics 13y ago
      answer: http://indysci.org/projectmarilyn http://indysci.org/projectmarilyn
• 001sky 13y ago
  However, one aspect of being a professor has been terrifying me for over five years now – the uncertainty of getting funding from NIH. No let me rephrase that. What is terrifying is the near-certainty that any grant I submit would be rejected. I have been waiting for the funding situation to improve, but it seems to only be getting worse. I personally know about ten scientists who have become professors in the last 3-4 years. Not a single one of them has been able to get a grant proposal funded; just rejection, after rejection, after rejection. One of these is a brilliant young professor who has applied for grants thirteen times and has been rejected consistently, despite glowing reviews and high marks for innovation. She is on the brink of losing her lab as her startup funds are running out and the prospect of this has literally led to sleepless nights and the need for sleeping pills. How can this not terrify me? Why does MIT require funding from the NIH? Isn't this what endowmnets and tuition is for? Imaginge of google or GE hired people and forced them to raise money from the federal government to actually build their next project? Notwithstanding the mis-appropriation of the profits, purely from a managerial perspective this is highly flawed. The flipside is also true, Universities are sturctured to leverage outside capital rather than their own (despite having gobs of it). MIT has $11B in the bank, they are not desperate for cash. To do "science", or otherwise.
  • HarryHirsch 13y ago
    Why does MIT require funding from the NIH? Because research nowadays is very expensive. Seventy years ago you could win the Nobel Prize with a cyclotron half a meter in diameter, nowadays you need the LHC at CERN to do that. And it isn't just high-energy physics, it's biology, chemistry, even computer science. Big data requires big storage. Research grants go to research and upkeep of facilities (the dreaded indirect costs), tuition and endowment is for salaries, building projects and startup grants. It's accepted that the mission of universities is to conduct research on behalf of the taxpayer, and that these results are public. Google is not serving the taxpayer, and that's why what falls out of their research is a trade secret.
    • avani 13y ago
      At many universities grants for the sciences subsidize other university functions. In computer science, at least, you may have to pay your own salary out of your grants after the university has taken their (substantial) cut for keeping the lights on. Also, all of your graduate students and postdocs must be paid out of your grants (if they don't have their own money); the universities won't pay them to do research in your lab, though they will happily claim the IP they generate.
• fonnesbeck 13y ago
  Apparently, its not possible to leave academia unless you write a detailed blog post about it.
  • mallin 13y ago
    Selection bias.
  • _delirium 13y ago
    Required for the exit visa. :(
  • apples2apples 13y ago
    I like to think if it as a last call for attention. Remember academics are attention addicts.
• ChristianMarks 13y ago
  I've left academia and returned, then left and am returning again. Thanks to the sequester, the NIH and NSF funding situation is bleak--I know successful PIs who currently have zilch. They're pursuing consulting contracts to make ends meet--at least in engineering this is possible. At this point it is trolling--pure sadism--to suggest that confidence and hard work will overcome the destructively competitive working conditions many academics look forward to every day. (I suppose I could be confident, for an additional charge.) Why is it trolling? Because the troll will never ever acknowledge his expectation that scientists (and science along with them) should thrive in a plutocracy as if it were a meritocracy [cf. Leiter, Brian, The Truth is Terrible (February 22, 2014). Daniel Came (ed.), Nietzsche on Morality and the Affirmation of Life (Oxford University Press, Forthcoming). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2099162 http://ssrn.com/abstract=2099162 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2099162 http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2099162] I happen to be returning to academia after leaving a non-academic job a few months ago. I spent the intervening months working an application with a friend. Over the past decade we have been attempting to solve a certain problem for ourselves. After dead end upon dead end, we have a prototype. Now, on the verge of re-joining the academic precariat, a potential customer has asked us for how much we would license our software. We'll see how that goes. The probability of my landing a tenure-track position anywhere is less than the probability that the software venture succeeds (perhaps this isn't surprising, judging from my posts online here). One tires of playing zero-sum games for diminishing payoffs against people who should be your collaborators. This is the kind of the cost-benefit analysis one doesn't do explicitly that seems to underlie decisions to leave. (I am rational, according to a cost-benefit analysis I haven't done.)
• Balgair 13y ago
  My brother is leaving industry and going into the ivory tower later this year. He says that it's not just the DoD or the academy, its all government funding. He says the PhD is like a union card now. Lockheed just fired 4000 people[0] and NASA's average age is about 53 [1]. The entire DoD is aging and about to retire, with no-one in the 25-50 year old range, effectively. You'd think that they would then start hiring people in those age brackets, but no. It seems that the idea is to just let government funding die a slow death, that or transition to drones somehow. Its increasingly likely that the good jobs are going to be from private funding due to decreased tax revenue. We can see this in the Valley right now. This means you gotta know people to get the work, not just be 'good.' [0]http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/awx_11_14_2013_p0-636944.xml http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/awx... [1]https://wicn.nssc.nasa.gov/c10/cgi-bin/cognosisapi.dll?b_action=powerPlayService&m_encoding=UTF-8&BZ=1AAABgNNr_f942m2PQWuDQBCF~8yOaS9hdlTUgwd1DRHamEahZ6NjCTFuUFOaf981KYTSzu7wHm__gV2ryJdFme~STIXjpAfO1BMQHSShS5TK2I89x~NXsYt24AfKd4Mg8mLHMM~WvJtGu2S9jcp1CLSqdT9xPxnX6q7hAdwYHOyrE4OtFttBt4eOgTC57HlcgKsMea7qY~XBv9F3PRxbPdQz~LM245YqkmWSbzZpUmZGotc0~Ae14rewRRQSEaVEIQQKFwWhmI8QUdcZOD2dO31lHgGDvDeBukxXI0DtPP0yP2m4MfaFq082kADygWwDsATaAwX3QD4C8afk7c7m~qBbP_obQJNj2A%3D%3D https://wicn.nssc.nasa.gov/c10/cgi-bin/cognosisapi.dll?b_act...
  • acbergan 13y ago
    Strictly anecdotal, but NASA is hiring and they are looking for young engineers either straight out of graduate school or with a couple years of experience. From what I understand it's something like one hire for every 3 that retire though.
    • Balgair 13y ago
      Thanks for the info there. 1/3 replacement leaves a ghost town.
  • declan 13y ago
    Um, FedGov tax revenue continually increases in current dollars, short downturns caused by the stock and housing bubbles notwithstanding. Tax revenue for 2013 is expected to be over 50% higher than 2003, for instance: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=200 http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc... And tax revenue for 2018 is expected to be nearly 50% higher than 2013. The idea that tax revenue has somehow "decreased" is folly. It's just not being spent on what this particular special interest group (academics in science-related disciplines, it seems) would prefer.
• Maria1987 13y ago
  Loved your article - inspiring and I can definitely see your point! Sharing my personal experience I left academia a year ago (leaving a promising neuroinformatics career) to what it seems crazy starting my own company! I now make at Lear ten times more money that what I used to make, I work only half weekends, I can sleep at night without the Need of drinking alcohol before bed ( yes it was necessary with the stress of publications) and I enjoy my friends and family! I don't know if company will go well but I know I am now happy! Very well done to you and good luck x
• namocat 13y ago
  This is so dead on. I recently left my post-doc position from a top school, and it evoked such a reaction of "take me with you" from my fellow labmates when I was leaving. The hopelessness is palpable in a lot of grad students/post-docs. Everyone seems to be shopping for a way out. Sad, but very true...
• tibbon 13y ago
  My girlfriend right now is trying to figure out her postdoc in neuroscience. While I fully support her passion, the industry of academia seems completely irrational from almost every sense and full of traps. While the end goal of a tenured professor is exceedingly stable, getting there requires heroic acts of risk, going with the flow and instability that even when compared with the world of startups seems insane. After 4-7 years on a PhD (which is fraught with the possibility of your PI losing funding, vets shutting you down for weeks on end, the university messing up shipping of things that need to stay frozen, strange policies of academic journals, endless bureaucracy, the university threatening to cancel health insurance or not pay you for a few months despite them wanting you to work) you exit with the ability to make less money at a Postdoc than you had with just your undergraduate degree, and certainly less than you'd make if you had just stayed as a lab tech for that term. In admission to a Postdoc program, you've gotta deal with PIs who seem to check their email in more archaic ways than RMS and seem to play games with you with their intermittent responsiveness. The chances of you getting into a place doing the research you'd like in a geographic region that has any semblance of culture or livability. Of course, all the pitfalls of your PhD are still present, as funding is constantly on the brink and your PI might die or retire without notice- which essentially ends your academic career. Then maybe after a postdoc (or two), you find a tenure track position (again, where this is... you seem to have little control over), which also seems to pay crap considering the amount of knowledge and experience you have. All of these funnels seem to have a 20:1 (or worse) completion rate. Something always seems to screw up. Fortunately, my girlfriend is almost done with the PhD part, and the Postdoc part is looking more promising than it is for most. Whatever relationships, life, family or culture you'd like to maintain through this seem nearly impossible. Now, I'm aware that 'softer' subjects are a little more flexible on parts of this. You don't need a lab with a half million a year funding to write the next great american novel or study the culture of people on 4Chan. In comparison, startups seem much more certain. Move to SF|Boston|NYC, program awesome things, get funding, etc... no one's going to ask you suddenly to move to Alabama to work with the one startup in the US that does Haskell programming, but in science academia that's entirely possible. Worst case scenario, you go work for Google or similar. And after working for 10 years, they aren't going to pay you barely livable wages. Unless you're running a center (which probably less than 0.1% of people entering into a PhD program ever will), the monetary reward almost never catches up. The risk of failure is high, and the alternatives for leaving are grim. Whereas if you leave your CS PhD, you can get a job at a startup... there are few places that are dying to hire PhD dropouts.
• api 13y ago
  I turned down an opportunity to do a really interesting Ph.D in machine learning / biologically-inspired computation because I wasn't either willing or able to take the vow of poverty required. Since then I've consistently made many times what most scientists make doing programming and even IT work that is far below my abilities. Basic research is economically worthless-- you can't patent a concept or a law of nature, nor can you sell understanding of nature's principles to anyone. The transistor may be worth billions, but the understanding that enabled the transistor is worth $0 as there is no way to monetize it. The economic worth of scientific understanding seems to obey an extreme hockey-stick graph: it is worthless until it nears the instant of delivering a marketable technology, at which point it skyrockets. As a result, the market only rewards the last few people in a very long line of innovation that began with basic principles. Mark Zuckerberg is worth billions. How much is Tim Berners-Lee worth? How about the communications theorists before him that pioneered the idea of hypertext? (Do we even know who they were?) ... and so on, with each step back in time being worth exponentially less. Why do science, except as a hobby?
• leobelle 13y ago
  What a weird comment at the end about ending his relationship with his wife, even if it is in a hypothetical context. He could have stated that differently and not ended on such a dreadful tone.
• egocodedinsol 13y ago
  There are several alternatives to the current funding giants, and I think they'll offer superior returns. If they do, NIH and others will change. My favorite example: Janelia Farm - I believe they expect 50% of their projects to fail. A Janelia recruitment excerpt is illustrative (and you don't have to have done a post-doc even to lead a lab): "We invite applications from biochemists, biologists, chemists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, neurobiologists and physicists who are passionate in their pursuit of important problems in basic scientific and technical research. All laboratories are internally funded without extramural grants. Scientists at Janelia have no formal teaching duties and minimal administrative responsibilities. Janelia labs are small groups of postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and technicians tackling challenging research problems that are expected to have transformative impact. Group leaders are expected to engage in the direct conduct of research in a highly interactive and collaborative environment." It's not the only way - and I doubt Janelia thinks it should be - but this style could be good for science in general. Even if funding levels return, I think they should probably return in a different form. Janelia might offer a blueprint for that. http://www.janelia.org/ http://www.janelia.org/
• whitewhim 13y ago
  This is one of my biggest fears as a physics student graduating in two months time. I love to learn and from my previous summers work I love to research. I've gotten into one of the top schools to research my dream subject. Despite all of this there is the overwhelming feeling of dread that I will dedicate myself for five years and than not be able to find a career afterwards in something even tangentially related to my research and be able to support a family. Not to mention the large debt I will still have from my undergrad.
• rdl 13y ago
  I wanted to be a scientist until the Superconducting Supercollider got killed by politicians, in a way which actually cost more than finishing it. After that, I stopped being interested in any grant-funded research career.
• jamesash 13y ago
  I made lemonade from the lemons: came out of an MIT postdoc with a Science paper, the academic track didn't pan out (2 application cycles) but I saw that there was a need for a great online organic chemistry resource, so I started building one. 4 years in, it's self-supporting, and I have many of the advantages of an instructor with very little of the red tape I'd be experiencing if I were teaching in academia. Miss the research sometimes, but I'm sure someone would accept me as a visiting researcher for a year if I ever wanted to get back into it.
  • selimthegrim 13y ago
    Link? As a fellow chemist turned software engineer I am curious.
• stokedmartin 13y ago
  tldr; I get a lot of satisfaction/happiness[0] from being taught by good teachers and talking to people doing research in CS and that's why I got back to academia. Not sure what will happen after this. ======= I first entered industry as a software engineer after my Master's from a good university in the US. I felt the job to be very structured. By `structured` I mean - goals were well defined; best practices of SE were applied; at times there was confusion of what exactly the requirement meant but we all had it sorted since meetings with managers and product managers were regular. Research there meant to dive into existing code and/or ask experienced developers around. After having spent ~10 months, I decided to apply for a PhD program. The reason I gave to a lot of my friends at the time of leaving industry was, `I didn't have enough meat to chew`. IMO the company's structure hampered my ability to learn deeper concepts of Math-CS, and made me lethargic (probably due to the compensation). Of course, had I stayed there long enough, I could have probably defined the structure, but at that time I thought there were more interesting things to study. I was fortunate to get accepted for a PhD program. Having an average Math background, I struggled in my first year studying mathematical models behind CS, for instance queuing theory. Everyone around me had a better intuition to such things and I felt really awkward. I survived the first semester, and in the second managed to handle more than a course. I am currently in my second year. Most of my classes are theory based and not at all intuitive to me. However, I spend hours to understand the proofs. There are some amazing theoretical work which goes in developing algorithms[1] and concepts like these this keeps me going. Of the some I understand, I feel excited. Of the ones I don't, I hope to get my head around them some day. I meet people who are great researchers. Class projects are a great way to sow seeds of research ideas and challenging since I have to compete, in some cases, with a few classmates who have a lot more knowledge in the subject. With all classes till now, I am able to do mediocre research which aligns with the research grant given to my advisor. However, in the future, I hope to do much concrete research. My advisor knows that my current focus is on courses and he's fine with me investing more time in them as opposed to research. Till now, all this has been challenging, and exciting. I don't know whether I'll end up in the steady state[2] of research as OP pointed out or may be I am already there :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philomathean_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philomathean_Society [1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_state
• lnanek2 13y ago
  There's only as many grants as there are money. If he and his brilliant friends can't get grants, maybe they shouldn't have their own labs like they are trying to have. Maybe they should just work for someone else's lab, or god forbid, industry. It would be great if we had unlimited money for everyone that wants to run their own lab, but it just isn't going to happen right now.
• ThePhysicist 13y ago
  I'm an (ex-)academic myself and can really understand the author's position and concerns, but I wonder if this situation has been so much different in the past. Academia has always been a highly competitive field with a high workload and comparatively low salaries as compared to industry, so it obviously is not for everyone. I think though that the article omits many of the benefits of positions in science, so I want to list a few (of course not all of these apply to all positions in science): -You don't have a boss that yells at you and tells you what to do. -You can work on your own projects and ideas (if you're capable of developing such). -You can't get fired , or at least the likelihood of you being fired is pretty low. -You can do a lot of traveling (conferences, summer schools, workshops, exchange visits) -You can work with very intelligent and motivated people. -You can work on hard, interesting and (sometimes) important problems. Personally, what I miss most since leaving science is the possibility to work on really interesting, hard problems, because although most companies will tell job applicants that they're working on really cool and important stuff, most of the work consists of pretty boring, uninspiring things (this is not necessarily different in science, but at least there there are some really cool things mixed in between the boring parts). As one of my colleagues once put it, "the problems are hard and complex in an uninteresting way". So, I think if people would have the choice between a well-paying position in industry and a position as a research scientist, many would choose the latter even if it meant a lower income and a higher workload. The author is of course absolutely right about the fact that there are not enough "B-level" positions in science (i.e. permanent researcher positions situated somewhere between post-docs and professors), which really has to change in my opinion. Personally, it makes me sad to see so many brillant PhDs leave university and work e.g. as data scientists in companies where they basically try to make people "click more on stuff".
• altyus 13y ago
  I stopped reading at the first paragraph. What an inflated sense of self to think that ones' own feelings after leaving academia imply a dire situation for all of academia.
• altyus 13y ago
  I stopped reading at the first paragraph. What an inflated sense of self to think that ones' own feelings after leaving academia imply a dire situation for all of academia.
• mbreese 13y ago
  One of the major issues in academia is the total abuse of the postdoc system. Instead of doing a postdoc for a 1-2 years, you can now see people in postdocs for 5+ years. It's a horrible half-way existence. You have your PhD, but you don't have your own lab so you get paid like crap. Instead of PIs paying staff scientists (which would demand 2X higher salaries), they just load up on postdocs because they are available and cheap. Unfortunately, we have way too many highly trained scientists and not enough research funding. Realistically, the only way out of this is increased government funding, and that's not happening anytime soon.
• rachellaw 13y ago
  I declined a PhD offer (full-ride even!) for a start-up It wasn't the money potential, but the lack of opportunities in the field. You can work for less pay if you're compensated for something else in terms of opportunity cost (social status, privilege of doing what you love etc) but right now there's zero incentive and it's so bleak A lot of my professor friends don't rely purely on salary even if they're tenured. There's other ways like speaking engagements, book royalties etc. I know some tenured professors who don't use grant system at all (especially in humanities) instead they get funding through collaborations and other sources
  • cwal37 13y ago
    Just fyi, you would have been getting robbed if your PhD wasn't paid for.
    • rachellaw 13y ago
      yes that's what my professor/mentor told me. It was just hard to turn this one down since the university did not usually offer scholarships (nyu)
      • cwal37 13y ago
        Well, it's not even scholarships in the traditional sense necessarily, but the department covers tuition and you get a stipend. I'm eyeing a PhD down the road, swapping with my significant other when she finishes hers, and I would also turn down any non-stipend positions. It's really surprising to me that a wealthy university like NYU would charge PhD candidates. If you don't mind sharing, what field/topic were you considering?
        • rachellaw 13y ago
          Nah this was a traditional scholarship with research funding inclusive. It was difficult to turn down because of that NYU and other private universities (Saas-fae etc.) will charge PhD candidates because they can. They have prestige, more applicants than they can deal with and the whole snob-appeal. I was going to join their Media Studies/Computer Science department
• balladeer 13y ago
  Such news are no less than scary and disheartening for a (third world) programmer who is applying for a master's and then intends to do a PhD and enter academia. My belief is there's always two sides of a coin, I hope I don't end up with a biased one.
• niio 13y ago
• assqwert 13y ago
  I wish I can say the same!
• quarterwave 13y ago
  Years ago I was an engineering post-doc in the US, and happened to meet this science post-doc (you can guess at which institute) at an airport. I was amazed to learn this person was spending 2X my hours in the lab at 0.5X my salary.
• randomsearch 13y ago
  It seems to me that there is an enormous amount of negativity towards academia, here. I think it's very unbalanced. Let me redress this a little. It is true that young academics are not well paid, don't have good job security, and that the academic system is run from the top in the wrong way. Grant-chasing is a fact of life, and administration can distract you from your work. However, being an academic can be great. I've worked in industry and academia, and I found academia to be less stressful, more rewarding, and more intellectually challenging. Here are a few great things about academia: * You get to work with really smart, creative, intellectual, people. Probably the smartest people you meet in your life will be colleagues. It's a very stimulating environment. * You get to work with young and enthusiastic students and researchers, who constantly challenge you and bring new ideas to the table. It keeps you young. * You see ideas and technologies that most people don't. For example, I recently saw a bunch of robots in development at another UK institution. * It's an opportunity to continue learning, with access to great resources (huge libraries, experts on a wide variety of disciplines and sub disciplines down the hallway / across campus). * You are not constrained to thinking about product development or the short-term. You can think on much greater timescales, and propose and investigate ideas with no direct application. * When you make a real contribution, find a great result, or inspire other researchers, it's hugely rewarding. * You're part of a machine that has generated enormous progress. Often people don't recognise it, particularly in Computer Science, because commercial companies appear to have "invented" things that they actually developed from work in academia. The most incredible discoveries and theories have come from academia. * Every day can be different. You don't repeat the same research twice, so it's a constant progression. This can be really exciting and stimulating. * You get to travel the world to collaborate, to attend conferences etc. Sometimes you can extend these trips to holidays; I've travelled more since I became an academic than anyone I know outside of academia. You have the opportunity to move overseas and work at foreign institutions. * You have flexibility in terms of what you wear, how you work, where you work, who you work with -- you get to choose much of the time. * You have an enormous amount of freedom to organise your time as you see fit. Your hours and holidays are incredibly flexible. * The money, whilst not great, is enough to live on. If you progress up the ladder to be a senior lecturer or professor (UK), the money is good.
  • mattfenwick 13y ago
• NPMaxwell 13y ago
  One guidebook to the archeological site of ancient Troy, starts with, "Having solved the money problem, Heinrich Schliemann turned to archeology." (For a bio, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Schliemann. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Schliemann.) Perhaps rather than starting in science and then bailing to industry, academics might follow Schliemann's path and earn their funding first. This won't work for many very expensive fields, but it's unclear how well the funding lottery is working for those fields now.
• supergeek133 13y ago
  Universities and large schools prices go up and up, so does the amount of loan assistance. Where in the heck does all that money go if not to these people?