5 ms·

The article claims a problem is that there aren't enough mid-tier positions, for those who have just acquired a PhD but aren't yet suitable for a professorship.

by j2kun 11y ago

The article claims a problem is that there aren't enough mid-tier positions, for those who have just acquired a PhD but aren't yet suitable for a professorship. What sort of solution could one imagine? Outside of post-doctorate positions, there's neither funding nor desire for the kind of research that you need to further an academic career.

barry-cotter 11y ago
Reduce the number of graduate programme places so the over supply is less, either by reducing the number of places reasonably evenly across the system or by closing marginal doctoral programmes altogether. There are a lot of universities that graduate Ph.D.s who have virtually no chance of a decent academic position. The first tier universities graduate more than 5 times as many Drs. each year than are necessary to replace their own staff, some much more than that. You need to be an extremely strong second tier graduate to have a chance of getting a position at the same level, never mind going up. Third tier or below are basically exploited for teaching and research labour and then gradually eased out of the system. People should not enter these programmes expecting to get an academic job. Those who enter those programmes would be better off getting a J.D., which is damning. A J.D. is a horrible idea for most people but at least it only wastes 3 years and less than $200K. Most people who enter a Ph.D. programme drop out, in most disciplines, and some people who do graduate take up to ten years.
- FLengyel 11y ago
  This is correct. In retrospect my math Ph.D. was a waste of time. There have been proposals over the years on how to address the overabundance of PhDs. One approach seems to have been widely and independently adopted: advise those responsible for easing out the exploited to read Erving Goffman's On Cooling the Mark Out: Some aspects of adaptation to Failure [1, 2]. 1. http://www.tau.ac.il/~algazi/mat/Goffman--Cooling.htm http://www.tau.ac.il/~algazi/mat/Goffman--Cooling.htm 2. http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2002/10/31/cooling-the-mark-out/ http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2002/10/31/cooling-the-...
- sjg007 11y ago
  There are thousands of foreigners will to take the places. You can't talk about academia and ignore immigration.
- sjg007 11y ago
  There are thousands of foreigners will to take the places. You can't talk about academia and ignore immigration.
calibraxis 11y ago
As a start, remove the bureaucratic administrative layers which have grown wild due to managerialism? "My own knowledge comes from universities, both in the United States and Britain. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative tasks at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have more administrators than faculty members, and the faculty members, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administration as on teaching and research combined. The same is true, more or less, at universities worldwide." http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-decl... Articles like this indundate the reader with chart upon chart. High-res pictures with a scope too narrow to find serious solutions. What do these charts leave out?
learnstats2 11y ago
>Outside of post-doctorate positions, there's neither funding nor desire for the kind of research that you need to further an academic career. But why not? If academic work is for the benefit of mankind, there should be a desire in society for that kind of research[0]. This desire is only muted because of commercial interests having increased influence (directly and indirectly) over academia. [0]Perhaps there is a mismatch in what we mean by 'kind of research' here. But this is a political point as well - the kind of research that has long-term benefits to society should be exactly the kind of research that furthers academic careers.
- theOnliest 11y ago
  I appreciate your point, but this kind of attitude often (intended or not) leaves humanities PhDs out in the cold. Sure, for a PhD in computer science you might convince the public that your work is worthwhile (there may be some practical application). My PhD is in the field of music theory...a field which has practically zero real-world applications. It's still important as an academic field, but the long-term benefit to society of a music theory dissertation is simply that we understand a particular aspect of music better.
  - akshaypuradkar 11y ago
    "long-term benefits to society" is one attitude. Surely you have better argument in defense of your field or humanities generally. Can you elaborate a bit on the kind of attitude you talk of?
    - theOnliest 11y ago
      Sure. (I wasn't as clear as I might have been...it's early yet.) I was preempting a response that I often hear when this debate comes up, which is that "the market" will fix the problem of underemployed PhDs. This often turns into an argument that research that has "practical value" (as judged by the general public) is somehow more important than that which does not. On Hacker News I sense that it's common to read "PhD" as "STEM PhD," and the response is "it's fine, they can just find positions in the industry." This logic tends to fall short when applied to the humanities in general, and external (non-university) funding for humanities research is shockingly less than those in STEM fields. The National Endowment for the Humanities has an annual budget of $167 million, and the National Science Foundation, compared to $7 billion for the NSF (numbers from Wikipedia). Humanities research often tends to get mocked in debates on public funding: "Why are we, the taxpayers, paying this person to go look through archives in Germany looking for fragments of music by Robert Schumann?" The humanities do not, in general, have "practical application," at least if practical application means monetary value (as it often does). As 1stop notes in a sibling, humanities research is often research for the sake of culture, or for the sake of research itself. I got into my field because I love it, but also because I think there is inherent value in knowledge. The number of people who will read my dissertation could likely all enjoy a meal together, but for those few people it matters deeply. So there is some long-term benefit to society for humanities research (other people, likely also scholars, can benefit from it later), but it's not a benefit that's easily quantified. In today's society, this is a problem without a clear solution, and it's an attitude I see a lot on HN (with constant talk of valuation and whatnot).
nmrm2 11y ago
> Outside of post-doctorate positions, there's neither funding nor desire for the kind of research that you need to further an academic career. At least in Computer Science, the alternative is to simply go into industry at a company that will let you continue publishing, and get a paper out every year or two. Lots of people have successfully made the transition back into academia after a post-PhD stint in industry.
- cscheid 11y ago
  That turns out to be exactly what I did, but that type of opportunity is now much rarer than it was even 10 years ago. MSR is the stalwart "you-can-publish-here" industrial research lab, and look at what happened to MSR SV -- to say nothing of other smaller places, also shrinking.
  - nmrm2 11y ago
    I meant really "going into industry", not "going into the industrial portions of academia". As in, becoming a software engineer at Google et al. You won't be able to net a position at a top R1, but plenty of universities (and esp. colleges) would be happy for someone a few years out from a solid Ph.D. but with a strong industrial background and track record of (perhaps ad junct) teaching and/or moonlight researching. Especially if you stay in industry long enough that you don't need a six figure salary. Congratulations on successfully navigating that transition, BTW.

by j2kun 11y ago

barry-cotter 11y ago

Reduce the number of graduate programme places so the over supply is less, either by reducing the number of places reasonably evenly across the system or by closing marginal doctoral programmes altogether. There are a lot of universities that graduate Ph.D.s who have virtually no chance of a decent academic position. The first tier universities graduate more than 5 times as many Drs. each year than are necessary to replace their own staff, some much more than that. You need to be an extremely strong second tier graduate to have a chance of getting a position at the same level, never mind going up. Third tier or below are basically exploited for teaching and research labour and then gradually eased out of the system. People should not enter these programmes expecting to get an academic job. Those who enter those programmes would be better off getting a J.D., which is damning. A J.D. is a horrible idea for most people but at least it only wastes 3 years and less than $200K. Most people who enter a Ph.D. programme drop out, in most disciplines, and some people who do graduate take up to ten years.

FLengyel 11y ago
This is correct. In retrospect my math Ph.D. was a waste of time. There have been proposals over the years on how to address the overabundance of PhDs. One approach seems to have been widely and independently adopted: advise those responsible for easing out the exploited to read Erving Goffman's On Cooling the Mark Out: Some aspects of adaptation to Failure [1, 2]. 1. http://www.tau.ac.il/~algazi/mat/Goffman--Cooling.htm http://www.tau.ac.il/~algazi/mat/Goffman--Cooling.htm 2. http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2002/10/31/cooling-the-mark-out/ http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2002/10/31/cooling-the-...
sjg007 11y ago
There are thousands of foreigners will to take the places. You can't talk about academia and ignore immigration.
sjg007 11y ago
There are thousands of foreigners will to take the places. You can't talk about academia and ignore immigration.

calibraxis 11y ago

As a start, remove the bureaucratic administrative layers which have grown wild due to managerialism? "My own knowledge comes from universities, both in the United States and Britain. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative tasks at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have more administrators than faculty members, and the faculty members, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administration as on teaching and research combined. The same is true, more or less, at universities worldwide." http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-decl... Articles like this indundate the reader with chart upon chart. High-res pictures with a scope too narrow to find serious solutions. What do these charts leave out?

learnstats2 11y ago

>Outside of post-doctorate positions, there's neither funding nor desire for the kind of research that you need to further an academic career. But why not? If academic work is for the benefit of mankind, there should be a desire in society for that kind of research[0]. This desire is only muted because of commercial interests having increased influence (directly and indirectly) over academia. [0]Perhaps there is a mismatch in what we mean by 'kind of research' here. But this is a political point as well - the kind of research that has long-term benefits to society should be exactly the kind of research that furthers academic careers.

theOnliest 11y ago
I appreciate your point, but this kind of attitude often (intended or not) leaves humanities PhDs out in the cold. Sure, for a PhD in computer science you might convince the public that your work is worthwhile (there may be some practical application). My PhD is in the field of music theory...a field which has practically zero real-world applications. It's still important as an academic field, but the long-term benefit to society of a music theory dissertation is simply that we understand a particular aspect of music better.
- akshaypuradkar 11y ago
  "long-term benefits to society" is one attitude. Surely you have better argument in defense of your field or humanities generally. Can you elaborate a bit on the kind of attitude you talk of?
  - theOnliest 11y ago
    Sure. (I wasn't as clear as I might have been...it's early yet.) I was preempting a response that I often hear when this debate comes up, which is that "the market" will fix the problem of underemployed PhDs. This often turns into an argument that research that has "practical value" (as judged by the general public) is somehow more important than that which does not. On Hacker News I sense that it's common to read "PhD" as "STEM PhD," and the response is "it's fine, they can just find positions in the industry." This logic tends to fall short when applied to the humanities in general, and external (non-university) funding for humanities research is shockingly less than those in STEM fields. The National Endowment for the Humanities has an annual budget of $167 million, and the National Science Foundation, compared to $7 billion for the NSF (numbers from Wikipedia). Humanities research often tends to get mocked in debates on public funding: "Why are we, the taxpayers, paying this person to go look through archives in Germany looking for fragments of music by Robert Schumann?" The humanities do not, in general, have "practical application," at least if practical application means monetary value (as it often does). As 1stop notes in a sibling, humanities research is often research for the sake of culture, or for the sake of research itself. I got into my field because I love it, but also because I think there is inherent value in knowledge. The number of people who will read my dissertation could likely all enjoy a meal together, but for those few people it matters deeply. So there is some long-term benefit to society for humanities research (other people, likely also scholars, can benefit from it later), but it's not a benefit that's easily quantified. In today's society, this is a problem without a clear solution, and it's an attitude I see a lot on HN (with constant talk of valuation and whatnot).

nmrm2 11y ago

> Outside of post-doctorate positions, there's neither funding nor desire for the kind of research that you need to further an academic career. At least in Computer Science, the alternative is to simply go into industry at a company that will let you continue publishing, and get a paper out every year or two. Lots of people have successfully made the transition back into academia after a post-PhD stint in industry.

cscheid 11y ago
That turns out to be exactly what I did, but that type of opportunity is now much rarer than it was even 10 years ago. MSR is the stalwart "you-can-publish-here" industrial research lab, and look at what happened to MSR SV -- to say nothing of other smaller places, also shrinking.
- nmrm2 11y ago
  I meant really "going into industry", not "going into the industrial portions of academia". As in, becoming a software engineer at Google et al. You won't be able to net a position at a top R1, but plenty of universities (and esp. colleges) would be happy for someone a few years out from a solid Ph.D. but with a strong industrial background and track record of (perhaps ad junct) teaching and/or moonlight researching. Especially if you stay in industry long enough that you don't need a six figure salary. Congratulations on successfully navigating that transition, BTW.