This is only surprising if you expect that every postdoc should stay in academia, or would want to. Being in academia is not the only way to do research, and is not a prerequisite to using your degree. The private sector is a thing, and postdocs leaving academia can do perfectly good work in their field while actually making a grown up salary.
These are good arguments about phd's not going into academia. But a postdoc at a university is an underpaid training position for the most part. Not a worthwhile sacrifice if you want to work in the private sector in my field. Maybe it's more important for industry jobs in biology or something.
Personally I think it's a warped system that takes advantage of cheap labor from developing countries. And it feeds itself. The more temporary research staff professors can hire, the less permanent research staff universities need.
That's mostly reasonable. But for some people at least, the PhD doesn't give them all the skills they are looking for, so they might do another post-doc (2-3 years at slightly better than PhD lifestyle), before jumping ship.
generally you are somewhat right, but it's complicated by country. for example it would be less surprising that a UK-style 3 year PhD might want a couple more years training after.
> But a postdoc at a university is an underpaid training position for the most part.
That's not really true or fair. You're talking about a person who's done likely 4 years of undergraduate and between 4 and 8 (median 5?) years of graduate studies and gained a Ph.D. This person is without a doubt "an expert" in their field. Does that person still need training? Sure. But who doesn't?
You're also talking about someone who is probably in their early to mid 30's. Eventually people want to start having a life. And you're expecting them to make pennies? I'm not joking. Here's a list of CS Post Doc stipends[0]. Go to Berkeley or Stanford and make $66k-$80k? I've gotten more money as a PhD Intern! You're going to get more than double that in industry before we talk about RSUs.
I think this is something we need to take quite seriously here. There aren't really good reasons for people to choose this path, especially considering how disruptive it is to your life (have fun moving again in a few years :). Maybe we can hope that those who go are just really dedicated to research and following their passions. So dedicated that they are willing to put off normal human things like starting a family, maintaining relationships[1], or even just building one's net worth (or paying off student debt). Some people want to become a professor[2] so will do that.
But the big thing I see is that there's nothing to attract the best people. (We can extend this to even just professorships[3]). So who are becoming the postdocs and professors? Who are becoming the people that educate the next wave of people? If you are at the top, you likely aren't going the professor route, you're likely going to industry where you'll likely get 2x-3x the pay AND more freedom in your research. Even if you're pretty mid you can get 2x-3x the pay in industry with an honestly less stressful life (but you may not be doing research or likely have more restriction of what research you can pursue). This, seems pretty disastrous. At best, unstable. There's not a lot of professor spots but I think we need to have some incentive system such that people at the top are encouraged to carry on their research for the public as well as educate future researchers. As a business you want to be greedy and capture top talent, but that's also because you should be thinking much shorter term. At social levels, we have to think generations.
TLDR:
So are we confident we are getting "cream of the crop" (even if shared with industry) in academic positions? Are we sure that's even true at highly prestigious institutions?
I think the answer is "no", we should not be confident in that outcome.
[1] Good chance you met your partner while doing a PhD and yay now you both need to find post docs but they are competitive and so good luck finding one in the same place? Hope you like long distance relationships or are willing to let one partner make a bigger sacrifice.
[2] Which weird thing that we train someone to become an expert researcher and then as a professor we give them such high and diverse workloads that they will often have little time for research and instead will more be managers. The research skill degrades with time and only keeping up at a high level is not sufficient.
[3] In CS a post doc is also often a way to elevate your status. Like you got your PhD from a lower tier university and so doing a Post Doc at a much higher tier can make you employable at a more prestigious university. Because prestige still matters a lot, especially since it is tightly coupled with things like equipment access.
[side note]: I think with the competitiveness that it is a bit odd we still have these strong notions of prestige. Just to put things in perspective, if every graduating PhD at the number 1 school, they likely graduate enough people that you could fill all available faculty positions available. Given how prestige matters, it should be clear how high prestige graduates permeate into lower prestige positions. More clear when you start to consider things like how many top universities are in not the greatest living locations. https://drafty.cs.brown.edu/csopenrankings/placement-rank.ht...https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/
As a grad student, for the duration of your thesis work, you're locked into a specialty at a specific institute that isn't necessarily first-tier, may need to work at a level of intensity that prevents you from attending to a proper job search, and may end up under a professor who doesn't adequately support your career (e.g., with reputation and favorable recommendations).
In short, many things can go wrong, but you're focused on finishing. Under those conditions, if you do go straight into an industry job, it may be a shitty job that's not much better than a post-doc.
A brief stint as a post-doc gives you an income while you repair your career. This may involve changing specialties, developing your own research idea, working in a more prestigious institute or under a famous professor, or searching for industry jobs. Whatever it is, my own advice would be to only consider doing a post doc if it serves a credible purpose, otherwise, getting paid to get older isn't worth it.
In my field (physics), it was customary for grad students to work for their PhD advisor as a post-doc if they didn't already have a job lined up. I know lots of people who did that. It may inflate the number of "postdocs who leave academia" if it's not really a new job and their intention was to leave academia all along.
It's not as if there is a surplus of academic job slots that are going unfilled. The pyramid where one professor trains multiple grad students quickly becomes unsustainable.
You should absolutely only do a postdoc on the supposition that you will get a tenure track faculty position afterwards. It makes no sense financially or emotionally to do one if your goal is to go into industry.
But how can we know that we picked the right person for the job if we aren't at the very least absolutely sure the alternatives were worse?
The human mind resists accepting decisions made without a proportional amount of effort put into those decisions. If we only get one candidate for the job, we will either hire them and deal with constant nagging doubt, or we will lower our standards to get more options we can reject to feel good, but at which point we've now created false hope in the remaining candidates and an illusion of more opportunities existing than actually do.
Humans are messy, and so everything is always fucked. Even when it's not, we find a way to make it so.
I don't think I ever remember a time when the walls of the pyramid were shallow enough that the base could support all of the people at the top.
2 out of 5 people getting all the way to the end and discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.
A lot of people convince themselves that what they aren't feeling now will finally come to them after one more milestone, and as long as there enough milestones ahead of them they can play for time until it happens. Or they hit Sunk Cost and feel like they can't tap out now because they'll look like idiots, ignoring how much bigger an idiot you look like for wasting X more years of your youth and saddling yourself with even more debt. Or existential crisis with much the same outcomes. "Who am I even if I'm not..."
* discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.*
It’s not the research or teaching that drive people out of academia. It’s the endless and humiliating scrambling for money. Everyone who’s not a psychopath hates that part of the job, and the people who are any good at it have options outside of academia.
>2 out of 5 people getting all the way to the end and discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.
Research and teaching can take place outside of academia.
>A lot of people convince themselves that what they aren't feeling now will finally come to them after one more milestone, and as long as there enough milestones ahead of them they can play for time until it happens. Or they hit Sunk Cost and feel like they can't tap out now because they'll look like idiots, ignoring how much bigger an idiot you look like for wasting X more years of your youth and saddling yourself with even more debt. Or existential crisis with much the same outcomes. "Who am I even if I'm not..."
Learning can exist for the sake of learning and doesn't necessarily need to be reflected in career choice or identity.
For many it’s not easy to accept that "who you are" doesn't have to depend on the prestige of a title or a position, and that's often where people get stuck.
I think that all postdocs should stay in academia, why else would you do a postdoc? I assume (maybe wrong?) that most of the postdocs had intended to stay when starting the postdoc.
You can do research during your postdoc with chill timelines and pretty much 100% autonomy on your topic and then bootstrap a company with the ideas you've developed during said postdoc? In many countries the postdoc owns the IP of the research they're doing
Sunk cost? Selection bias? I don't think you can get a PhD by accident, you have to really want to work in academia (or a specific industry). And I doubt getting a second post doc position is all that hard (as long as you're willing to travel), given they're capable of getting the first one. My understanding is that universities quite like being able to hire cheap, hard working, disposable researchers.
People who go into academia are probably willing to live the life of an underpaid researcher. The fact that they have the post-doc title instead of the professor title probably is that big a deal, nor is the salary going to change their decision. The lack of autonomy is probably annoying, as is the lack of stability. Having to worry that they might change labs and maybe cities every 3 years, and not knowing for sure if they'll get a job is probably the only thing actually making them quit.
Seconded. Ex post doc here. Any post docs reading this, I would say - academia is a sort of gravy train for the middle class (in the UK). If you want a comfortable life without doing much of worth, you’re not really driven in your work, stick with it. You’ll have to fight for your lectureship but once you’ve done that you can live an easy life with the only difficulties stupid bureaucracy, politics, and cynicism.
However, if you have a bit more energy in you than that, have some ambition, leave asap. Startups are a great alternative. Big co research labs are another. Or just get a day job that you love and do research in the evenings. You could even get paid to do real research via patron etc if you do well.
I think academia in the uk is part of the social structure designed to maintain the status quo. The academics get good pensions and don’t do much, and in return they don’t challenge the ruling classes. Part of the class system.
There are some exceptions to this rule, some good places doing good research, but they are a tiny minority.
> Being in academia is not the only way to do research,
No, but (and I'm not in this space, so totally ignorant), is it not the case that if you're not associated with a Uni in some form that _PUBLISHING_ your research is all but impossible?
You can definitely publish outside academia. I assume you mean in scholarly journals specifically, and are questioning whether or not you need the backing or credentials of an educational institution to get past the gatekeepers—you can. It's just that, outside academia, where publishing is kind of a job requirement, there's not as much incentive to do so, and you may not always be allowed to do so by your employer.
Indeed. In other news, the overall pass rates for my (translated into US terms for the first three) middle school, high school, university and post-graduate degree were all approximately 50%. So this doesn't seem particularly bad.
Not surprising. I quit after about a year. I could have stayed on but I realized that it just wasn't right for me. By then I had figured out that most research is done by post docs and phd students and it doesn't pay very well. Not that I cared about the money but I started thinking about what is next and did not like the perspective.
Professors are basically there to manage the process and haggle for funding. They tend to not be very hands-on with research for the simple reason that that's not their main job. They mostly delegate that to people in their team.
And you can only become a professor by doing post docs, landing some tenured position and then maybe they'll make you a professor somewhere. It's a long, uncertain process and the failure modes are basically ending up with a teaching position or being otherwise stuck in some faculty mostly not doing research. Nothing wrong with that. But not what I was after. And a lot of teachers in university are basically people that dropped out of the process somehow.
Anyway, the whole management thing had no appeal to me: I did not want to be a manager managing other people doing all the fun stuff (research) while basically dealing with a lot of bureaucratic shit. Not my idea of fun, at least.
So, I left. It was the only logical thing to do. I worked for Nokia Research for a while after that. But the career paths there weren't a whole lot different there. And the whole thing started imploding a bit after the iphone launch.
These days I do startups and a bit of consulting. Mostly as a CTO, and I'm very hands on which is just how I like it. Inevitably, there's a bit of management involved as well. But I like what I do.
sometimes I read posts like this and am awed. it feels like something out of a book to me
never had a chance to go to college, no family, no friends, no social skills, mostly dumb except for basic computer skills
my life except for like 1-2 years has been fighting to survive in horribly abusive situations currently unable to work with my own SSN being messed with by a bunch of human traffickers
but I love computers my dream in life is to learn about them and built an integrated app kind of like the M1 but for software and I probably will die or be killed way before that happens but its cool to see there are people way smarter that care about building as much out there and computers will get better
Almost by definition, if you're doing a Postdoc in a STEM field, you're probably qualified for a relatively well-paying job in industry [1].
And it's not like universities don't know this, people have been complaining about it for forever. They know if they were to just hire a person with a relevant PhD to do work, they'd ask for a good wage, so instead they dangle this "maybe you'll qualify for a tenured professor job eventually if you do underpaid labor for us for N years..."
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My relationship with academia is...complicated. I dropped out of college in 2012, worked as an engineer for awhile, did a brief stint as a researchey-person at NYU, got laid-off from there, worked in industry for another several years, tried school again in 2018 and dropped out again in 2019, finally finished my degree in 2021, and started a PhD in 2022, and did an adjunct lecturer thing from second-half of 2022 to first-half 2023.
Since I was working full time (and couldn't pay my mortgage on academic wages), I was doing a PhD at University of York part-time remotely. It was fun, but I wasn't just paid poorly, I had to pay them! About $15,000-$16,000/year American [2]! Even though I was doing work for the school, writing code for them that's not categorically different than the code I got paid yuppie engineer salary for, I was losing money in this prospect (and not just the normal opportunity cost kind).
I did it for two years, but I dropped it in November of last year because it was an expensive thing that I wasn't convinced was actually going to pay off for me. The PhD was already pretty self-guided, I could still research the topics I was interested in for free, academia's pace is glacial-at-best, and I didn't burn any bridges so I could go back later if I really wanted.
I might still publish a paper with my advisor in this next year (that's still pending), but of course since I'm not enrolled-in and paying-money-to the school, it won't count towards any credential. I think I'm ok with that.
[1] There might be exception to this but I can't think of many.
> Almost by definition, if you're doing a Postdoc in a STEM field, you're probably qualified for a relatively well-paying job in industry
Be careful: many people who are great postdocs are rather overqualified (and thus rather not suitable) for many jobs in industry.
Getting well-payed in industry requires in my opinion skills that are opposite to those that make you a great postdoc:
In industry you must not be a truth-seeker who can deeply absorb himself in problems. Being a truth-seeker makes you an insanely fit in the brutal office politics.
Also, while I do insist that in graduate school you actually learn a lot about leadership (in the sense of being able to push people to do great things), the abrasive and highly demanding leadership style in graduate school and academia is commonly very undesired in industry (but in my opinion not bad: a very particular kind of people (who will love graduate school) flourishes in such an environment).
At least in computer science, postdocs have other benefits:
1) they can be well paid, like high five to very low six figures;
2) they can be an extra year or two to figure out your own research direction with some help but not much oversight;
3) they can be much easier to get than industry positions -- sometimes requiring little more than a solid publication record and advisor recommendation;
4) if you've been in a university environment for ~a decades and liked it, it might strike you as an easy path to keep doing that (this is probably the worst reason, though).
This is skewed by computer science postdocs at highly ranked schools, though. Yes, people taking these positions face opportunity costs, but the actual experience can be pretty nice.
Hmm this doesn't sound like what I experienced a professor doing... But this probably depends on the location and the discipline... Or well at least here in Germany you can more or less pick what you want to do: more being a people / project manager or more own research, or a mix of that... The uncertainty/low chances of getting a tenured position are not different though... And though it might suck, this is something you know, at the latest, after your PhD.
This shift from hands on research to project management is pretty similar in industry from what I have seen. All of our principal applied scientists basically do the same thing. They don't really spend any time actually getting their hands dirty. Maybe other companies are different?
My spouse is a molecular biologist pursuing her PhD in RNA therapy. She works ~2x longer and 10x harder than I do, with only a third of the yield. You can only sustain that for so long. She's in academia solely because she's good at it. However, there are a few things I've observed from the sidelines:
- PIs can make your life absolutely miserable for no reason, and it's difficult to switch labs if you're otherwise making good progress.
- The pay is poor, and professors often joke about how cheap PhD students and postdocs are.
- A significant amount of time is wasted on internal politics, such as deciding whose name appears on a paper and in what order.
- Pursuing irrelevant papers just to secure tenure is common.
- Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.
- PIs often treat their subordinates like high school students, expecting them to work weekends for "research" and forgo vacations.
- It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.
It's exhausting, and there are better ways to make a living. She plans to leave academia as soon as possible.
With the exception of poor pay, I experienced all of those things while working as a software dev for a major company. And with the exception of irrelevant papers, a friend of mine went through all of those at a startup she joined after her PhD.
I am doing a postdoc now - the pay sucks (still good compared to non-tech salaries) but I like what I do, I can choose my own tools, and I'm not longer contractually obligated to put my name in papers I don't like.
The instability of the postdoc life sucks if and when you want to have a family, but it can also be very rewarding.
> With the exception of poor pay, I experienced all of those things while working as a software dev for a major company.
Same here. I've worked at grindy startups that made me want to leave the profession altogether—everything from gaslighting by small shop CEOs to firing threats, and even firing a colleague just to show "who's in charge."
But switching companies is always an option, as is switching domains. I did that multiple times without much trouble.
> The instability of the postdoc life sucks if and when you want to have a family.
I thought stability was one of the reasons people choose academia. By stability, I mean a supervisor or program that guarantees a steady influx of cash for a certain period of time.
Yeah, but it comes down to what gives you fulfillment. For me, I need challenging work with a reward in pay that matches the effort and academia doesn't seem to fit that curve.
Poor pay is an understatement. Back in 2010’s when I graduated, I was making USD$21K per year! If you calculate the hourly rate it is probably close to $3/hour given that PhDs work every day, and specially in the holidays that the advisor has more free time.
We were jokingly say that they don’t dare to call it a salary, that is why they call it a stipend.
That’s exactly how much I was making in 2010 when I graduated. It’s even much worse than that because the benefits sucked and the school took back about about 1/3rd in the form of outrageous parking fees and outrageous student fees that required us to pay for tickets to every sports game we couldn’t even attend. Add overpriced books to that too.
It took a PhD to figure out how not to accumulate any new debt for those 6 years. I would have been first in line for food stamps, if they were available to us. I literally couldn’t afford to stay in student housing.
are you in the US? that's surprisingly low as by the mid/late 2010's PhD students in stem fields were averaging 30k. for the many postdocs on nih-supported grants i seem to remember ~60k being standard at that time. eg https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/salary-cap-stipen... .
For readers still in a position to make a choice: interviewing and carefully selecting the lab / professor that you attach yourself to for the PhD is really a good idea!
Unfortunately, a lot of people enter the pipeline (in the US) not yet equipped to evaluate the possibilities.
If that’s you, get the masters degree that gives you enough knowledge to make an informed choice, then move if necessary.
I've worked in academia for almost all of my adult life, although in CS/LangSci not in molecular biology. Either I got lucky or it is some other reason, but I have not had the same experience.
> She works ~2x longer and 10x harder than I do
Now, I don't know how long you work but most academics I've met do it because they love it. Mind you, it's not like there is no pressure to stay on top of your game, and endless administration tasks do eat up a lot of your time that you would like to spend otherwise. But I know a lot of people who work at the weekends not to make up for lost time, but because their work is their passion.
> - PIs can make your life absolutely miserable for no reason, and it's difficult to switch labs if you're otherwise making good progress.
That is true, although you can also have awful superiors in a regular job. And it's not easy to just switch jobs for a lot of people when that happens. Also, I've personally never had any issues whatsoever with my PIs, so the opposite can also be true: PIs can be very supportive and interested.
> - The pay is poor, and professors often joke about how cheap PhD students and postdocs are.
Not true in my experience, the pay in academia has always been more than acceptable. But again, I was in CS/LangSci, and I know that for instance in the humanities, pay is lower for similar jobs.
> - A significant amount of time is wasted on internal politics, such as deciding whose name appears on a paper and in what order.
In all my many years, there was never any case where the author issue has ever come up. Also, perhaps I was lucky (again), but I've almost only experienced collegiality across groups in the places I worked. I wouldn't say that "internal politics" is a bigger issue in academia than in industry.
> - Pursuing irrelevant papers just to secure tenure is common.
The pressure to publish is real, but irrelevant papers do not really help you a lot. Your time is better spent doing work that can make an impact. That said, not all ideas that you pursue lead to amazing output, and you cannot afford to let half a year of work go to complete waste. So, yeah, if worst comes to worst, you might opt for a lower-tier conference and squeeze at least some insight out of your failed work, but it is not common to specifically try to create irrelevant papers.
Also, over the years, the acceptance rate for main conferences has become increasingly hard to get over, as competetion is ever increasing. So, you do want your work to be relevant, or else it's not much you'll get out of it.
> - Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.
I've read about this on the internet to the point where I believe it's real. However, I cannot personally attest this, as my work places have always been different.
> - PIs often treat their subordinates like high school students, expecting them to work weekends for "research" and forgo vacations.
Not true in my experience, I and my colleagues, including PI, have always tried treating students and other group members respectfully. There is, of course, a certain expectation regarding your work ethics, but for the most part, I've never heard of anyone demanding from subordinates to forego vacations.
The only thing I can think of is when the deadline for an important conference comes up and everyone's really trying to get some final experiments done in time. Then it could happen that you're asking someone if they could do it, but I've also been in situation where the answer was "no" and that was, of course, accepted.
> - It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.
Probably true.
> It's exhausting, and there are better ways to make a living.
"Better" is completely subjective. I loved working in academia but that doesn't mean that there were plenty of situations where I didn't like something and loudly complained.
The one thing that's missing on your list and which for me was the deal breaker in the end was that, depending on where you are, the prospect of getting tenure is very vague and insecure. When I was young and independent, I didn't care if I only had a two-year contract. But as you mature and eventually start a family and/or buy a house, your responsibilities and priorities shift.
So, in the end, I am one of the 40% or whatever that left academia, but it was not the work itself that I minded, it was the lack of a secure future. I mean, as secure as any future could ever be...
>> - Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.
> I've read about this on the internet to the point where I believe it's real.
My experience as a PhD student in France circa 2016: a professor comes into our office one morning, tells me "your work is completely stupid, irrelevant and useless anyways, you should just stop" and then leaves
> Not true in my experience, the pay in academia has always been more than acceptable. But again, I was in CS/LangSci, and I know that for instance in the humanities, pay is lower for similar jobs.
This could also depend on location, but from what I’ve seen, postdoc CS pay in most places is less than what you can earn as an entry-level frontend engineer at a medium-sized scale-up.
Hi - please don't assume that retirements become job postings. Tenure lines have to be granted in many cases; if a dean is told by the provost to trim, then tenure lines are not granted after a retirement. My department has not matched its attrition rate for some time now.
I thought the 40% number seemed lower than my experiences suggest. But this is a solid point that suggests that even 84% is too low. I guess it could be as high as 90%.
Many of them never wanted to be in academia in the first place, or at least shouldn't have wanted it. If you're in a class full of people who want to teach this same class, you might be questioning why you're there.
Perhaps too simplistic since tenure is not the only way to “make it” in academia. Many people have academic careers without making tenure. You’ve also excluded people who publish impactful work, spend time teaching, and leave before seeking tenure. It might be fair to say 84% of graduating PhDs don’t make tenure, it’s just jumping to conclusions to say they don’t make it in academia.
Also don’t forget there’s a large time lag between graduating PhDs and when they get tenure, so today’s 270k graduates might be shooting for the next decade’s 15k or 20k tenure spots. Or… who knows they might be shooting for the future 5k spots if the rumors about colleges trying to reduce their use of tenure are true.
“Non-tenure-track faculty account for about half of all faculty appointments in American higher education.” … “About 90 percent of all full-time lecturers and nearly 50 percent of all full-time instructors are nontenure track.” https://www.aaup.org/report/status-non-tenure-track-faculty
Sounds like a lot more than I'd expect, especially considering ~50% of those 57000 doctorates probably don't even want to continue in academia. It's starting to look like the odds of landing a tenured position are quite good.
Yes, I expected the 40% to be much higher too. I guess once you go from PhD to postdoc it changes a bit, but again just looking at the numbers the pipeline gets a lot narrower at each transition.
I would have expected a higher percentage. Few openings and a high bar for whatever there is. It was tough to get an assistant professor job 30 years ago and I can't imagine what it must be like now.
This. A 60% stay rate evokes scenarios of academic inbreeding and a total disconnect between the real world and the small bubble where research groups operate.
> A 60% stay rate evokes scenarios of academic inbreeding and a total disconnect between the real world and the small bubble where research groups operate
I couldn't read the whole article due to the paywall. I wonder (now that my knee has stopped jerking) whether they consider non-tenure-ladder professorial positions at universities as 'academia'. e.g. adjuncts, lecturers, staff or contract researchers, lab administrators, ...
Keep in mind that this is a postdoc. The thing you do after you complete a PhD, and for most of history, something you only did after you started working as a professor.
I'm not sure about the situation elsewhere, but in Lithuania, it feels like professors produce articles or tackle topics solely to check a box. Most of the content generated by universities here seems completely irrelevant and ends up being discarded after completion. The courses are very bland and uninformative too.
I sometimes just wonder, a lot of professors are bad at teaching because they don't have to be good at it. Is it the same for universities? It feels like reputation for universities are quite detached from the courses they have or teaching quality. Rankings focus a lot on quantitative measures, but teaching quality is hard to measure quantitatively. The output of universities, i.e. the quality of their students, depend on both the teaching quality and "IQ" of their students before admission, which is mostly a feedback loop because universities with good reputation get the best students... Optimizing for teaching quality also means that professors spend more time on teaching and less on research, which may reduce their research output and reduce the ranking, which has a more immediate effect on the reputation than teaching quality.
Teaching is not really relevant in the hiring process of professors.
I saw several committees for prof position and teaching is treated like a checkmark. You should done it and provide a small sample lecture (which you prepare much more than your average lecture) and don't have to suck at it. After this checkbox, the differentiating factors are about citations and how much grant money you can/could/do have... (Western Europe, maybe somewhere else it's different).
I think it doesn't really enter the equation. The single worst lecturer I've had at university is now a professor. I don't enough about tenure tracks and we also call them differently (not adjunct, associate, etc) - but he's still there, 20y later, teaching (I think he just had gotten his PhD back then). I can only hope he has improved from "open script, read one page at a time, close script, dismiss".
> spend more time on teaching and less on research, which may reduce their research output
It's ironic that universities are primarily judged by their research output rather than their teaching, even though their original purpose was to share and preserve knowledge.
- Many people who did a PhD and didn't want to do research don't do a postdoc
- I would say, "40% have left so far'. Following the same cohort for a few years might yield even higher numbers (because as long you haven't made your mind about quitting research, you are still a postdoc and not accounted for leaving, even it's your 10th year...).
Readit News
Personally I think it's a warped system that takes advantage of cheap labor from developing countries. And it feeds itself. The more temporary research staff professors can hire, the less permanent research staff universities need.
You're also talking about someone who is probably in their early to mid 30's. Eventually people want to start having a life. And you're expecting them to make pennies? I'm not joking. Here's a list of CS Post Doc stipends[0]. Go to Berkeley or Stanford and make $66k-$80k? I've gotten more money as a PhD Intern! You're going to get more than double that in industry before we talk about RSUs.
I think this is something we need to take quite seriously here. There aren't really good reasons for people to choose this path, especially considering how disruptive it is to your life (have fun moving again in a few years :). Maybe we can hope that those who go are just really dedicated to research and following their passions. So dedicated that they are willing to put off normal human things like starting a family, maintaining relationships[1], or even just building one's net worth (or paying off student debt). Some people want to become a professor[2] so will do that.
But the big thing I see is that there's nothing to attract the best people. (We can extend this to even just professorships[3]). So who are becoming the postdocs and professors? Who are becoming the people that educate the next wave of people? If you are at the top, you likely aren't going the professor route, you're likely going to industry where you'll likely get 2x-3x the pay AND more freedom in your research. Even if you're pretty mid you can get 2x-3x the pay in industry with an honestly less stressful life (but you may not be doing research or likely have more restriction of what research you can pursue). This, seems pretty disastrous. At best, unstable. There's not a lot of professor spots but I think we need to have some incentive system such that people at the top are encouraged to carry on their research for the public as well as educate future researchers. As a business you want to be greedy and capture top talent, but that's also because you should be thinking much shorter term. At social levels, we have to think generations.
TLDR:
So are we confident we are getting "cream of the crop" (even if shared with industry) in academic positions? Are we sure that's even true at highly prestigious institutions?
I think the answer is "no", we should not be confident in that outcome.
[0] https://vspa.berkeley.edu/faculty-staff/compensation/postdoc...
[1] Good chance you met your partner while doing a PhD and yay now you both need to find post docs but they are competitive and so good luck finding one in the same place? Hope you like long distance relationships or are willing to let one partner make a bigger sacrifice.
[2] Which weird thing that we train someone to become an expert researcher and then as a professor we give them such high and diverse workloads that they will often have little time for research and instead will more be managers. The research skill degrades with time and only keeping up at a high level is not sufficient.
[3] In CS a post doc is also often a way to elevate your status. Like you got your PhD from a lower tier university and so doing a Post Doc at a much higher tier can make you employable at a more prestigious university. Because prestige still matters a lot, especially since it is tightly coupled with things like equipment access.
[side note]: I think with the competitiveness that it is a bit odd we still have these strong notions of prestige. Just to put things in perspective, if every graduating PhD at the number 1 school, they likely graduate enough people that you could fill all available faculty positions available. Given how prestige matters, it should be clear how high prestige graduates permeate into lower prestige positions. More clear when you start to consider things like how many top universities are in not the greatest living locations. https://drafty.cs.brown.edu/csopenrankings/placement-rank.ht... https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/
As a grad student, for the duration of your thesis work, you're locked into a specialty at a specific institute that isn't necessarily first-tier, may need to work at a level of intensity that prevents you from attending to a proper job search, and may end up under a professor who doesn't adequately support your career (e.g., with reputation and favorable recommendations).
In short, many things can go wrong, but you're focused on finishing. Under those conditions, if you do go straight into an industry job, it may be a shitty job that's not much better than a post-doc.
A brief stint as a post-doc gives you an income while you repair your career. This may involve changing specialties, developing your own research idea, working in a more prestigious institute or under a famous professor, or searching for industry jobs. Whatever it is, my own advice would be to only consider doing a post doc if it serves a credible purpose, otherwise, getting paid to get older isn't worth it.
In my field (physics), it was customary for grad students to work for their PhD advisor as a post-doc if they didn't already have a job lined up. I know lots of people who did that. It may inflate the number of "postdocs who leave academia" if it's not really a new job and their intention was to leave academia all along.
The human mind resists accepting decisions made without a proportional amount of effort put into those decisions. If we only get one candidate for the job, we will either hire them and deal with constant nagging doubt, or we will lower our standards to get more options we can reject to feel good, but at which point we've now created false hope in the remaining candidates and an illusion of more opportunities existing than actually do.
Humans are messy, and so everything is always fucked. Even when it's not, we find a way to make it so.
2 out of 5 people getting all the way to the end and discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.
A lot of people convince themselves that what they aren't feeling now will finally come to them after one more milestone, and as long as there enough milestones ahead of them they can play for time until it happens. Or they hit Sunk Cost and feel like they can't tap out now because they'll look like idiots, ignoring how much bigger an idiot you look like for wasting X more years of your youth and saddling yourself with even more debt. Or existential crisis with much the same outcomes. "Who am I even if I'm not..."
It’s not the research or teaching that drive people out of academia. It’s the endless and humiliating scrambling for money. Everyone who’s not a psychopath hates that part of the job, and the people who are any good at it have options outside of academia.
Research and teaching can take place outside of academia.
>A lot of people convince themselves that what they aren't feeling now will finally come to them after one more milestone, and as long as there enough milestones ahead of them they can play for time until it happens. Or they hit Sunk Cost and feel like they can't tap out now because they'll look like idiots, ignoring how much bigger an idiot you look like for wasting X more years of your youth and saddling yourself with even more debt. Or existential crisis with much the same outcomes. "Who am I even if I'm not..."
Learning can exist for the sake of learning and doesn't necessarily need to be reflected in career choice or identity.
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People who go into academia are probably willing to live the life of an underpaid researcher. The fact that they have the post-doc title instead of the professor title probably is that big a deal, nor is the salary going to change their decision. The lack of autonomy is probably annoying, as is the lack of stability. Having to worry that they might change labs and maybe cities every 3 years, and not knowing for sure if they'll get a job is probably the only thing actually making them quit.
Both of these aren't real incentives for the bottom 80% of postdocs.
However, if you have a bit more energy in you than that, have some ambition, leave asap. Startups are a great alternative. Big co research labs are another. Or just get a day job that you love and do research in the evenings. You could even get paid to do real research via patron etc if you do well.
I think academia in the uk is part of the social structure designed to maintain the status quo. The academics get good pensions and don’t do much, and in return they don’t challenge the ruling classes. Part of the class system.
There are some exceptions to this rule, some good places doing good research, but they are a tiny minority.
No, but (and I'm not in this space, so totally ignorant), is it not the case that if you're not associated with a Uni in some form that _PUBLISHING_ your research is all but impossible?
Professors are basically there to manage the process and haggle for funding. They tend to not be very hands-on with research for the simple reason that that's not their main job. They mostly delegate that to people in their team.
And you can only become a professor by doing post docs, landing some tenured position and then maybe they'll make you a professor somewhere. It's a long, uncertain process and the failure modes are basically ending up with a teaching position or being otherwise stuck in some faculty mostly not doing research. Nothing wrong with that. But not what I was after. And a lot of teachers in university are basically people that dropped out of the process somehow.
Anyway, the whole management thing had no appeal to me: I did not want to be a manager managing other people doing all the fun stuff (research) while basically dealing with a lot of bureaucratic shit. Not my idea of fun, at least.
So, I left. It was the only logical thing to do. I worked for Nokia Research for a while after that. But the career paths there weren't a whole lot different there. And the whole thing started imploding a bit after the iphone launch.
These days I do startups and a bit of consulting. Mostly as a CTO, and I'm very hands on which is just how I like it. Inevitably, there's a bit of management involved as well. But I like what I do.
never had a chance to go to college, no family, no friends, no social skills, mostly dumb except for basic computer skills
my life except for like 1-2 years has been fighting to survive in horribly abusive situations currently unable to work with my own SSN being messed with by a bunch of human traffickers
but I love computers my dream in life is to learn about them and built an integrated app kind of like the M1 but for software and I probably will die or be killed way before that happens but its cool to see there are people way smarter that care about building as much out there and computers will get better
Almost by definition, if you're doing a Postdoc in a STEM field, you're probably qualified for a relatively well-paying job in industry [1].
And it's not like universities don't know this, people have been complaining about it for forever. They know if they were to just hire a person with a relevant PhD to do work, they'd ask for a good wage, so instead they dangle this "maybe you'll qualify for a tenured professor job eventually if you do underpaid labor for us for N years..."
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My relationship with academia is...complicated. I dropped out of college in 2012, worked as an engineer for awhile, did a brief stint as a researchey-person at NYU, got laid-off from there, worked in industry for another several years, tried school again in 2018 and dropped out again in 2019, finally finished my degree in 2021, and started a PhD in 2022, and did an adjunct lecturer thing from second-half of 2022 to first-half 2023.
Since I was working full time (and couldn't pay my mortgage on academic wages), I was doing a PhD at University of York part-time remotely. It was fun, but I wasn't just paid poorly, I had to pay them! About $15,000-$16,000/year American [2]! Even though I was doing work for the school, writing code for them that's not categorically different than the code I got paid yuppie engineer salary for, I was losing money in this prospect (and not just the normal opportunity cost kind).
I did it for two years, but I dropped it in November of last year because it was an expensive thing that I wasn't convinced was actually going to pay off for me. The PhD was already pretty self-guided, I could still research the topics I was interested in for free, academia's pace is glacial-at-best, and I didn't burn any bridges so I could go back later if I really wanted.
I might still publish a paper with my advisor in this next year (that's still pending), but of course since I'm not enrolled-in and paying-money-to the school, it won't count towards any credential. I think I'm ok with that.
[1] There might be exception to this but I can't think of many.
[2] depending on the dollar->pound exchange rate.
Be careful: many people who are great postdocs are rather overqualified (and thus rather not suitable) for many jobs in industry.
Getting well-payed in industry requires in my opinion skills that are opposite to those that make you a great postdoc:
In industry you must not be a truth-seeker who can deeply absorb himself in problems. Being a truth-seeker makes you an insanely fit in the brutal office politics.
Also, while I do insist that in graduate school you actually learn a lot about leadership (in the sense of being able to push people to do great things), the abrasive and highly demanding leadership style in graduate school and academia is commonly very undesired in industry (but in my opinion not bad: a very particular kind of people (who will love graduate school) flourishes in such an environment).
1) they can be well paid, like high five to very low six figures;
2) they can be an extra year or two to figure out your own research direction with some help but not much oversight;
3) they can be much easier to get than industry positions -- sometimes requiring little more than a solid publication record and advisor recommendation;
4) if you've been in a university environment for ~a decades and liked it, it might strike you as an easy path to keep doing that (this is probably the worst reason, though).
This is skewed by computer science postdocs at highly ranked schools, though. Yes, people taking these positions face opportunity costs, but the actual experience can be pretty nice.
- PIs can make your life absolutely miserable for no reason, and it's difficult to switch labs if you're otherwise making good progress.
- The pay is poor, and professors often joke about how cheap PhD students and postdocs are.
- A significant amount of time is wasted on internal politics, such as deciding whose name appears on a paper and in what order.
- Pursuing irrelevant papers just to secure tenure is common.
- Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.
- PIs often treat their subordinates like high school students, expecting them to work weekends for "research" and forgo vacations.
- It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.
It's exhausting, and there are better ways to make a living. She plans to leave academia as soon as possible.
I am doing a postdoc now - the pay sucks (still good compared to non-tech salaries) but I like what I do, I can choose my own tools, and I'm not longer contractually obligated to put my name in papers I don't like.
The instability of the postdoc life sucks if and when you want to have a family, but it can also be very rewarding.
Same here. I've worked at grindy startups that made me want to leave the profession altogether—everything from gaslighting by small shop CEOs to firing threats, and even firing a colleague just to show "who's in charge."
But switching companies is always an option, as is switching domains. I did that multiple times without much trouble.
> The instability of the postdoc life sucks if and when you want to have a family.
I thought stability was one of the reasons people choose academia. By stability, I mean a supervisor or program that guarantees a steady influx of cash for a certain period of time.
Yeah, but it comes down to what gives you fulfillment. For me, I need challenging work with a reward in pay that matches the effort and academia doesn't seem to fit that curve.
We were jokingly say that they don’t dare to call it a salary, that is why they call it a stipend.
It took a PhD to figure out how not to accumulate any new debt for those 6 years. I would have been first in line for food stamps, if they were available to us. I literally couldn’t afford to stay in student housing.
Unfortunately, a lot of people enter the pipeline (in the US) not yet equipped to evaluate the possibilities.
If that’s you, get the masters degree that gives you enough knowledge to make an informed choice, then move if necessary.
Worth pointing out supply can be slim in narrower fields of research or for location requirements, like being close to a significant other.
Talk to the grad students of other professors
Rather: because they deeply love doing research.
> She works ~2x longer and 10x harder than I do
Now, I don't know how long you work but most academics I've met do it because they love it. Mind you, it's not like there is no pressure to stay on top of your game, and endless administration tasks do eat up a lot of your time that you would like to spend otherwise. But I know a lot of people who work at the weekends not to make up for lost time, but because their work is their passion.
> - PIs can make your life absolutely miserable for no reason, and it's difficult to switch labs if you're otherwise making good progress.
That is true, although you can also have awful superiors in a regular job. And it's not easy to just switch jobs for a lot of people when that happens. Also, I've personally never had any issues whatsoever with my PIs, so the opposite can also be true: PIs can be very supportive and interested.
> - The pay is poor, and professors often joke about how cheap PhD students and postdocs are.
Not true in my experience, the pay in academia has always been more than acceptable. But again, I was in CS/LangSci, and I know that for instance in the humanities, pay is lower for similar jobs.
> - A significant amount of time is wasted on internal politics, such as deciding whose name appears on a paper and in what order.
In all my many years, there was never any case where the author issue has ever come up. Also, perhaps I was lucky (again), but I've almost only experienced collegiality across groups in the places I worked. I wouldn't say that "internal politics" is a bigger issue in academia than in industry.
> - Pursuing irrelevant papers just to secure tenure is common.
The pressure to publish is real, but irrelevant papers do not really help you a lot. Your time is better spent doing work that can make an impact. That said, not all ideas that you pursue lead to amazing output, and you cannot afford to let half a year of work go to complete waste. So, yeah, if worst comes to worst, you might opt for a lower-tier conference and squeeze at least some insight out of your failed work, but it is not common to specifically try to create irrelevant papers.
Also, over the years, the acceptance rate for main conferences has become increasingly hard to get over, as competetion is ever increasing. So, you do want your work to be relevant, or else it's not much you'll get out of it.
> - Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.
I've read about this on the internet to the point where I believe it's real. However, I cannot personally attest this, as my work places have always been different.
> - PIs often treat their subordinates like high school students, expecting them to work weekends for "research" and forgo vacations.
Not true in my experience, I and my colleagues, including PI, have always tried treating students and other group members respectfully. There is, of course, a certain expectation regarding your work ethics, but for the most part, I've never heard of anyone demanding from subordinates to forego vacations.
The only thing I can think of is when the deadline for an important conference comes up and everyone's really trying to get some final experiments done in time. Then it could happen that you're asking someone if they could do it, but I've also been in situation where the answer was "no" and that was, of course, accepted.
> - It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.
Probably true.
> It's exhausting, and there are better ways to make a living.
"Better" is completely subjective. I loved working in academia but that doesn't mean that there were plenty of situations where I didn't like something and loudly complained.
The one thing that's missing on your list and which for me was the deal breaker in the end was that, depending on where you are, the prospect of getting tenure is very vague and insecure. When I was young and independent, I didn't care if I only had a two-year contract. But as you mature and eventually start a family and/or buy a house, your responsibilities and priorities shift.
So, in the end, I am one of the 40% or whatever that left academia, but it was not the work itself that I minded, it was the lack of a secure future. I mean, as secure as any future could ever be...
> I've read about this on the internet to the point where I believe it's real.
My experience as a PhD student in France circa 2016: a professor comes into our office one morning, tells me "your work is completely stupid, irrelevant and useless anyways, you should just stop" and then leaves
This could also depend on location, but from what I’ve seen, postdoc CS pay in most places is less than what you can earn as an entry-level frontend engineer at a medium-sized scale-up.
This is really the root of most other problems mentioned.
Assuming a tenured professor holds that position from age 35 to age 65, that's 9000 tenured positions to be filled per year.
According to https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2023 there are 57,000 research doctorates granted per year.
So 84% of people granted PhDs don't make it in academia.
Also don’t forget there’s a large time lag between graduating PhDs and when they get tenure, so today’s 270k graduates might be shooting for the next decade’s 15k or 20k tenure spots. Or… who knows they might be shooting for the future 5k spots if the rumors about colleges trying to reduce their use of tenure are true.
“Non-tenure-track faculty account for about half of all faculty appointments in American higher education.” … “About 90 percent of all full-time lecturers and nearly 50 percent of all full-time instructors are nontenure track.” https://www.aaup.org/report/status-non-tenure-track-faculty
This. A 60% stay rate evokes scenarios of academic inbreeding and a total disconnect between the real world and the small bubble where research groups operate.
Why?
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I saw several committees for prof position and teaching is treated like a checkmark. You should done it and provide a small sample lecture (which you prepare much more than your average lecture) and don't have to suck at it. After this checkbox, the differentiating factors are about citations and how much grant money you can/could/do have... (Western Europe, maybe somewhere else it's different).
It's ironic that universities are primarily judged by their research output rather than their teaching, even though their original purpose was to share and preserve knowledge.
But the academic paper printer goes brrrr!
System behaves as designed. Situation normal: all fucked up.
- Many people who did a PhD and didn't want to do research don't do a postdoc
- I would say, "40% have left so far'. Following the same cohort for a few years might yield even higher numbers (because as long you haven't made your mind about quitting research, you are still a postdoc and not accounted for leaving, even it's your 10th year...).