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A Career in Science Will Cost You Your Firstborn

• roadnottaken 12y ago
  I have never heard of a professor "forgoing their own salary" to keep the lights on. I'd be surprised if this was allowed, actually. Also, for what it's worth, I did a PhD and a post-doc and have a nice biotech job that pays well. It's not an easy road (what is?) but it's not as bleak as all-that, if you enjoy doing science.
  • timr 12y ago
    The whole piece is about how your earning potential rises when you leave academia, so pointing out that your income rose when you left academia isn't really a rebuttal. How much income did you forego during your PhD and post-doc, and how much would you have foregone if you'd stayed?
    • roadnottaken 12y ago
      I made approximately $30k as a grad student (5 yrs) and ~$50k as a post-doc (2.5 yrs). I probably could've made more in a different industry, but it was plenty to live on at the time. It would've been a different story if I'd had kids sooner... anyway, I didn't go into science for the money, I went into it because I like science. I don't disagree with many of the conclusions in the original post, I just wanted to add my anecdotal experience which has been relatively happy and sufficiently-compensated.
      • timr 12y ago
        You may have been satisfied by what you were making, but that doesn't mean that you were making as much as you could have. I mean, people renounce their belongings and live in ashrams for spiritual reasons, and they're OK with it. But let's not pretend they aren't making a trade-off.
        • roadnottaken 12y ago
          I wasn't trying to pretend. As I said, I went into science because I like science. If I wanted to get paid as much as possible I would've done something else.
  • squidfood 12y ago
    Sure it is allowed. You can apply for grants for your lab, and not include funds for yourself, and if your own salary is soft-funded, you might have to go "on leave" or the like while your lab gets the money. That said, I've never seen anyone do it for more than a month's gap, and very rarely.
    • hga 12y ago
      I can't track down the source of the quote (thought it was Noland Bushnell), but "You aren't an entrepreneur until you've made a payroll out of your own pocket". Interesting, but not surprising, to know that scientists are known to have done this.
      • Fomite 12y ago
        The problem being that they don't get an equity stake in anything in return. There's no upside potential.
        • hga 12y ago
          The upside is continuity of operations. The ability of your lab to continue doing work is no small thing. Also, I'm pretty sure it's assumed that's structured as a loan.
          • Fomite 12y ago
            I meant a financial upside, in contrast to entrepreneurs. And it's definitely not structured as a loan. You forego your summer salary, its gone. All you've done is chosen not to pay yourself.
        • deleted 12y ago
          [deleted]
  • adamdoupe 12y ago
    Most professor salaries are on 9-month appointments, for the academic year. The three summer months usually come from grants, teaching summer sessions, or consulting. However, a professor can choose to spend the grant money on student support rather than summer salary (thus forgoing their own salary), which is what I assume the author is referring to.
  • bduerst 12y ago
    > I did a PhD and a post-doc and have a nice biotech job that pays well Which works if your field of study is an applied science. I think that for many in the pure fields there is this sort of romanticized "career in science" that can cloud expectations. As with Margaret in this story, though, they eventually figure it out.
  • regehr 12y ago
    I routinely forego summer salary in order to make sure the students are fed. This works because I receive a perfectly adequate 9-month salary from the state (and also my household has two incomes).
    • mjt0229 12y ago
      This is my family's situation as well. My wife has a 9-month salary for her tenure-track position at a state university. Her startup package hardly covered anything. The university has virtually no money to give out in small grants to help along until she gets an extramural grant from the NIH or the NSF, but the kind of research you can do at a small state university that's focused on teaching is not sexy enough to garner big money from most extramural granting agencies. As a result, she's applying for grants at the moment to pay a few students a paltry sum to stay and work in her lab over the summer. She will work for free. Any students who can't cover their own room and board on their own probably couldn't afford to stay and work; they need to spend 30 or 40 hours a week in the lab, which pretty much excludes other sources of income. My wife makes the point that it's unfair that poor students can't afford the experience to work in a lab as an undergraduate, even if it will benefit their careers in the long term.
      • zaroth 12y ago
        > The university has money to give out... The kind of research you can do...is not sexy enough. Capitalism is like this, but I don't see why in this day and age there isn't sexy research that you could do just about anywhere. Research -> Patents -> Profit. Just like in most startups, if the revenue model is nothing to sell and just hope VCs keep you flush, it's not going to work out in most cases. It sounds like the research simply isn't profitable so the lab fails. That is the definition of capitalism, and the same reason most startups fail. We need to make good research easier to monetize and more profitable, not figure more ways to hand out grants. At least that's the Economic argument.
        • deleted 12y ago
          [deleted]
  • therzathegza 12y ago
    I believe the official term in grant funded kinds of places is "no cost extension" of the project.
    • Fomite 12y ago
      This can also be used for "We haven't spent out all the money yet but the funding period is coming to an end."
  • DaveWalk 12y ago
    >It's not an easy road (what is?) I think we could work on the road, actually. For as long as a PhD is, there are ways to make it less of a slog, I believe. Early career development and more relevant classes come to mind from my institution. Also, if a postdoc is truly required these days, maybe we can shorten PhD length to 3 or 4 years? Cutting down the opportunity cost of time has nothing (directly) to do with salary...but it would have profound changes on the culture, I believe.
  • pvaldes 12y ago
    > I have never heard of a professor "forgoing their own salary" to keep the lights on. I'd be surprised if this was allowed, actually. This is because when you say Science you are of course thinking "USA Science". This is pretty common in other countries. I spend 6 entire years "collaborating" with my University waiting for my opportunity. No salary, no social benefits, no contract and all day. It was take this or take the exit and bye bye!, we have a lot of other candidates, ha ha. This was my election. I don't blame on it. But the worst was when (after spending all day picking-up things from the inner guts of a deeply rooten 500 Kg carcass of a dolphin) someone tells me: "you should be happy, all your wishes granted, this is what you wanted!" Yeah, to bath myself in shit, rancid fat, guts and breath formaldehyde all day is the best thing in the universe...
• AznHisoka 12y ago
  Replace science with medicine, or law, and the same still applies.
  • toufka 12y ago
    Yep. An entire generation of our society's most educated all in the same boat right now.
    • saschajustin 12y ago
      Most educated? Yes. Most intelligent? No. Smart people have been shunning science and academia since the 90s. The best and brightest work on Wall Street and they do tend to have kids--their genes for intelligence do pass on. It is very encouraging to hear that people who make dumb life choices are being prevented from reproducing their foolish genes. Maybe in a few generations no one will be stupid enough to work for a boss that doesn't reward them, and then we will have reform. Downvote me all you want. You can't handle the truth.
      • justnotsure 12y ago
        you are a simpleton. In your world: smart == rich. In your world Justin Bieber is a f#ing genius.
      • tekromancr 12y ago
        Truth nothing, that is a petty, shortsighted view. Yea, if you want to go work for some thugs in the financial industry, go ahead, get your silver. The people who sacrifice their entire adult lives furthering knowledge for the sake of humanity deserve better.
  • kohanz 12y ago
    Where I am (Canada), at least, doctors and lawyers will end up at their final positions with much more certainty than someone seeking a faculty position and they'll pay their debt off a lot faster.
  • declan 12y ago
• carlmcqueen 12y ago
  Maybe it's just me, but I've never really thought getting a PhD had to do with money, but instead the result of either extreme curiosity or a very strong passion about a more granular complex topic. I never understood it to mean a path with a defined cost to equal a defined salary. This scientific equation of years of school to salary just feels foolish.
  • debacle 12y ago
    Regardless of who you are, it's very likely that at some point in your life you'll want love, rest time, a family, financial security. Being a scientist offers nearly none of those things.
    • avz 12y ago
      It's true that most people seek family and stability. However, there is more to human existence than that. There are people who lead very eccentric life styles that express passions for other pursuits. For some reason scientists do seem more prone to eccentricities than most. Examples abound in biographies of great scientists and engineers like Galois, Tesla, Whitehead, Heaviside, Erdős...
  • bduerst 12y ago
    This is why working in a lab as an undergraduate is absolutely key, as it sets expectations. Through various internships and part time jobs, I worked both in industrial and academic labs as an undergrad, and while I enjoyed the work it helped me realize that it was more about dedication to the love of a subject than actually forging a balanced, lucrative career.
  • pm90 12y ago
    I see where you're coming from, and yes, I do agree that having more education does not automatically qualify someone to a better salary or benefits, which seems to be the undercurrent in this article. However, its not about earning "lots" of money, but enough to at least sustain yourself and maybe a family. That is not possible if one has to be a postdoc for 6 years. The point is basically that the system is misleading bright young kids into thinking that they can have reasonable expectations of having a "regular" life when doing interesting work.
• PaulHoule 12y ago
  I think that's the right way to put it.
• kohanz 12y ago
  I only did a Master's and avoided the academic route (wasn't interested). My lab peers at the time were 5 PhD students. Of that group at a good Canadian University, 3 are still post-docs (4-6 years after graduation), 1 has a decent-paying research position (non-teaching) and 1 is a faculty member... in the Middle East. Meanwhile, I work in an R&D field alongside many current faculty members, a surprising number of whom are 65+ and will die before they retire. In general, my observation has been that the students that quit after a Masters tend to do better financially than those who continue on. That's not to say that Master's graduates are hitting the big time; they just tend to end up getting their market value.
  • refurb 12y ago
    I had a similar experience as you. I wrapped up my Masters in Canada because the job prospects were better than if I stayed and finished a PhD. Most of my lab mates went into industry and are doing well. Only one landed a prestigious faculty position.
  • entee 12y ago
    I think the downside of no PhD is that you're much more likely to hit a glass ceiling. There are obviously exceptions but you're more likely to be put in charge of a research project in industry if you have a PhD than not. Clearly an MS or BS level science student can absolutely eventually do the same things as a PhD or postdoc. The latter just have scientific approaches that have usually been subject to repeated and rigorous challenge by their peers, which means they are typically (though by no means always) more rigorous out of the box. In my time in industry I've found that in many cases that kind of critical challenge doesn't happen as much as in academia. In the end I think people in hiring positions use the PhD letters as a screening tool for how strong a scientist the person is, without necessarily really evaluating the individual.
    • kohanz 12y ago
      I think the downside of no PhD is that you're much more likely to hit a glass ceiling. I would agree in the context of staying within the R&D field. However, I know more than a few people who used the extra years not spent doing PhD post-doc to develop their careers in a different direction (sales, biz-dev) that allowed them to stay in their field and shattered those glass ceilings. You can still do these things with a PhD, but it will be more difficult (people pigeon-hole you, and you're playing catch-up time-wise). In the end I think people in hiring positions use the PhD letters as a screening tool for how strong a scientist the person is, without necessarily really evaluating the individual. This is key. I've actually found that a PhD. is a relatively poor predictor of how well a person might function in an industry R&D role. Please note that I'm not saying it's a negative predictor. I've just found there's little to no correlation. I've worked with incredibly smart and capable people with PhD's and others who could not function outside of a low-consequence lab setting.
• comrade1 12y ago
  This is nothing new. I planned on being scientist in genetics/cell bio starting around 10th grade. I worked in laboratories throughout my undergrad years and then got into a prestigious human genetics phd program around 1993. I first started to see that something was wrong while still an undergrad while working with people smarter than myself that were on their second or third post-doc. I had no desire to be into my career 12 years (phd + 3 2-year post-docs) and still not have a real job. In graduate school I saw this continued and I also began to see just how much of a crap-shoot having a successful science career in academia was. The young professors on tenure track all had some amazing research during their phd or post-doc(s) but most often it based on something unexpected or novel that they couldn't have predicted. Finally, when the head of the NIH testified in front of congress that there is a glut of scientists and that he couldn't recommend to anyone to go into science I decided to drop out. I've had a great career since then outside of science but there are times when I miss it. I especially miss being around people much smarter than myself and driven purely by curiosity and the desire for knowledge. And I miss doing original research solving a fundamental question about life that is completely unknown and that can't just be googled. And there are times when I get tired of the software industry and its man-children and its lack of seriousness... I know that everything we do isn't pointless and I've worked on some interesting cutting edge government/military projects that had mixed academic/industry teams, but it saddens me that so many of the smartest people in the software industry are working on essentially marketing/advertising projects. Google has become the blackhole for researchers that Microsoft Research used to be in the late-90s. I'm not as negative as my post probably comes across as. I do like what I do and I have made friends with people in the software industry that are closer to my mindset than the norm. But it would have been nice to have been able to stay in science and have a better chance at being able to support myself and a family.
  • DaveWalk 12y ago
    >This is nothing new. Thank you for bringing up this point (and speaking to it personally from 20+ years ago!). I have been beating this drum for years since I've read Paula Stephan's research[1] on "How Economics Shapes Science." The overproduction of PhDs, the delaying of retirement by professors, and the addition of institutions to grant funding have been known since the 1980s, and the trend has been linear since then. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Shapes-Science-Paula-Stephan/dp/0674049713 http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Shapes-Science-Paula-Stephan...
• debacle 12y ago
  If it weren't for our current economic system, having a glut of lawyers, doctors, scientists, engineers, etc, would be an incredibly good thing. For everyone.
  • protomyth 12y ago
    what economic system values having a glut of people of the same profession?
    • debacle 12y ago
      One that recognizes the realities of a globalized, post-scarcity, automated economy. Not everyone can work.
      • aetherson 12y ago
        A post-scarcity economy is not a "reality."
        • lotyrin 12y ago
          Post-scarcity doesn't mean "scarcity-naive" or that everything has to be non-scarce. We already have things that aren't scarce and by assuming scarcity is a factor of value, we irrationally devalue them. Post-scarcity economic systems attempt to resolve that. Look at the struggle the entertainment and journalism industries have had since the value they provide was divorced from distributing scarce print/recording media, etc. Disregard human subjective behavior, the rational behavior under capitalism before was to buy the thing you wanted, now it's to try to be a free rider, so that's what most people are doing, despite valuing creativity and journalism no less. So, instead of being able to participate in an economic system that solves the problem of compensating the creators of non-scarce information, they turn to DRM and paywalls and other ineffective solutions to try to force their bits to be effectively scarce for the majority of consumers, and therefore remain valuable and prevent the free riders. That said, a post-scarce economic system also shouldn't aim to be producing a glut of any one variety of professional, so it certainly isn't a good argument within the original thread.
• mathattack 12y ago
  It seems strange to me that people assume that more education in any field they want will necessarily result in more money. Schools are producing too many Biology Phds. Or Forensic Science undergrads. Such is life. There's no way to predict 100% what the market will be like, so we make do. There's no intrinsic right to a job in the field that one chooses to study, and most people work in fields outside of their major. It's also true that your choice of first (or second or third) job is no guarantee. GM used to be a job for life. Now it isn't. As individuals we make our best choices, and then have a small safety net to fall back on if we're wrong. The only thing we should push for schools to do is show transparency on where the alums wind up, because unfortunately their incentives in producing Phds (and JDs and Russian literature degrees) differ from ours in receiving them.
  • throwawayaway 12y ago
    idea for a business, #1 use cheap forensic scientists to enable police state. #2 ????? #3 profit
  • fat0wl 12y ago
    yeah i guess it strikes me as odd that these silos are painted as such dire straits when describing a scenario that includes the backdoor of "unless you choose to go into industry and immediately make 100k+". I and the other people in my graduate program don't have that option... I studied music technology, degree was pretty expensive. no stipends, literal you pay for degree, BA-style, but are not going into a six-figure business field. These are the choices you make in life, and being presented with an opt-out like that is as they say "a good problem to have". It would be cool if every field could make intelligent people rich as they improved the world but, you know.... its life. If I had chosen a different field maybe I would be making 6-figures instead of doing boring enterprise work (decent money but most of my research peers were less programming focused, didn't even have this type of out), but I also would be even further from my goals. I wouldn't have the foundation of knowledge that I'm hoping to return to / build from in the future. I guess the point of this comment is that the author should be thankful that people in science are valued by industry (even many programmers are only considered "labor", basically). There are lots of fields people devote themselves to that have no industrial use & they are relegated to lower-paying dayjobs regardless of who they are willing to sign on with. As for whether or not academia should be more lucrative, well.... should people be paid to learn? is academia the most efficient way of learning? is it an antiquated social construct? many open-ended questions.... got my masters but didn't go back for PhD, waiting to see whether or not there is a better way to make it happen out on the pavement.
• fiatmoney 12y ago
  Not brilliant to ensure a good fraction of your smartest citizens are effectively unable to reproduce.
  • saschajustin 12y ago
    Would your smartest citizens really make such dumb life choices? My professors pushed me so hard to get on the grad school track. I was too smart to do something so stupid. Professors are no longer the smartest people in society because only idiots go into academia. Grad students are often not the best or brighest but people with some kind of mental illness that prevents them from making rational long-term decisions. There is no way that an intelligent person would ever try to get into academia in this climate. The people who try are on par with the pothead guitar player starting a garage band to get rich--they're not smart.
    • rifung 12y ago
      There are reasons to do things besides money
      • marincounty 12y ago
        I have always felt what you stated. Sadly, I have seen society change for the worst; and just value money. It's almost like people have forgotten they will die? I know more than a few people who worked in careers they didn't like--just to make it big some day. That day never came to 99% of them. By middle age they are angry, and miserable, but won't admit they made a huge mistake chasing the "Paper". (Yes--I used slang). They have no problem blaming society, the divorce, or Liberals for ruining their lives though? They go to the annual physical, and the doctor wants to talk --at lenght-- over a few abnormalities on the blood test. It's all over in a few months?
    • jerf 12y ago
      "Would your smartest citizens really make such dumb life choices?" Oh, my, yes. One of the biggest problems with being smart is that it makes one especially prone to listening to and trusting in words, because one is so used to doing so due to the fact that it was the rewarded and reinforced behavior throughout their entire life, which remember, has consisted of little but schooling for such people up to that point. It takes additional training or practice to break out of that. After a lifetime of words about how wonderful this career path is, how suited to it they are, and how it's their natural goal, it cuts down to their personal identity to realize that the words were not true, and that's a hard thing to go through. (I am not being even slightly sarcastic. That can literally drive people to suicidal levels of emotional pain.)
• chris_wot 12y ago
  Or a career in science may save your firstborn, or someone else's. Just saying.
• wwweston 12y ago
  "Why does anyone think science is a good job? The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following: * age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college * age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month * age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year * age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year * age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a 'second rate has-been' label on his forehead." http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
  • eranation 12y ago
    Wow, this is sad. I knew the situation wasn't great, but it makes Breaking Bad look much more realistic than I thought. I guess the people who do it, don't do it for the money, I hope that those 8% who make it to tenure, do it because they love what they do. I just hope they have enough energy to keep things up once they get there. There has to be a better way. I liked the mention of DIY scientists, if people could have done hobby medicine research the same way they can 3D print, start a SaaS company, built a home automation solution using an Arduino and some stuff from ebay, if doing DIY lab research would be as easy as launching a mini delorean style quadrocopter (search on youtube), I'm sure a lot of the community here in HN would have been working on the next cure for cancer.
    • longlivegnu 12y ago
      I think DIY scientists have it the hardest, especially the ones that cannot survive without a job.
• cryoshon 12y ago
  I don't have a PhD, and won't be getting one. While it's something I'd love to do for the sake of knowledge, it simply isn't workable money wise, family wise, or time wise. The postdocs and graduate students work 6 days a week for 10 hours each day for a pittance. I'd like to think that all these gripes about science are reaching some sort of boiling point, and that some solution is right around the corner-- except that I'm here in the trenches, so I know there is no such thing happening. People suffer through it, grumbling once in a while, but refusing to attempt to better their own circumstances in any way other than more work. Many of them lead outwardly lonely or empty lives spent slaving away at their lab benches or tissue culture rooms. They cannot afford to replace their old clothes, phones, or bicycles. They live in houses with 4-6 other people, even into their 30s. When they publish their paper, it is their supervisor's name that is noticed. The bitterness and beatdown demeanor they express suffuses many of their non-work conversations. Science is a pretty bad life in academia. Industry scientists still need to muddle around in academia for at least some period of time, but on the whole they seem much better off... except that most people from the academic side don't consider them to be scientists at all.
  • Retra 12y ago
    >except that most people from the academic side don't consider them to be scientists at all. Are they publishing their work in a way that other people can use? Or are they grinding out the meat of patents and trade secrecy?
• veryluckyxyz 12y ago
  If that is all a career in science will cost you, you are one of the lucky few. For many others, it costs a lot more. If your significant other is also in science, bonus costs for you! If you came to US on a student visa and want to continue living in US and you spent your OPT working as a post-doc, more bonus costs for you! If after many years of postdoc, you have not been able to get a tenure-track position, even more bonus costs for you! One has to try though.
• greymeatball 12y ago
  I know it's N of 1 but I did grad school with a wife and kid both at home, all of us supported on my typical student stipend. Then lived in one of the most expensive locales in the country as a postdoc, again, wife was at home with the kid(s). Started making $45k, 2.5 years later was at $55k (you do know that postdocs can ask for raises, right?). Now in a tenure-track faculty position, have federal funding, and making $125k/year. It's not impossible to make it work, and I'd do it all again.
  • theorique 12y ago
    You're one of the fortunate ones - and undoubtedly you worked extremely hard to get into that position. But many people also work hard but do not wind up with the same reward at the end of the road.
• paulmd 12y ago
  Yup - "STEM jobs pay well" is just wrong at this point. Neither Science nor Mathematics pays worth a damn, what people actually mean when they say this is "go work in technology or engineering".
  • brianwawok 12y ago
    Can you draw that conclusion from this article? I think Academia is not paying that well. I think a lot of these post-docs could make a lot more in industry, no? I think if you are willing to sell your soul to the devil, most STEM pays pretty dang well...
    • IndianAstronaut 12y ago
      > I think a lot of these post-docs could make a lot more in industry, no? If you are in a programming heavy field, yes, else no. If you did biochemistry, developmental biology, etc, you are SOL.
      • entee 12y ago
        I think this is only partially true. It's really a case of what you worked on, where you worked on it, and who you did it with. For example: a lot of Biochemistry and Dev Bio these days relies at least in part on so-called next-generation sequencing. If you happened to work on a project where you worked with that technology, there are lots of well paying jobs out there for you. If not, it might be harder to find one, but again it's very person-project-location dependent. Of my graduate school (PhD Biochemistry) cohort, I don't know anyone who doesn't have a job they're happy in. Some of them went postdoc, some went to industry (maybe 50-50 at this stage), and I have no doubt those who stayed in academia would have no problem finding a job in industry. That said, I went to a strong program in an area where there's a lot of Biotech, so that helps. As for me, I left academia and am now a hybrid data scientist/biochemist, I'm fortunate to have a decent salary and a job I love. Was the PhD worth it? I wouldn't have this job if I didn't, but I don't know. If it wasn't it's mostly because a PhD was a huge opportunity cost for me I think.
• cafard 12y ago
  In the cultural historian Burkhardt's letters, I saw one to a young friend saying, in essence, What do you want to be a university professor for? Become a high school teacher, and you'll earn enough to marry and start a family. This was 19th-Century Switzerland (or possibly Germany, I forget).
• mason240 12y ago
  So what can actually be done? Simply adding more funding won't change the grad student -> post doc -> tenured professor system.
  • brianwawok 12y ago
    You could create more tenured prof positions with more funding, which would obviously help right?
    • dnautics 12y ago
      so waste taxpayer money on more positions which create more postdocs and grad students? Just kicks the problem down the road. What if there's a limited social capacity to do science? As in, at any given time there's it's only worth it to allow some percentage of people to do science (and not all of them will be doing science). Throwing more money at the problem will only muddy the waters by drowning out the good voices with junk, and what you will see is thousands of journals, and more fraud and bad science percolating through the upper journals. Hmm...
      • craigyk 12y ago
        I might agree with "What if there's a limited social capacity to do science? but "more fraud and bad science" seems (to me) to be excaerbated by increased pressure for limited funding, rather than the opposite.
    • adrianN 12y ago
      Each tenured professor produces PhDs way above replacement rate. A tenure spot only opens when the Professor leaves academia, but during his career he produces dozens of PhDs. The system can't work out like that.
  • pcrh 12y ago
    You have to stop graduating useless PhDs. Graduate students, and often postdocs (though more justifiably), are recruited primarily in the expectation that they will provide work for their advisors/Profs. If Profs could no longer benefit directly from the labor of grad students, in the manner that teachers don't directly benefit from the work of students, then academia would be less inclined to churn them out. Supply would go down and both average quality and salaries would go up.
• eykanal 12y ago
  Excellent post. Even more depressing, the author didn't discuss the fact that when this young researcher—who just finished a PhD and postdoc training in a specific research area—applies for her first grant, she is effectively required to submit a grant for whatever topics are "hot" at that moment. These topics may not be directly related to her field of interest, and may be something she has very little expertise in. However, by writing a proposal in simply whatever area she finds interesting, she is taking her already dismal chances of obtaining funding and decreasing them further. Even MORE depressing, once our young female scientist has done a good job, built her lab, and is now in her mid-forties, if she really wants to improve her pay at that point she will have such attractive options as "department chair", which adds a lot of non-research administrative work to an already overworked person. What fun!
• rthomas6 12y ago
  What is the economics of this? I never understood why this is the case now in academia but it apparently didn't used to be. What changed?
  • haihaibye 12y ago
    https://biomickwatson.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/nbt-2706-f1.jpg https://biomickwatson.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/nbt-2706-f...
• ergzay 12y ago
  This all comes back to profitable work generation. MUCH of science just isn't profitable, you're usually doing something that simply shows that something ISN'T possible. This, to the economy, was a worthless result. The only value was to stop other's from also spending money on that same worthless result. That's fundamentally why science doesn't pay well.
  • pcrh 12y ago
    Perhaps it isn't that science is unprofitable, it just isn't immediately profitable. Pretty much the entire modern economy, i.e. those parts that don't depend primarily on manual labor, politicking or usury, is founded on the work of scientists and engineers.
• djoshea 12y ago
  Certainly a depressing perspective, but as a Stanford PhD student (neuro), my thoughts have always been that pursuing science was a decision to work on the problems that interested me at the _expense_ of not receiving good financial compensation. The particular things I'm interested in studying happen to exist primarily within academia (and non-university academic institutions like Allen Brain and Janelia), because the neuroscience work being done in industry (today) is far more primitive (e.g. EEG). This may change in the near future, and I'll reconsider my options then, but for now, I'm under no delusion that my salary (~30k) is anywhere near what it could be for an EE/CS in industry. That being said, if the amount of bullshit and politics becomes so burdensome that it kills the attractiveness of the science, then I'd leave.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • koof 12y ago
    I think you might find this article relevant. I think that liking your work shouldn't be in exchange for fair compensation and work conditions. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/do_what_you_love_love_what_you_do_an_omnipresent_mantra_that_s_bad_for_work.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/...
    • djoshea 12y ago
      Read the article, but I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with it. Of course I don't think that scientists "should" make less money as they're doing something they love, but since when are salaries determined by how much someone "deserves" to make? My working conditions are excellent; I'm at Stanford in a well-funded lab. And I decided and continue to believe that this is research that I'd like to do despite the financial opportunity cost. If I'm reading it correctly, this article seems to suggest that the advice that pursuing work that you find fulfilling is itself responsible for lowering wages, which may be true in as much as people are willing to accept lower wages if they enjoy the work despite having better options. But what would you propose as an alternative? Pursuing work that you find less fulfilling in exchange for more money? That's not a sacrifice I'm willing to make, and I've been privileged with enough opportunity and financial security to have a choice. Of course everyone has different objective functions they're seeking to optimize, so I see why others would make different choices, which is all good by me.
• Balgair 12y ago
  Ask HN: Ok, well, im in my first year of a neuro PhD. I returned to school to beat the credential creep and partly to change careers. I have burning questions, but the funding is just not there at my uni. Also, as it is a career change, my grades aren't the best, as I lack the foundation in neuro (was EE before). What now?
  • epicureanideal 12y ago
    Start a startup and go on academic leave permanently to pursue your dream? "I left to found a company and never went back, I've been too busy." sounds pretty good to me. But you should obviously get more opinions than my 2 minute consideration of your situation.
  • pcrh 12y ago
    Where are you located? If you're in one of the "hubs", i.e. Bay Area, San Diego, Boston, Cambridge (UK), etc, identify the local networking organizations and get exposure to what others are doing, both in industry and academia. If you're not in a hub, get to one....
  • dnautics 12y ago
    "beating the credential creep" is just about the worst reason to get a PhD, so I'm going to be a jerk and start by saying "you're part of the problem". But thank you for considering changing careers. What you have identified is exactly correct. If your institution is unable to raise funds in neuro that is a BAD SIGN since Obama promised a heap of money for neuro, and it is one of the few areas that is modestly well-funded (of course a lot of 'other players' jumped in to try to capture that money too so there's now, surprise surprise, more competition for that grant pool). If you were an EE, even with bad grades, you should be able to find a startup that will want you, that is, if you're young and want to play the startup lottery. Another thing to consider is to get a master's in EE or a related engineering discipline if you want a 'second chance' to bring your grades up. Sure, it costs money, but it's only one or two years and masters are very highly valued in the Engineering disciplines.
  • DaveWalk 12y ago
    > The funding is just not there at my uni Does that mean you won't be able to continue? As other posters suggested, if your "burning questions" are about leaving, perhaps you should set yourself up with an Exit Master's and use that to start your new career in neuro, depending on your situation and university. Feel free to pop over to the ScienceCareers forum for more specific advice: http://scforum.sciencecareers.org/viewforum.php?f=1 http://scforum.sciencecareers.org/viewforum.php?f=1
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• throwaway-4321 12y ago
  This hits just way too close to home to keep a straight face :-( If anyone on HN has any questions/doubts/need details, AMA. I'm a Life Sciences Post-Doc at a major US university. I'll try my best to answer (no personal details please).
  • sosuke 12y ago
    I loved science as a child, genetics was my hobby. The more I read, the more I learned, and the more I learned that to make a difference would require a monumental effort. To learn about the world, the understand the world, these are fun things. To unlock the secrets of the world puts you in a completely different category, and you need a certain drive and focus that not many have. My view of STEM and liberal arts have begun to merge. To excel academically in either requires devotion, and you have to learn 10 years to have the base knowledge enough to even start making headway into new territory. The idea of a 10,000 hour expert doesn't work through college education. Going to college used to be an affair for the intellectual elite, something that you did when you had family that could already cover living expenses for their children. The pursuit of knowledge was because you wanted to, and there wasn't often jobs connected to degrees. That is different now, thanks to available credit and a golden carrot people from all corners can sit in university, and get an education. The costs are deferred, hidden, for their future selves to contend with. Knowing what you know now, would you again go into Life Sciences with the thought of making a living in it? Would you go again perhaps because you love Life Sciences, that is your hobby, your passion, but do it on the side and get a 'regular job'. Maybe you could finish getting your PhD, decide that the joy of discovery was worth the time and cost, but then go into a more lucrative but perhaps unrelated field. Whatever happens, the price, the time of learning everything I assume you have learned has value. I took a different path, but I loved my 2 years of community college that I did as a hobby, learning about history, art, geology has all brought richness to my life. You're on HN, you have a hacker mind I assume, you see the startups. You have a valuable asset in your knowledge that most (top 20% easy) don't have. Look at the world, find a problem, solve it, do it on the side like programmers bootstrap. You can make the future what you want, but an education is very valuable, and a really cool thing to have done.
    • 12y ago
• facepalm 12y ago
  On the other hand, getting tenure is like winning the lottery, so maybe 8% is not that bad a probability.
• dnautics 12y ago
  I think it's important to consider that maybe scientists aren't worth paying that much. The average scientist is probably moving society forward, but I'm not so sure the median scientist is. Having been to a 'top 10' PhD program in a 'hard science' (chemistry), I am not sure 75% of the professors there were worth a dime. I am not sure 50% of the thesis defenses were, either (mine included). This is in contrast to the doorman example, or in my case, being a Lyft driver (which pays more than being a postdoc). Every night, I help society out by providing a service that someone wants, and if you want to be more abstract, by keeping drunk people off the road. I was able to raise $56,000 for an experiment in anticancer research. That doesn't seem like much (it isn't) but in retrospect it's about right. I asked for money for one experiment, and that's what I got. It doesn't pay my salary, but I probably don't deserve it (yet) until I've proven myself at least at one stage. Drug development is risky, why should society pay much more than the bare minimum to get it done?
  • acgourley 12y ago
    I too have had interactions with academics I don't think society is benefiting from. I think it's important to say out loud - maybe we need less research scientists and when we do that we might work on more important areas with slightly better funding.
  • emodendroket 12y ago
    Is this any less true for the median lawyer or doctor or office worker or any other profession you care to name which involves more than the most basic skills?
    • dnautics 12y ago
      increasingly doctors and lawyers are coming up against this professionalism/credentialism creep.
      • emodendroket 12y ago
        I suppose my point is that it's not as though having some people be more capable than others is unique to science; it does not seem to be much of an excuse to pay scientists less.
• tezzer 12y ago
  I've contracted for several government agencies and research firms, and I've noticed only PhD's get to run laboratories. Without one, you hit a glass ceiling rather quickly (by which I mean you don't make the leap from 100Kish to 200Kish salaries)
• kevinalexbrown 12y ago
  "Why do we do this to ourselves?" She asked me. "We train forever and ever, live in near poverty, work insane hours—all of it to get jobs that don’t exist, as tenure track faculty. Why do we suffer this way?" Because it's fun and fulfilling. My lab has had people who left banking and consulting gigs, at extraordinary financial cost, measured in dollars. Neither seemed to regret the switch much, but many who go the other way feel the same. Planning on a tenure track job isn't very reasonable, it's like planning for a successful startup, I suppose. But right now I get to do exactly what I want to be doing. The 'premium' economists would say I pay is worth it to me, for now.
  • Retra 12y ago
    It's not that fun though. It's a fun _dream_, and a dream that is worth chasing in theory, but most of us never come close to living it. Instead you just say "well, I'm sure things will work out after the hard part is over." There is no reliable point where the hardship ends. It's just sacrifice or career change for most.
  • DaveWalk 12y ago
    I respectfully disagree, and think "because it's fun" is a dangerous precedent to set. When I was in grad school there was an informational poster in the lobby that said something to this effect: "Why are you in lab at 12am on a Friday night? Because science is your passion, and you are awesome. Good job." I should have graffiti-ed "THIS IS PROMOTING AN UNHEALTHY LIFESTYLE" next to it. Why should we encourage this behavior -- especially in graduate students, lowest on the totem pole? How many PIs burn the midnight oil, versus living their life with their families? It felt so degrading. One of the most valuable things I learned from career development in grad school was that, in the real world, you can demand to be paid what you're worth. (And, ironically, you are respected more for it.) I think it is this, more than the actual salary, that is responsible for the depression seen in the article.
• varelse 12y ago
  Grad school cost me close to ~$100M... My bad... No I am not exaggerating. I would have been #3 at a very successful tech company had I chosen it over grad school and that's about half what #1 and #2 are worth these days. That said, over a decade after I tripled my salary in a day by fleeting my post-doc for the dotcom boom, everything I learned in academia suddenly became relevant and continues to increase in relevance every year.
  • puredemo 12y ago
    What became more relevant that you learned?
    • varelse 12y ago
      bioinformatics and machine learning
• sosuke 12y ago
  I remember watching Prince of Darkness, the students were in science. [Walter is studying quantum physics] Walter: Why do I want a Ph.D. in this? Catherine: Particle beam weapons, research grants... Walter: A millionaire when I'm forty! Now I remember! That is what I thought as well, I guess science doesn't pay.
• fergie 12y ago
  As a well paid software consultant, I totally envy my friends and family who get to work in academia. I would love to do a PhD no matter how poor it made me.
• vph 12y ago
  All this person is focusing on is $, $, $, and more $. If you want money, get a MS degree. PhD's don't get you high-salary jobs.
• api 12y ago
  It's simple: we have de-funded science just like we've de-funded other liberal pursuits. People like Peter Thiel are right about the drought of fundamental innovation since the early 70s, but they are wrong in other ways that ultimately render their arguments void and hypocritical. Thiel backs the same right-libertarian economic policies that caused this problem in the first place. The reason we stopped going to the Moon and inventing new paradigms in computing is because we stopped funding it. The simple fact is that only three kinds of entities can fund basic research in most fields: (1) Governments. (2) Gigantic corporations with entrenched monopolies so profitable that they can afford to spend like governments (e.g. the old Bell Labs). Usually deep lasting monopolies of that sort are government-granted... again Bell Labs is a good example. So this goes back to governments or alternately government can be seen as the ultimate super-monopoly. (3) Individuals with absolutely stratospheric net worth (over one billion at a minimum). The problem is that there are few of these and fewer who really get science and care about it that much. You can't -- and shouldn't be able to -- patent a law of nature. Discovering a fundamental principle that led eventually to practical fusion power, interstellar travel, or radical life extension (to give examples) would be among the most valuable acts in human history, but its economic value would be pretty darn close to $0. There is no way to directly monetize it. As a result, markets cannot efficiently fund basic research. There is no way to securitize it -- no marketable financial vehicle for valuing it, capitalizing it, or delivering returns on it. Monetize-ability doesn't come in until later -- until engineers have assimilated the new scientific discovery or principle and designed practical and workable technologies based around it. Usually these are different people than the original discoverers. Sometimes this process takes generations. Science won't come back from its present abyss until and unless we get over market fundamentalism and realize that there are some classes of human endeavor that markets just aren't very good at funding. It's a fact that's been true throughout history too. All the wonders of the ancient world (pyramids, Roman roads and aqueducts, etc.) were built by governments. None were built by commerce. All the wonders of the modern world -- the Moon landings, the Internet, the ISS, the Human Genome Project, the harnessing of the atom -- are either wholly government funded or were set into motion by a substantial initial investment of government money. The only big set of counterexamples I can think of are mostly out of Bell Labs, which was funded by a government-backed telephone monopoly. If you think Xerox Parc is a counterexample, go find the Engelbart demo. Parc was doing stuff that was trail-blazed by a DOD-funded SRI project a decade earlier. If you think Elon Musk's ventures are counterexamples, understand that both Tesla and especially SpaceX are built directly on massive amounts of government R&D over the past 50 years. SpaceX is basically commercializing a lot of NASA (and Soviet, and German) technology. Elon himself says this, to his credit. Most libertarians are simultaneously pro-tech and anti-state-investment. This requires an act of willful blindness and ideologically driven self-delusion on the same level as believing that the Earth is 6000 years old and mankind coexisted with dinosaurs. There is simply zero historical evidence that you can have that cake and eat it too. This is a special case of the more general "public good denialism" of right-libertarian and conservative ideology. Market fundamentalism is, quite ironically, America's own version of Soviet dogma. The deeper underlying reality is that to make a huge step forward like this requires enough capital to effectively insulate a group of smart motivated people from the market (and other forces and demands) long enough to enable them to try something fundamentally new. Nothing like that is ever profitable from the get-go. You can't bootstrap it. It must be a "pure act," almost Nietzschean, undertaken for the goal itself and nothing more. "We will go to the moon" or "we will build a pyramid" because... we decided to. Period. Only once the trail has been blazed can commerce come in and line the street with shops and houses. At that point you've de-risked the path enough that bootstrapping and venture funding and similar things become thinkable. I'm not anti-market. I reject that fundamentalism too, and generally reject fundamentalism as a way of thinking. Governments can fund basic research because they can, but they stink at taking it beyond the discovery or prototype phase. I'm just saying that markets are good at some things, but not others. Market should be free to act where they are effective, but they should be part of a larger political landscape that encompasses multiple mechanisms that are (hopefully) given jurisdiction where they work best. Everything I wrote here will remain true until someone figures out a way to profitably fund such things within a market framework. Given the monstrous challenges involved I'm not holding my breath. Patents would be a poor mechanism, since they would have the perverse effect of shutting down research in a whole area for a long time.
• niche 12y ago
  The issue here is that you are focused on: something vague (a PhD) and a quantitative psuedo paycheck. Money is bound by numbers, a primal abstraction of the mind. Focus on what is most meaningful to you, get it, chew it, digest it, vomit it out, study your vomit and repeat. Everything else will fall into place. You are limitless.
• pvaldes 12y ago
  This is totally true.
• harmonicon 12y ago
  My first college major was biology. I was determined to become a "scientist", inspired by all the giants I learned about in high school. I immediately found a job working in a lab after getting to college. However, I quickly become disillusioned about the career prospect. In the textbook, it seems like Mendel had a great idea one day after observation of pea traits. He cultivated some pea plants to test his idea and thus came the genetic theory of inheritance. Boom, home run. Modern biology research takes a lot more effort and churning just to get to a intermediate finding. Obviously I was at the bottom rung with the most menial work but it just did not appeal to me much. In addition to that, it is very apparent that everyone in the lab is stressed out. The professor is always working on a new grant application; post-docs worried about their future; grad students trying to get their experiment finished and paper out. People come into the lab on weekends all the time. It feels like a grind and very few people seem to have the time to slow down and take delight in their work. I didn't have an idea of how much their respective salary back then but its obviously they are not rich. I worked on the job for all four years but am very glad I switched my major to CS in my sophomore year.
  • hudibras 12y ago
    I don't really want to start a "us vs. them" flamewar, but biology is almost universally recognized as the most stressful lifestyle for grad students and post-docs, followed closely by chemistry. The lab lifestyles in those disciplines are insane.
    • Retra 12y ago
      It is easy to hate working in a lab...
• harmonicon 12y ago
  Also I feel like this article just reflect a familiar trend across all US labor market: Winner takes all. The people at the top always take a disproportionate amount of the overall resources. In manufacturing it's the CEO vs the assembly line worker; in healthcare it's the hospital administrator vs the nurse aid; in academics its the university administrator vs the grad student.
  • crpatino 12y ago
    I do not think "winner takes all" reflects what you described. Rather, I'd say it means: best basketball player plays in NBA and makes millions per year. Median basketball player trains a pee-wee team on the side while holding a sales day job.
    • DaveWalk 12y ago
      I diagree, and think the OP's point is actually quite prescient: "winner take all" is exactly how science is rewarded. The first to a discovery can claim the credit, and will get the merit added to their score on grant applications, tenure, etc. The second discoverer, or one who affirms the finding, is considered at best to lack creativity.
• CurtMonash 12y ago
  I got my PhD in Math from Harvard in 1979. Based on http://abel.harvard.edu/dissertations/index.html http://abel.harvard.edu/dissertations/index.html, it seems that 5-10 folks per year did that in those days. Perhaps 20% went on to research careers big enough to have Wikipedia articles now -- mainly in academia, although there's one in industrial cryptography (Don Coppersmith) and another in finance. Most of the rest have had decent careers in academia or business. However, I don't recall grants -- beyond grad school fellowships or whatever -- playing a major role in pure math at that time.
• othmanaba 12y ago
  The argument that PhDs should earn more because their education costed more is faulty. Salary is a price, you see. It is governed by laws of economics, supply and demand. Scientists should not earn more, because their value is unknown. Why would anyone pay $200,000 to someone who "might" create an amazing paper? Whereas those in investment banking earn much more than that because they provide much greater value to the employer. One should be pragmatic about life and not feel entitled just because they incurred high costs.
  • MereInterest 12y ago
    I think that the point is the other way around. Why should anybody go into science, given how little compensation there is for it? And that is the problem. It is easier to pay people for things with short payback periods. That's why the car salesman gets a bonus for each car sold, but the engineer who designed the car does not. The engineer was more essential yo the product, but the connection between the salesman and the money is more obvious. The scientist is more useful to society, but the investment banker has a more obvious connection to money, so the banker gets paid more. We should add more incentive to the scientists, because otherwise the rational choice is to leave science.
    • jschwartzi 12y ago
      And more importantly, we should ask ourselves what kind of society we would prefer to live in. Would we like to live a life as a used car salesman, surrounded by other used car salesmen, talking about our weekly sales numbers with our used car salesmen wives?
  • eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    A scientist generates knowledge. An investment banker generates debt. Debt is just promises, promises that someone else has to pay. Ultimately, those promises can only be paid using matter, energy, and knowledge.
• drdrey 12y ago
  "It didn’t really occur to me that most employed twenty-somethings weren’t scavenging free food from lecture halls." I used to do the same thing as a postdoc at UC Berkeley, while trying to provide for a wife and kid. Actually finding leftover sandwiches was a big deal.
• geebee 12y ago
  My guess is that none of this is surprising to people on HN, we're well aware of it. But the message is important. Our government still operates on an almost unquestioned assumption that there is a critical shortage of people going into science and engineering. A discussion from the chronicle of higher education is here - along with a link to the very specific legislation that is voted on. http://chronicle.com/article/Immigration-Overhaul-Hailed/140055/ http://chronicle.com/article/Immigration-Overhaul-Hailed/140... "The real game changer in the bill for universities is in the green-card section, where advanced-degree graduates for STEM fields have green cards stapled to their diplomas," said Craig Lindwarm, assistant director for international issues and Congressional and governmental affairs at the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities." Notice that this is specifically STEM. Many legislators in government truly believe that there is a shortage of STEM workers, especially at the grad degree level (they are almost never holders of these degrees). Meanwhile, a report from the RAND institute finds the aversion to STEM graduate degrees among US citizens (ie., people who already have the freedom to work and live in the US regardless of what degree they hold) is rational considering the better prospects in other fields. http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html Keep in mind that a dental hygienist in San Francisco makes a median salary of 109k a year, a registered nurse in San Jose 122k a year (see us news best jobs for sources). The whole system is due for a correction, and truth is, the market would bring about this reckoning on its own if it weren't for the interference of government. To get people into STEM graduate programs, especially at the elite level, you'd need to make those graduate programs as attractive as MBA, dentistry, medicine, elite law, and so forth. What would happen? Perhaps universities would do something about the 50%+ PhD attrition rates, realizing that elite law and med schools typically have attrition rates of below .5% (yes, half of one percent). Perhaps they'd make completion times shorter and more predictable. Perhaps salaries and work conditions would improve. Or, alternatively, universities wanting students and tech companies wanting workers can lobby for special consideration in the immigration system, where immigrants are allowed into the US only on the condition that they either have immediate family or spend a huge chunk of their lives studying science and engineering, getting PhD degrees that only make sense if you don't have the same choices as full and free citizens, and working in this field under limiting visa conditions for an extended period of time, after which your life options may be more limited. So far, the second choice appears to be the path the US has chosen, but by delaying the market correction, the US may truly harm itself in the long run. I don't think it's wise to allow the career path for science to deteriorate to the point where the only people who would pursue it are ones who don't have the freedom to chose their profession in the US.
• ska 12y ago
  It can even be hard when your career trajectory isn't stuck. I went to grad school because it was well funded and I could do fun research; I did the same thing in a post-doc with my own funding (much more than this article suggests, so I wasn't giving up too much salary compared to industry). But I got a good look at what the next 10+ years were going to look like if I wanted to be successful at it. Although I had tenure track offers I decided the life of a research academic, even at an R1, wasn't for me. The practicalities of maintaining funding derail a lot of good research ideas and make people very conservative. Time pressure from the admin and teaching on top of this leaves little left for actual research. This was topped off with the difficulty I was having trying to get outside collaborations really working and transition my research into practice. Maybe if I'd been better at it I would have had opportunities that changed my mind, I don't know. So I left, although many of my colleagues thought I was crazy to do so having "made it" past the post-doc trap. I can't complain at all, I made a decent salary for several years to just do research and learn things, which was great. But I couldn't see staying.
• michaelochurch 12y ago
  Academia and VC-funded startups in this "M&A has replaced R&D" era seem radically different but are actually similar in structure. You have a massive wealth of mostly passive capital with vague desires behind it. For the VCs, it's "invest in small businesses and get me a high return", the passive capitalists being administrators of teachers' pension funds in Ohio who delegate the small-business investment decisions to a bunch of well-connected "experts" and kingmakers in California. From the government, it's "invest in research that benefits the national interest". You have talent that wants to do the research and exploration. And you have politically-adept middlemen who manage to leverage the principal-agent problem native to passive capital for personal gain. In technology, those are the venture capitalists, the well-connected people who can be founders whenever they want by placing phone calls, and the buy-side executives at Hooli-type companies who have the authority to acq-hire mediocre "talent" at $10 million per head. In academia, they're the bureaucrats who administer grants and the most successful academics who transfer out of an IC role into a professorship that is mostly a management role with a high degree of credit. (That's what the OP's discussing when he talks about the people doing the work getting the least credit, having it taken by advisors and full-timers.) Power goes not necessarily to the best scientists, but to those who are most able to direct the flow of passive investment capital (from the government) in a direction they find favorable. It's upsetting and perverse, but it also shouldn't be surprising. People sell their votes for pennies and wonder why they don't have power. Ohio pension funds invest their wealth in Silicon Valley VCs and wonder why none of the jobs being created are within 500 miles of them. Academics and startup engineers who work based on "idealism" or "changing the world" are likewise selling their votes by taking jobs that underdeliver in compensation and career support. And, of course, people pay taxes into the federal grants that keep universities afloat (let's be honest: even "private" universities breathe on taxpayer oxygen) and tuition to get their kids stamped as "approved for admission into the middle class" and that's the biggest bit of cut-price vote-selling in all of this. Part of me says "fuck this noise" and the other part of me doesn't know what the solution is, for startups or for academia. I think the end goal of all societies should be (just as political vote-selling is illegal) to make passive capital a bit less passive, so that the salesmen who make careers of buying and selling cheap votes at a profit are (what is the word?) disintermediated.
• superdude264 12y ago
  So the university get a portion of each grant someone brings in? This may be naive, but I thought grant money was given to a person/project and that tuition paid for university stuff.
  • dekhn 12y ago
    Yes, universities get an extra amount over the requested amount; it's negotiated between the U and the funding agency and is called "overhead". It goes into Dean's funds and stuff, part of which supports departmental-level services, as well as many other places.
• throwaway1979 12y ago
  I have a PhD in CS from a highly ranked school (systems) and work for an industrial lab (6 years out of school). I make the same as a fresh graduate from Waterloo from recent empirical evidence. It is just dressed up differently ... the fresh grad in question has a salary at the 100K mark salary with 25K-ish in guaranteed bonus for a few years (plus some stock options). I make that in guaranteed salary with no bonus or options. My work week just ended (easily 10 hours a day doing very cool stuff but not science). I'm juggling reading some papers out of true interest (deep belief nets), reviewing some crappy papers for some journal that were due two weeks ago, and spending time with my wife. Clearly I made some very bad career decisions.
  • billsossoon 12y ago
    Then get out of your comfort zone. If you want to shake up your career, now's the time to do it. And nobody is going hand it to you.
• saalweachter 12y ago
  This is trickle up economics at its finest. The share of income going to labor has been declining for decades. 2000 hours a year at minimum wage is $15k before taxes. Why should universities pay their grad students any better when $15-20k is the realistic best alternative? If you want to increase grad student stipends, a $15/hr minimum wage is the way to do it.
  • tdaltonc 12y ago
    I would expect that most grad students have plan-B options that can beat minimum wage.
    • saalweachter 12y ago
      The problem is that there's also a very large pool of people who could be grad students who are currently unemployed or underemployed. If some grad students get tired of the conditions and decide to seek higher wages in private industry, the universities can easily recruit more grad students in short order for the exact same wages as they were paying before. Therefore, there is no incentive to improve the conditions to retain their existing grad students (or post-docs, or assistant professors...).
• dluan 12y ago
  It's posts like these that show just how ripe for innovation academia has become. It's no surprise that there are now so many science tech startups popping up. Founded primarily by scientists. https://hackpad.com/Science-Tech-Startups-zSZ0KdT6Zk1 https://hackpad.com/Science-Tech-Startups-zSZ0KdT6Zk1
• lambdafunc 12y ago
  go do an mba instead of a phd if you really want to spend more time in university.
• rrtwo 12y ago
  ok, so I have done the 'mistake'* and now an epsilon away from getting my PhD in CS. What would be the best came coming out of it financial? * I did enjoy the process very much, and learned a lot, but like the gist of the article - you can't feed on science.
• abvdasker 12y ago
  relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovEghdXC4tE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovEghdXC4tE
• tsotha 12y ago
  >Frankly, everything about the career, the business of science, is constructed to impoverish and disenfranchise young scientists, delaying the maturation of their careers beyond practicality. That's because way, way too many people want to be scientists. Lots of people want to be actors, too, and most of them end up working as waiters for the same reason. I've never run across such a smart group of people who are so dumb. Even if you win the lottery and get that coveted tenured position you're not going to be doing much in the way of research - you're going to spend all your time filling out grant applications and managing grad students. You may as well get an MBA instead.
• stalcottsmith 12y ago
  Passed on a career in science when I was 17 and noticed after interviewing professors that it was mostly full of politics and money stress and precious little science. Fact is there are a lot of fields that are "desirable" and enjoy and endless supply of willing young and talented recruits. These fields always pay terribly for all but the elite and offer tremendous competition. Publishing seemed to be another one. It was common knowledge or at least patently obvious to me that you should not attempt a career in publishing (editing and evaluating manuscripts for major publishing houses) in NYC without a trust fund and or a magic credit card paid by daddy. Science is like that. I hope my children can do science.
• MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  Why do scientists regard academia as necessary? Out of my own education, the science class that I regard as the very-most valuable with Caltech's "Physics X", taught by Richard Feynman. There were no grades, no homework, no tests. One did not register for the class ahead of time, one could come and go as one pleased. One could ask any question one wanted, provided Dr. Feynman was not required to work out any math. It's not like he didn't know how to, rather that he felt conceptual understanding was far more important than the understanding that comes from following derivations. Pierre Fermat totally stymied more than three hundred years of the world's very finest mathematicians with his famous Last Theorem - while serving as a magistrate of the French Court. We've had universities since medieval times, however it is only recently that universities have served science. It is also only recently that one attended a university to prepare for a career. Consider that I have a degree in Physics, despite that I work as a coder. In my actual experience I am often able to do work that those with Computer Science degrees are unable to. (I expect that some CS graduates could perform Physics research that I myself would be unable to, were they only to try.) Would you like to do research? To publish? Win the Nobel Prize? Score with graduate students? Just carry around a notebook. If you see something that you don't fully understand, write it down. You might forget, or if you remember the phenomenon, you might not remember it accurately. If you find a phenomenon that you can't explain, try to find some way to explain it. perhaps it's in wikipedia. Or if not, perhaps it's in scientific american magazine. or if not, perhaps it's in the astrophysical journal. Maybe you've discovered something totally new, or if not, you are the very first to take interest in any otherwise unnoticed phenomenon, or perhaps the first to explain it. If you can explain it, publish your explanation. Don't gripe about the peer-reviewed journals - publish it on your website. If you have a Sitemaps Protocol file - http://www.sitemaps.org/ http://www.sitemaps.org/ - then The Wayback Machine will eventually pick it up. "Peer Review", for me, consists of mentioning something I'm working on at Kuro5hin, then getting flamed mercilessly for it. The way I see my colleagues at Kuro5hin, is much like the reason Inspector Clouseau requested that Kato attack him with sophisticated martial arts whenever he entered his apartment. "Citation" is getting linked. "What about research grants?" you may reasonably ask. When I was at the Institute, there was an Astronomy Professor who had never been awarded a grant in her entire career - no doubt due to sexism, as the grants are awarded by anonymous committee members. She was real pissed off about this, but didn't let her lack of funding get her down; she paid for her research by operating a recycling center on the side. I'm good enough at Physics that I figure I could get tenure were I to complete my doctorate. But I don't want to be part of the system. It was pointed out to me in 1993 that there were too many postdocs, and not enough professorial seats. I'd like to publish, but really, I don't see the point of completing my PhD or even applying for a postdoc fellowship. However, I do carry a laboratory notebook around with me. And I do publish - on my own website. (BTW - I didn't decide to be a scientist when I was sixteen; I decided to be a Chemist at first, when I was but eight years old.)
• hueving 12y ago
  > Don’t we, as a society, want them to have bright little babies who will make the future a better place? If we do, we’re really working against ourselves. This is a common flaw in thinking I see all of the time when it comes to teachers, scientists, and everyone else that someone says is underpaid. The fact that they are underpaid represents exactly how the sum of our society values people in these positions. So the blunt answer is, "no, humans are more focused on short term goals and reward people that provide something with an immediate return." Lots of smart people train to become lawyers as well, and now the market is saturated with new lawyers resulting in a situation similar to PhD students. Think about how much interest you have in shelling out extra money to fund these new lawyers salaries with bring them to parity with the law graduates of 10 years ago. That is how much interest most of society has in ensuring that someone with a PhD in biology is making six figures.
• known 12y ago
  Why you should not go to medical school? http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/abinazir/2005/05/23/why-you-should-not-go-to-medical-school-a-gleefully-biased-rant/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/abinazir/2005/05/23/why-you-sho...
• kirk21 12y ago
  Guess it depends on your location. In Belgium they pay quite a lot to compete with the private sector. In Germany not so much...
• padobson 12y ago
  If you're smart enough to copy DNA with a polymerase chain reaction, then you're probably smart enough to figure out the logistics of building a highly efficient janitorial services company that undercuts the local competition. On that career path, you'll be making six figures before your scientist doppleganger gets their graduate degree. The point is, most career paths don't put money as the top priority. Count up the costs before you start down it.
• xanmas 12y ago
  Assuming 7% returns, and 6% employee match of a graduate student's salary in my programme (32k), graduate school costs ~288k in lost retirement savings, as well.
• mudetroit 12y ago
  I wonder if this doesn't point to a market inefficiency that someone could take advantage of. A company that focused on research specifically, patenting and marketing relevant discoveries or spinning of subsidiary companies to exploit research they are doing. I know it isn't the tenure track positions that are mentioned in the articles. But a company like this could potentially pay substantially more than the academic institutions,and give them a more immediate opportunity to publish as a primary investigator. Those additional publishing opportunities may allow them to even return to the academic field if they chose to later on. Just something I was mulling over while reading the article.
  • Chronic30 12y ago
    Go make that mobile app then.
• nosferatus 12y ago
  low cost high reward, from my view
• papul1993 12y ago
  This makes me so sad. I am currently studying Chemistry in a joint undergraduate+postgraduate program. And reading all of this makes me so sad. Here in India, the situation is even worse.
• mikhailfranco 12y ago
  If a situation doesn't make any logical sense, you are not seeing it from the right perspective. If you look around and can't see the sucker, it's probably you. Higher education is not designed to produce happy productive affluent scientists, it's designed to make money for the education industry (administrators) and churn out debt slaves for the finance industry.