The author of the article never mentions what faculty or program they're in, or references any of their work. No doubt this is a real problem, but in this particular case they could just be a lousy researcher in a faculty that doesn't have a high demand for new professors.
IOW the "psychology" / "liberal arts" over population.
I'm not trying to knock any of those studies, but there is a large excess where I'm from.
Yet those programs would happily take on more than their replacement rate, while at the same time not being upfront about the actual chances of getting a job.
In general, though, I think most grad programs should take more than their replacement rate. There should be a (sizeable) outflow to non-academic jobs in a healthy system.
This also requires not having an institutional "tenure or failure" mentality, which is, sadly, not uncommon in many science grad schools.
Yes, there should be a sizable outflow to non-academic jobs, but that implies that the demand is there, and that the jobs hey sufficiently well to make up for the opportunity cost of not earning for eight years or more. These conditions do not really exist for a lot of fields. How many jobs outside academia are there where a PhD in medieval history is an advantage?
It's those transferrable skills, yo. In general, a liberal arts PhD will be able to work independently with little supervision, plan a course of work and make headway without much feedback. In general, they can also communicate effectively through text.
I totally get that people don't want to leave their speciality, but the PhD will normally give students a bunch of skills that are hard (but not impossible) to get elsewhere.
I have a psychology PhD, and now work at a tech company (I always loved stats, and discovered coding during the PhD due to laziness, so may not be a typical case).
As a former neuroscientist, that's somewhat true, but it's pretty bad all across academia. Every department takes on more grad students than can possibly fill academic offices.
The author seems to think writing a book is necessary for tenure, so he isn't in a STEM field (obviously many STEM professors write books but the vast majority of STEM professors who receive tenure have not written a book).
A history grad student I knew (I was in STEM) remarked that if he couldn't get an adaptation of his dissertation published somewhere in book form, it would be a major career setback.
Having graduated in 1992 with his PhD, his book came out in 1998, as he moved through a series of temporary positions. He's tenured at a major university now, but he does have to live in an out of the way and rather drab college town. It's no picnic.
There's an overpopulation in virtually every field. Any graduate student can look to his or her left and right in class and realize that those people are his or her competition for a job that only one of them is going to get. The situation is only somewhat better in STEM fields, because there's more industry demand (where you can get paid more and have better mobility, but get looked down on by your academic brethren.)
I hate having to enable JavaScript just to read a website.
It was worth it for this one though, just one main thing; still I almost didn't click it, I often don't.
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I see that same mentality reflected in far too many places, no one wants to hire for a career anymore; and that's what 'tenure' is at a college. The 'contract' in society between the working class and those who employee them is beyond broken.
I sincerely hope that people who are genuinely excited about research do not adopt this attitude. Our affluent society allows us to specialize in what we like; allowing the best of us to create art and mathematics and make discoveries in science is as important as being a "contributing member of society".
We all have to make choices between what we enjoy and have a passion for and what pays the bills. For many of us, there is a degree of overlap though likely not 100%.
Our society is not so affluent that, if what you are genuinely excited about is medieval German poetry, you can reasonably expect to be supported with that passion unless you win a very specific academic track lottery (or have other sources of income).
I was thinking more about scientific research, such as funding for pure mathematics, theoretical computer science and such. These are skills that require years of dedicated effort to master the basics and reach a level of understanding that is rigorous enough to start making original contributions and yet offer very little financial compensation in industry.
You are right in that a decision has to be made in what areas we consider important enough to allow a sustainable career from it. In your example, I would certainly not fund a person for studying Medieval German poetry only; but more funding for research into history? Sure thing.
Who decides where "funding for research into history" goes? In our STEM graduate program (a fairly prestigious one), it was pretty widely argued that you basically had to attach yourself to one of the big name grants to try and get funded.
I had a few friends who had some ideas but their professors weren't too happy with those. They found a way to incorporate some of the buzzwords for a giant grant our university had, pitched it to the professor, who submitted a grant application, and got them funded on the idea. Professor was happy (he had money), students were happy, but at the end of the day, the process was idiotic.
Our affluent society doesn't actually, unless food stamps are an acceptable outcome. The affluence does not wish to provide funding for very many excited researchers.
> Our affluent society allows us to specialize in what we like; allowing the best of us to create art and mathematics and make discoveries in science is as important as being a "contributing member of society".
Yes, but this stops happening when economic growth is non-existent.
The Western economy (developed countries generally), outside of Silicon Valley and a small number of bright spots, is not really growing.
First let us dispense with certain lies that nearly everybody believes.
The statistics about growth you always hear in the news or from politicians are fraudulent. All economic growth ultimately derives from technology - more output for less input or doing more with less. In the 1930s the growth statistics looked very bad but were actually better than they appeared because a host of new technologies were invented - artificial rubber, secondary oil recovery. Measuring this sort of thing is meaningless because every new invention is only discovered once. How the invention of the steam engine and vulcanized rubber impacts on the price network is unknown until it actually happens and the two inventions contribution to economic growth cannot be compared until they enter the price network egro...
The growth stats were always at best a guess at the underlying reality.
The real economy has not grown significantly since the early 70s. People who correctly point to the massive increase in computational power as marvelous should contrast that with with real energy prices in the same period. That is what the hoi polloi feel, and they are more correct about that than a supertanker packed with econometricians and politicians. This is why the hated Trump is so beloved, notice how the campaign slogan isn't 'Make America Greater', it is 'Make American Great Again'. This admission of a failure is fascinating (for a politician) and utterly ignored by the press.
I don't believe it is 'the end of the world' (there was some growth after all) but people really need to pull their heads out of the asses, academics in particular. Unless we realize there is a problem we cannot adjust our positions in order to fix it.
The fact is that the ideas in your head need to pay rent somehow.
If the net affect is that they do not, then society fragments, which is an appropriate strategy to deal with failure through complexity. I note that the Roman Empire had a very high basic literacy rate. Normal people could read and most often poor children went to a kind of elementary school.
That all got fucked when the Empire fell. It didn't happen immediately but we ultimately went 5 centuries in which only a tiny tiny elite, sometimes in the low hundreds or thousands had the ability to read and write. There is a small island off the coast of my country that held the only copies of most old Greek and Roman texts, but for that 'seedbank' saved by the monks and a passionate illiterate king (Carogolian Empire), you would know nothing of Seneca, Cicero, all the myths and legends of the Ancient World and much more besides.
Kenneth Clark did an excellent documentary on the subject if you're interested.
The episode is: Civilisation (1969) Episode 1 "The Skin of Our Teeth", from 13:35.
This is an interesting comment. But why is the affluence of society dependent on economic growth itself? Especially when, as you point out, the impact of technological advances is hard to quantify?
The pre-modern world required the presence of a class of cheap laborers as there were so many tasks that could not be automated. Productivity was low and there was no way that the basic needs of society could be met without everyone pitching in.
In today's day and age, we have highly automated agriculture and are doing more of it. Productivity has skyrocketed. And yet, we burden our population with arbitrary schedules (e.g. 40 hour weeks, limited vacation time), making most of society incapable of enjoying the real fruit of modern life: the ability to survive without working a dumb job all the time.
You state that ideas need to pay for rent somehow. I agree completely: they do need to. But what if we provide a certain basic income to everyone so that its not something one has to worry about? We have not seen the results of this kind of experiment.
Your comparison to the Roman empire is also interesting. I didn't think that most Romans were literate or familiar with the classics! However, as I noted earlier, productivity of labor in Roman times was still not as high as today, so maybe its not an apt comparison.
> But why is the affluence of society dependent on economic growth itself? Especially when, as you point out, the impact of technological advances is hard to quantify?
Economic growth is real, just partially measurable at best.
The affluence of a society is contingent on two things. Generating wealth and the transmission of said wealth.
Did you know that Singapore's founding father forbade the gathering of most statistics when they were getting started? There's an interesting story there. He didn't trust modern economists and Singapore turned out alright.
> The pre-modern world required the presence of a class of cheap laborers as there were so many tasks that could not be automated. Productivity was low and there was no way that the basic needs of society could be met without everyone pitching in.
Yes, with the exception of the aristocrats or ruling class and the freedoms afforded to them by slavery. For most of human history a necessary evil in order to coordinate a more complex society and only recently has invention and innovation been separated from the patronage of the ruling class (with mixed results).
> In today's day and age, we have highly automated agriculture and are doing more of it. Productivity has skyrocketed. And yet, we burden our population with arbitrary schedules (e.g. 40 hour weeks, limited vacation time), making most of society incapable of enjoying the real fruit of modern life: the ability to survive without working a dumb job all the time.
I agree that is a problem, both individually and collectively. Right now we have a bunch of crude heuristics being used because we don't know or aren't willing to trust in a better way. I can only say we should experiment more.
On an individual level I'm invested in creating a Tiny House with zero rent/bills. Then in generating an inflation adjusting passive income stream from another project of mine. This shall, coupled together, allow me to live as I please for the rest of my life if I choose. I call this a zero marginal lifestyle, where any efforts on my part are 100% profit for me. This is what the aristocrats used to give their inventor friends in patronage, the security of having resources and no concerns about continuing to exist. That enables you, hypothetically, to give your full brain to something. I estimate it takes 150k - 250k to accomplish such a thing.
> You state that ideas need to pay for rent somehow. I agree completely: they do need to. But what if we provide a certain basic income to everyone so that its not something one has to worry about? We have not seen the results of this kind of experiment.
I think it very much depends on the mental models of the those people you give the basic income to.
For example giving basic income to ISIS members is not about to make the world a better place.
I think basic income should be unconditional on 'what' you spend it on, but that it should be conditional on 'general purpose'. How to achieve that I don't know.
Perhaps take inspiration from Heinlein's Starship Troopers. All citizens receive basic income but becoming a citizen requires some duty, work or deed that benefits the collective.
Recognition of good work is important in a society where money matters less. Google had this problem a while ago when it was trying to convince their millionaire engineers to keep working. By and large they appear to have succeeded by being flexible and offering meaning in the spot in Maslow's Pyramid that used to be occupied by accumulating income. If any Googlers have any comments on this that would be great.
I do know most rich people who stay rich are motivated by purpose and not by gathering of resources or at least not directly.
What you do not want is the Roman problem of Bread & Circuses. You never want your society to go down that rabbit hole. You shall require some stern measures to prevent that from happening. If a society descends into miasma you fix it without worrying ...
> An academic career should never be your only option. Make sure you study something that is useful in the real economy.
And where do the English and Economics professors that teach those STEM graduates come from, hmmmmmm?
The real issue is that we graduate too many PhD's for too few positions because PhD's are nice slave labor for universities.
This kind of overgraduation is true now in almost every field. We're either going to come to grips with the fact that there simply aren't enough jobs or things are going to collapse.
Saddening story. However, as an academic myself, some bits were misleading or odd:
> funding regulations meant the grant couldn’t pay my salary as its lead researcher
I've never, ever heard of anything like this occurring. The most I have seen are cost sharing pieces where a grant cannot more than a certain % of your salary. But these are often known upfront by the PI!
> The two disclosed who had submitted a grant proposal and whose book was near publication—all of which are needed for tenure. I was the only one in the room with books, articles, and a recently awarded grant.
This strikes me as a highly bitter position to take. There is far more to tenure than only the number of grants, books, articles, etc. Were the articles published in high impact journals? How much $$ was the grant for? A researcher 5 years younger might get a tenure-track position with no prior grants, but a hot research topic, a few good publications and an excellent pedigree.
> My financial reality still makes it hard to keep up with conferences. I haven’t had access to professional development funds since 2010
The author states he has funding grants but these did not explicitly cover several conferences? I'm very surprised by this, and this is not at all consistent with my experience. I had funding to attend conferences as a first year graduate student.
> There are jobs in the southern US and in the UK, which would take me away from family and a new relationship that I cherish. I don’t need to start building a life from scratch in my late thirties. I definitely don’t need to do it for a nine—or three-month contract without benefits, or costs of moving. And if we’re talking about the US, I don’t need to be dealing with signing religious codes of conduct or dealing with campuses where eighteen-year-olds can carry concealed guns.
The sad truth of the matter is: if you want to get a tenure track job, 99% of us will not truly have a choice in location where you live. Expect to move across the country (or across countries!). That is quite apparent when you sign up. You take what you can get. A friend took a position in upstate NY, and he hates the cold...
I suspect the author is from the humanities, which have starkly different funding realities than what you and I are used to. (Your profile says you are a computational scientist, and while I work in industry, I still publish in computer science academic conferences.)
> I still publish in computer science academic conferences
Having just recently attended an academic conference as a non-academic (but not submitted anything this time), I was wondering whether non-academics do, or should, feel guilty about publishing at these venues. It was very apparent how other people there were looking for jobs and using their publications and presentations as a part of that process. If non-academics publish in journals and conferences, should we feel bad that we're potentially taking away spots from those these venues are "meant for"?
I don't feel bad at all, and in computer science systems conferences, there's usually a mix of people from industry and academia. (Both attending and even on the program committee.) I think a good mix is healthy for such conferences. Personally, I do both research and development, and I want to be able to publish the research I do.
I don't think you should feel bad about that at all. The amount of jobs available is not going to decrease due to you publishing papers. If you "take away a spot" for someone's paper it might mean that that person doesn't get a job, but some other academic will get it instead (and none of them will know).
In fact I'd say non-academics publishing in conferences and journals can be good for academics even from an egoistic standpoint, as it can help break the popular perception of science/academia as an ivory tower of self-absorbing smartasses out of touch with reality. And better popular perception of science indirectly means more funding. So as an academic I would definitely see an increase of submissions by non-academics as good news for my interests.
> I've never, ever heard of anything like this occurring.
There are some really odd interactions between funders' and universities' rules. Many places won't let non-permanent staff be the "lead researcher"/PI/whatever on grants, particularly if the grant or contract has specific "deliverables" or if the grant runs longer than than employee's contract.
These policies are probably well-intentioned--you can't really commit to an employee doing three years of research if they may not even be employed here next year--but they can lead to aggravating catch-22 situations where people could have the job if there was funding, but they can't get the funding because they don't have the job...
Every student considering going to graduate school should read this article. Professors are very misinformed about how likely someone is to get tenure (most of them got it > 20 years ago, in a much better academic job market). This misinformation trickles down to students.
The simple fact is that right now the average professor is graduating more than 10 phd students, only 1 of which can become a tenured professor at a research university. The job options in academia other than tenured professor are horrible and exploitative. I know many post-docs who have gone into industry after slaving away at temporary and low paying jobs for over 6 years. These post-docs were very bright and dedicated people, but the tenure track position requires lots of luck in addition to skill.
Academia expanded enormously between 1945 – 1975, when virtually everyone who got a PhD could get an academic job. Since then, time-to-degree for PhDs in all subjects has increased dramatically, post-docs have become the norm, and academic jobs have become scarce. I wrote about this in "What you should know BEFORE you start grad school / PhD programs in English Literature: The economic, financial, and opportunity costs" (http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befor...), but the overall point can be generalized to a large number of fields.
As you note, academia has become increasingly exploitative, even when most individual professors remain well meaning.
In addition, many people considering grad school or who have recently begun it seem not to know quite how bad the situation is, or quite how bad it can be to be in your 30s and to have effectively wasted the career part of your 20s.
One of my most infuriating moments at Berkeley was when I attended a symposium on pursuing an academic career (I was interested in one at that point) and a professor complained that students were too concerned with academics and weren't spending enough time protesting, like she had.
It was the academic equivalent of Old Economy Steven. Very triggering.
In my first week as a Berkeley undergrad, I attended a workshop put on by the student activities office about student protest (sort of a mixture of history and how-to). Clearly at least some portions of the administration considered it part of their brand.
Yes. The market is very narrow for academia. I live in NYC. there are a handful of universes and colleges. If the large institutions are not hiring, you are left with the small fish normally just looking for teachers not professors. Also, to grow your career a healthy environment is collaboration. If you end up being a Professor at a small pond, your bet is external collaboration. If you don't like the small ponds, you have to find jobs somewhere else, that means moving to another state. Since there are thousands of post doc actively looking to join a good research institutions, the job market is so competitive.
For engineers, say you got rejected by Google, there are still hundreds of engineering teams you can apply to.
Should there be a policy to force retirement? Is it fair?
> Should there be a policy to force retirement? Is it fair?
No, artificially creating jobs does not seem like the solution. We should be requiring all schools, for all degrees, publish relevant employment figures for that degree. And for doctorates, that should mean giving percentages that have tenure after X years and the percentage employed in jobs that required their doctorate.
Informing students lets them make the choice. If they are getting a PhD for the love of it, and don't care, power to them. But they should be given real data for their job prospects.
Many universities did have forced retirement policies for professors above a certain age. I don't think those policies are common anymore. I'm not sure how much they would help anyway. A few more jobs would open up, but not nearly enough. It would be a drop in the bucket.
The bottom line is that there are way too many graduates for the size of the academic job market, and even if the number of newly minted PhDs dropped by half, there would still be too many. In some fields, the number of new PhDs could drop nearly to zero before it made sense to get one.
I heard a professor with tenure encourage my friend to try to get PhD by saying things like "Find an out of the way small college, get tenure, once you get it you don't have to do anything, you'll always have a job, you'll have time to travel, go to the pool do whatever you want".
In a way that mirrored what that professor was doing -- teaching stuff that was last relevant in mid 80's, doing absolutely the minimum required, reading off the slides all lecture, then have TA grade everything. It was scary imaging the wasted potential and thousands students over decades who missed on what could have been a useful course.
That was a state college, so besides taking parent's money and wasting them, they were taking state' money (although they'd been a lot less of that lately).
Most professors were very good and not saying we should not have tenure, as that would undermine the ability to do some green field research that perhaps doesn't have dollar signs attached to it, but at the same time, I think a few bad apples like that are ruining the image and idea behind it.
Of all the exploitable opportunities tenure is one of the worst. Your plan has to be "I will go to school for an additional 4-6 years. Then I will become a low paid professor. I'll take on increasing responsibilities for 5-7 years and apply for tenure. Then I may just get it and I'm set!"
Seems like somebody with enough smarts to do that could just go work in industry, make a bunch of money, then retire and do what they want.
I'm a tenure-track professor and a former researcher at NASA JPL. It is true that the market for tenure-track professors is terrible. One needs to have a number of high impact papers and come from a top-5 program to be really competitive without doing a postdoc in engineering. In the sciences, even that isn't true and a postdoc is usually needed even if finishing at a top program.
That said, there are many good reasons to pursue a PhD. A PhD in engineering/sciences gives one training in research, and there are tons of awesome applied and basic research jobs that require a PhD that aren't professors. Working at NASA JPL was amazing, and it required a PhD. If a person wants to do research, then a PhD in engineering/sciences opens many doors.
I think more graduate students need training in career planning and that they need to have realistic expectations. Too many people think they will win the lottery.
Being out of an academic job is a painful experience. I have a PhD in math and, entering grad school, was aiming only for an academic career.
However, it was very clear to everyone in my grad program (as well as to my friends doing physics PhDs across the street) that this requires 1-2 competitive postdocs (3-6 years at low salary) and a stiff competition to a tenure track. And you do not usually get a choice: i.e., if you get offered a position, you grab it, be it in Maine or Texas (I decided to avoid this race and went to the industry; there are pros and cons to both paths).
IMO, the tenure system, at least in the US, is highly inefficient. Things are pretty top-heavy (older, tenured professors who originally were expected to retire by ~60, often do not) and graduating PhDs with decent, but not stellar results have a very hard time on the academic research track.
For many years, universities had mandatory retirement ages:
>Until 1982, retirement of faculty members at many universities was mandatory at age 65. Because of amendments to the ADEA, in 1982 the minimum allowable mandatory retirement age was increased to age 70. In 1986 Congress made additional amendments to the ADEA, prohibiting any mandatory retirement ages for most workers in the United States.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737001/
I consider myself fortunate that I realized most of what was talked about in this article was true while I was about halfway through grad school. The fundamental realization that given the size of my classes, where my peers were competition for any academic job, combined with the fact that I would literally have to wait for someone to die before I could get one of those jobs, was enough to knock me right off of the academic track.
I might've even put up with postdoc hell, and the "6 year job interview " that is the tenure process if I thought it would have come to something. But, when you have 50 people competing for the same three openings in a year, and only one chance per year to apply, the odds don't look very good.
Same here. Leaving grad school was the best decision I ever made. The year I left, there were only 2 or 3 positions in my field in the entire United States, and one of them went unfilled because the university didn't like any of the candidates.
Me too. Sort of. I think I realized this subconsciously before I was conscious of it. The result was two years of depression and anxiety before I got everything straight and quit.
I don't know if it was wasted time or not. It was a long time to not be in the workforce, but I learned a lot of skills while working on what turned out to be dead end research projects. I have a job now that requires merely a fraction of those skills. But maybe I wouldn't have gotten the job without my half phd. Or maybe I'd have a better job if I finished.
I'm still pretty frustrated by the fact that what was presented to me as a failsafe career path was anything but failsafe. This is pretty much the same problem with all of higher education and the current economy in miniature. Just as an undergrad degree no longer garuntees a good job a phd no longer garuntees a tenured job.
> I think I realized this subconsciously before I was conscious of it.
This is grad school in a nutshell, in a lot of fields. I've seen three common responses to this cognitive dissonance:
1. Deny the brutal reality of the job market.
2. "But I couldn't ever be happy doing anything else!"
3. Leave.
One of the strangest things about my grad school experience was watching very intelligent people spend years of their lives, and sometimes borrowing money they could never pay back, to pursue a degree even though deep down, they understood that it was a really bad idea. The rationalizations they came up with were pretty transparent to anyone who wasn't also in the grad school bubble.
I suppose I sound harsh, but when people ask me if they should go to grad school in the field I did, my answer is always "not unless you are already independently wealthy and never need to work again."
For a long time I thought that "But I couldn't ever be happy doing anything else!" Now I'm not doing it but have a great job I'm way happier than I ever was in grad school. I wonder how I could have been so foolish.
FWIW, this story parallels the reality that most professional artists have experienced for a long time: hyper competition, extremely limited grant opportunities, no direct commercial market, everything paid out-of-pocket. A "compulsory hobby" is a great phrase.
For STEM academes: The difference is that professional artists have long been aware of the "starving artist" stereotype aren't strongly sold a nationalism-backed narrative that "we need more scientists", followed by unsustainable, hierarchical organizational structures. Moreover, science typically holds itself to a different sort of accountability (empirical results and uncompromising honesty) as a professional ideal, whereas the actual nature of the beast, where funding is drawn to popular ideas and politically connected researchers instead of the most honest and productive.
My experience in finance was that 50% of quants (especially physics PhDs from the 90s, when all the Cold War-era funding dried up) were failed academics.
Most of the rest were PhDs jumping straight to industry to avoid chasing tenure for years.
It depends on how you define "failed". Even the best academics may think it rational to make millions of dollars as a quant over a more conventional salary as an academic.
I am not a "failed mcdonalds cashier" if I choose to quit and something that pays more, even if I started out in that particular field.
Sort of funny that the recently deposed McDonald's CEO was an EE. That demonstrates the true value of STEM jobs in our society rather than the phony "shortage" hype.
Maybe I'm being blunt, but my definition is that I spoke to them personally and they told me they would still be in academia if they had managed to land a job.
I asked, because at the time I was considering leaving to pursue a graduate degree myself.
Of course, I didn't literally speak to every quant in on the street, but I sampled from the ones who were around me. Most people were quite open about the situation but glad they had left; some were still very bitter.
I'm not questioning whether it happened or not, I'm curious about the reasons their presentation was cut short.
"There’s nothing quite like having an established academic decide that hearing eight minutes of the allotted twenty would be sufficient. As a self-funded under-employed contingent, I wasn’t going to say anything useful anyway."
How would this established academic know they're self-funded and under-employed?
The author's job title might have given this away. In Canada (assistant|associate|full) professors are tenured or tenure track, and hence higher status. Any other title could be assumed to mean non-tenure track and under-employed, hence lower status.
>I don’t need to start building a life from scratch in my late thirties. I definitely don’t need to do it for a nine—or three-month contract without benefits, or costs of moving.
Well, it's not like the academic world, even when it was much better itself, has done much to protest and assist with the same and much worse situation in blue collar (and even office) jobs.
First they came for the McDonalds burger flippers, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a McDonalds burger flipper...
I don't disagree with that, but there's a difference between someone walking off a job after they quit and when a company terminates someone's employment.
I'm just an adjunct and will likely never break into the tenure track (not having a master's degree being one of many factors against me), but I was sad to see that even this purportedly slow and deliberate process be affected to some degree by ageism. A good friend of mine entered grad school (in the humanities) around 2004, when most folks he knew were easily finding tenure-track jobs after their PhDs. He found himself the runner-up for highly-contested jobs, and family events took him out of the hunt for a bit, but as the years went on and he was content to be hired by not top-tier schools, he ran into the "We'd love to hire you but your resumé is too prestigious for us and you might just use us as a stepping stone" and "If you haven't been snapped up despite such a great pedigree, then something must be wrong with you". He eventually got a tenure-track offer which he happily accepted, but he was close to giving up on his decade-long career path.
I think these struggles are endemic to nearly all professions but it seems to me that in academia, there's fewer opportunities to get tenure-track (or non-tenure, but decently-paying) positions once you've deviated from the usual path, even before you factor in the scarcity.
It's commonly assumed in humanities disciplines that if you don't get a tenure-track job within a few years of graduation, you probably never will. It's also common for advisers to tell their students not to adjunct under any circumstances, because it makes you "damaged goods" on the job market. A lot of professors advise their students to take non-academic jobs and keep applying to tenure-track positions, rather than take adjunct jobs.
Many older professors who have tenure, and who have great influence in their departments, entered academia when it was the case that "there are always jobs for good people." That's their worldview, and it's just not true anymore. But because they think that way, when they see a candidate who has been looking for a job for several years, they assume that candidate is not one of the good ones.
It seems to me that the sciences are different, because postdoc positions seem to be a normal part of one's career progression after a PhD. But in the humanities, that's not the case.
I don't have anything beyond a bachelor's degree. I was hired (I'm assuming) for my professional history. I haven't seriously considered going tenure-track and so have found it strange when other people find it strange that I'm not seeking tenure. In the same way a tech worker would find it strange to be asked if they hoped to stay at Google/FB/Apple for their entire liveas.
Just an anecdote... a professor whose classes I've taken, which were fantastic, recently got tenured. In the liberal arts, too!
I like to think that tenure isn't quite dead yet. Depends on the college, naturally. (I deliberately use the word "college" instead of "university"; I find that the liberal arts college at my university is more organized than the computer science department.)
Eventually the college loan bubble will burst, and universities will no longer be able to be run like businesses.
Many people have pointed to an overpopulation being the root cause for this, but I believe that ignores the increasingly inflating administrative staff at universities. That is, it is also a budget problem. The budget for the increase in professor staff is being diverted into additional administrative positions that do... something, apparently. I'm not convinced that the administrative bloat is worth a fraction of what it costs.
You'd be appalled at how much overhead universities take out of research grants (from NSF, DARPA, NIH, etc.) to maintain these administrations (along with legitimate uses, like paying utility bills). 40-50% is not uncommon.
I've long been expecting someone like the NYT to do an exposé on the "dark money" of F&A. It would seem to be ripe given he current discussion of the cost of education.
I won some student award at school funded through an industry sponsor. I think it was $1000. I was recommended by one of my professors. As part of the processing fee, they deducted 20% for school overhead!
Does anyone else see the contradiction: the amount students are spending on college keeps going up, but the budget for professors seems to keep going down. What accounts for the discrepancy?
Facilities and administrators. Schools get ranked based on their facilities and the types of programs and activities they offer so they keep outspending each other in this area to remain competitive. It's a tragedy.
That's part of it. The other part is for private universities, they are admitting more and more lower income students. Each low income student receives tuition waiver, and often a living stipend. So it's a double whammy on the budget.
The belief that everyone should go to college. What the government spends on public schools has actually gone up over the decades, but a move to everyone going to college means that funding per student has dropped.
This is a more accurate response than most on this issue.
To take it further, the underlying issue is that it is now compulsory for people to have a college degree in america to keep up with their expectation of a normal middle class life style.
Decades ago, you didn't need to be college educated to live the American Dream.
The collapse of those jobs has left citizens to scramble for what's left. this leads to all sorts of secondary effects such as the reduction of extra curricular activities, teaching the test, rote memmorization to survive tests, and cram schools.
This pattern exsists already in many third world and developing world nations, and it is a shit show. Our worst scams when it comes to education are horrifying. (Search: vyapam for the most recent education related scam in india.)
The education problems in america are a jobs/employment problem.
It's interesting to see this story on the front page at the same time with another one titled "We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated". It's easy to solve both problems (killing two birds with one stone?) by implementing protocols of purging scientists with track records of non-repeatable results from "personal opinions" and fraudulent scholars gaming publishing systems, including titles, positions, degrees and/or grant money ever awarded. This should at least release some vacancy in the academia (given a 11% repeatable rate from the Amgen study).
The point of the Nautilus article was repeatability is a must before a scientific result is accepted. However pressure to publish new results often lead to scientists losing motivation in doing replicating studies. It's a bug in the scientific ecosystem, particularly in the allocation of rewards. A significant number of experiments will always fail to replicate for various random reasons. That doesn't mean the concerned scientist is at fault.
one or two publications without repeatable results might be acceptable - maybe he or she is just out of luck or some how choose the wrong hypothesis. but if there are five or six non-repeatable papers in the publication laundry list, esp some used for degrees, promotions to tenured positions, or grant applications, this makes him or her looks like fraud with a track record of publishing "personal opinions."
this is relatively vague as if u do read the article, there are more and more adjunct and temp faculty positions at universities, not more tenure-track positions. besides, the pie of r&d grants in term of nih or nsf budgets did not grow much in the past decade. also i dont see there is major possibility for anothe UC system or ivy league to be duplicated in the next decade or so - it takes much longer time to build an oven for a bigger pie.
As somebody looking to go into research (in a STEM field), this is a rather chilling article... And it's by far not the first time I have heard about this problem of getting a long-term job in academia.
I'm just wondering: this guy was from Canada. What's the situation like in Europe? Especially Germany?
I'm not European, but I've heard the situation is hard there too, although not in the same way. The European academics I've met are, years after finishing the PhD, still quite dependent on their advisors for patronage. Those advisors likewise have to defer to their advisors. For decades. Until somebody dies. It's very feudal.
UK University chair of a STEM dept graduate school chipping in here: Every September during induction I point out to the PhD students that there are (around) ten of them in the room and our department advertised (around) 1 job last year. We also tell them this when they are applying for the PhD in the first place. They seem unfazed. Our PhD course lasts no longer than 4 years (good students are out in 3) and they appear to be highly employable at the end of it - both as postdocs and in industry. Having seen the US system at first hand as well, I'd say that the lower opportunity cost (time to finish) makes the whole process fairer on the students - graduating with a PhD at 25 still seems like a great opportunity. Doing the same at 32 is a very different prospect. I have no idea what the situation in the humanities is like.
Finally - UK research councils (who often fund PhD students) are very open about the fact that PhD students must now be taught a host of 'transferrable skills' to equip them for non-academic jobs.
The problem isn't with PhD positions. PhDs after all are training positions. But each postdoc position makes one less employable. There really is little justification (other than exploitation) in my mind for having postdoc positions that don't lead to permanent positions.
This is more of an issue in Germany (where I work now) than in the UK (where I did my PhD).
Does HN have any advice for those looking to get a PhD because they love the field (Computer Science)? And then follow up the PhD with a job at one of the tech companies' research arm?
If you really love it, there's no sense in talking about reason. "And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays." - Bottom, Midsummer Night's Dream
As for tech company research arms, look carefully at who recruits where you intend to go, and who your potential advisors publish with. If you land in a place with good connections, it increases your chances of landing a gig like that.
"If you really love it, there's no sense in talking about reason."
Not getting a PhD does not prevent you from working in the field or from reading the literature. IMO the only reason to get a PhD is that it will open jobs that otherwise wouldn't be available.
For the most part, loving the field is a terrible reason to get a PhD, especially in the humanities. I encourage students considering this decision to do so based on the job market - what options will be available, what is the pay, what will you be doing in that job. And make your decision assuming you are below average.
Get a Masters and go into industry. You will love the work you get to do in the field. Over time you'll learn what big unsolved problems are that we are currently facing. You might find one that particularly interests you and start thinking "man, I'd love to have a lot of time to really dig in and solve this problem, something my job never provides" Then you go back for the PhD where you get that time.
The work ethic that you learned will be invaluable and you'll have something solid to pursue.
In my opinion the two biggest wastes I saw when I was in my PhD program were:
1. most students had no work ethic. It was always "I fucked around all week and then rushed to do research before meeting with my professor"
2. not having any idea what kind of research the world needs. And why should you if you never go out and experience the world?
From where I sit, I certainly wish I had done that. A PhD in CS or EE (the only things I can comment on with personal observation) creates industry opportunities that an MS doesnt. Better projects. Easier path to project leadership. More choice of projects. More job mobility opportunities (hugely more).
This is data from observing how friends, relatives, and aquaintences with PhDs in CS, EE, and Robotics are doing. None on the academic track, by choice.
My brother-in-law with the PhD in econ (MIT, no less) chose the academic route, and has faced the tenure struggle.
Can someone please explain to my why tenure is needed? I've had some professors attempt to do it to me in the past and I never got it.
I maybe understand it for a humanities subject, but for STEM no chance for me.
I don't have tenure when it comes to working in the industry. If I'm a good enough employee I'll stay on, if I'm a bad enough employee I'll be replaced.
Tenure just seems to protect mediocrity. Can someone help paint this in a different light to me?
I thought that was a job in research and development? I know people in private companies that do this.
If your work is so crazy that it is completely inexplicable to another person and you cannot articulate it's value, then how are you going to find people to help you?
This seems like a really really uncommon situation.
In my college, there are professors who are in a nontenured position who do this sort of work. The difference is they can communicate the value of their work, set milestones for their research, and explain to people why they have or have not reached them.
If that cannot be done, or it falls on death ears, you have a much bigger problem at hand: the problem of academics not being able to recognize ground breaking research.
I'm in the humanities and at least in my situation (and that of the people I know who are in similar situations) is that I have no time to do research. I'm paid to teach 5 classes a semester. Last semester I had 5 classes with 3 different topics, one I had never taught before, 3 classes with 24 students each, one with 32, and a lecture with 70. After the first couple weeks of the semester I got zero writing done. So this summer I spent nearly every day working on getting something submitted to a journal (and there's no guarantee it will get published. the paper I spent last summer working on got rejected).
I enjoy teaching but I didn't get my phd so I could spend my entire career doing nothing but teaching entry level courses.
So I need to get a tenure-track job so my teaching load is less and I will be able to teach higher-level courses. But to get a tenure-track job I need to get published. But to get published I need time to write which I don't have because I don't have a tenure-track job...
So I'm giving it one more year before I give up on the career path I've been working towards for over 15 years at this point.
I think the problem is not being solved by the existence of tenure. It's masking the problem.
Shouldn't everyone be hired with the intention that they do research in their field?
It's not like universities don't have the money to have you teach 4 classes a semester and give you teacher assistants.
The profit margins have room for expenses like this.
I think my big issue is that I'm on the brunt of what happens when tenure gets to run wild.
I'd also love it if you could email me some information about your research, I'd like to understand what topics there are available for study in the humanities realm.
> I thought that was a job in research and development?
The type of research R&D shops perform is (reasonably) constrained by the profit motive. There is value to society by empowering individuals to pursue topics in a broader sphere. Even economic benefits, though I philosophically disagree that for an idea to have merit it needs to be profitable.
Somebody was reading up on that field of research and discovered it could be used to encrypt messages. Out of that blossomed a whole new sector of the economy. But the mathematicians who initially pioneered the work had no idea it would ever be used that way. They were just happily studying one of a thousand random and seemingly pointless avenues of mathematical exploration.
In fact, as I heard it the fact that number theory was completely academic as far as anyone knew and was not at all applicable was a point of pride for some of its theorists. Crypto changed all that of course.
> I thought that was a job in research and development? I know people in private companies that do this.
They don't realize it, but they are auto-constraining themselves to research that may eventually produce a profit. Example, IBM's research journal: https://www.research.ibm.com/journal/
When you work in industry, your job is to do what you're told. When you do research, your job is to learn new things and tell others about them, no matter who doesn't like those results. If you're studying earthquakes in Oklahoma, the oil companies won't like it. If you're studying evolution, certain segments of the population won't like it.
Tenure is one way of protecting academic freedom. You seem to be thinking of it in terms of job security. As many tenured professors that have been fired over the years for reasons like the university having financial difficulties can tell you, tenure does not provide job security. Of course there is a correlation between the two.
This makes sense, but are we not at a time where you can simply do all of those things and people won't crucify you?
> When you work in industry, your job is to do what you're told.
You are told to publish, are you not? It's the same principle except your job has extra steps.
I'd also like to point out colleges aren't the end all be all of R&D. The industry does R&D as well and they do crazy R&D without tenure. I've met people who have started companies just so they could do what they want, moved to companies just so they could research one thing, or even convinced their current boss as to why a certain piece of research would be of value.
I think this is a much more complete answer then what I've been told before, but it's still quite fishy.
"are we not at a time where you can simply do all of those things and people won't crucify you?"
Are you in the US? I'd say it's pretty clear you can get crucified for stating an unpopular opinion.
"I'd also like to point out colleges aren't the end all be all of R&D."
And they shouldn't be. They should primarily do work that the private sector is not willing to fund.
"I think this is a much more complete answer then what I've been told before, but it's still quite fishy."
There are no doubt advantages and disadvantages of tenure. Whether tenure is a good system is definitely up for debate, but the tradeoff is that some research will not be done and some topics will not be addressed in the classroom. There's little incentive to risk your career by jumping into controversial situations. Perhaps we are willing to move to a different model.
Let me be clear for others who come across this because I'm completely sure that since you've been a student and now work in the system you know where I am coming from as a student. Surely there will be people who read this who have not had the 'pleasure' of being graced with the "bad kind" of tenured professor.
In my college experience, which has only been one year, I've met a few types of professors.
There is the kind who LOVES teaching and who is amazing at it. This is the only kind of teacher that I'll give a real life example of. If you're going to NJIT and need a math teacher you're going to want to look for these two names: Jimmy Hayes and Kenneth Horwitz.
Both don't only want you to learn but they also want to be the one who teaches you. If I could have every professor I meet conduct themselves like this I'd have no problem with tenure. And that's coming from someone who failed the class taught by Hayes. The reason I'm giving such praise to these professors is there is absolutely no way my failing grade was their Hayes fault, it was my own (I had some problems going on in my life at the time).
They spent all the time they could preparing us for the exams and also gave us points back if we did something that was incorrectly graded and we could prove it was right.
Next there is the kind who "believes in the system". They teach because they enjoy it, they are usually charismatic and good at teaching but that isn't their main focus. They either do this while engaging in research or other projects to help the school or further their field.
I have no problem with this second group. It is again someone who puts time and effort into their job. Someone who cares about their work. It's altogether someone who is furthering humanity while not harming others around them.
The last professor is someone you don't want. It's the professor who is tenured. That's how all of us students refer to them since these seem to be the only kind of people, in the eye of a student, who actually has it. They are the professor who comes in 15 minutes late to class, consistently, refuses to answer emails or questions, and leaves randomly through the semester.
I've actually had one of or physics professors come in on the first day 15 minutes late. He started the lecture (for the class that was meant to be taken along side of Calculus 1) by saying "So does everyone here know how to take the derivative." When everyone is confused, he does a 10-second-basic drawing of what it was. Asked if anyone had any questions. He scanned the room full of raised hands and said "Ok" then went on with the lecture.
This happened 10-15 times across the semester.
Another incident was that the physics department cobbles together a "sort of practice exam" for each test. I found this out from a friend as my teacher had never talked about nor handed this exam out.
The last story I'll share of this horrible professor took place around the time of the 3rd exam. I took the exam and went in the next class to get my scores only to find he had absconded with the only copies of our exam on a "business trip"; we had to wait 3 weeks to get our exam scores. (I had given up at that point and started randomly answering on the exams. For this test I got 17/20 placing me in the top 20% of the test takers.... that might tell you a bit about our exams)
So this is my problem with tenure. It's often the WORST of the worst you notice have it while the best of the best struggle to get it since it seems they aren't one to shut up and play ball with the stupid processes needed to get it.
The confusion here is that you seem to think tenure has something to do with teaching. For a research university, tenure mostly (but not entirely) is a reward for research (and grant-getting) excellence.
It's a quirk of our system that excellent world-class researchers are obligated to teach basic materials to undergraduates, and sadly not all of them are very good at it. Further, while poor grading reviews don't help someone seeking tenure, a poor publishing record and no grants will kill it. The incentive is to prioritize research at all costs. One of the best researchers I know is also one of the worst rated instructors in course evaluations I've seen.
This quirk is why coursework from non-research universities might on average be better in your standard topics. For 101 stuff, you're better off being taught the material from someone who is a great instructor but isn't on the research frontier than the other way around.
These days many (probably most, though I don't have that kind of data) research universities are moving away from intro classes taught by tenured faculty. It's more common to have non-tenure track faculty teach intro classes, along with the tenured faculty that enjoy doing it. Interestingly, I've heard many complaints about tenure based on complaints about non-TT faculty.
Well you'd say that, but coinicdently the teacher I'm talking about has no published research listed on his profile page for our school, only "research interests." It doesn't look like he's done much, just that he's friends with the type of people who are in charge.
This is mirrored in the CS department where I am. One full time professor was given an offer by the school, a "retirement package." It was rumored to be in the 250k range. He is unanimously refereed to as "the weed-out professor" by everyone of my peers since he is the only teacher for one of the mandatory CS classes.
Sadly he has not taken the retirement package and has one of the highest failure rate classes in the college.
He has not been fired due to his tenure.
This is the reason why I and many other students have this distaste for tenure: because whenever we are confronted with it, it is because our lives are made infinity more difficult because of it.
In the years to come as students who have been poorly treated by tenured professors seep into administration of colleges there will be problems because of this.
I can't fix it and I don't mind at all if professors loose tenure as an option. That being said, if the research community wants to keep it they are going to need to shift public opinion of it and that will only happen by hiring professors who are good at teaching to replace the brilliant researchers in that regard.
I think your inherent bias knowing only about your field is distorting your r&d expectations.
Can you imagine a private sector narrative that could give rise to CRISPR? That's the sort of blue sky r&d that tenure is designed to protect - basic science r&d is impossible to value.
I could imagine it, yes. That's the point of R&D: you hire people, ask them to make something that will change the future, they show you continual results and you forward that to your investors so they feel good. This goes the same way as for the developments of technologies such as RF transceivers. It was a magical world changing discovery made by a few private inventors. Is there something making this impossible from happening again?
There's lots of research funded by private companies.
That being said, I'd say that it is possible to do the same research without tenure. Are you saying that you'd never be allowed to research something as important as CRISPR technology had you not received tenure?
If that is the case then that's a problem; if researchers cannot research certain things then there is a larger problem in the academic world and I'd need to be convinced that tenure is the best solution for it.
Something doesn't add up. University education costs have been increasing over at least the last one or two decades. But universities keep reducing costs by hiring adjunct, sessional, or contract faculty who are presumably less well paid than full-time professors. So where is the universities' money going to? Are they losing it by mismanaging their endowment funds? Are they spending more in other areas?
For public (state-funded) universities, they receive a large percentage of their operating budget not from tuition or endowments, but directly from the state. In many cases, over the past 10+ years, this direct support has been slashed. So, for these institutions, even as tuition has been increasing, their total budget was likely dropping. Tuition hasn't been able to keep up with the loss of state funding, so the universities try to make the numbers work in a variety of ways... one of which is to limit the number of professors.
This article has been posted and discussed on HackerNews before. I mean, not this exact same article, but the same narrative written by different authors. That shows on the one hand that a lot of people are unfortunately affected by the same problem, but it also means that it's not a new problem.
Whether it's academia or industry, after working at the same place for some 8 years or so, I think it's only human that you get a feeling that your employer "owes you" for your commitment. And perhaps they really do? But people lose their jobs all the time, why would academia be any different to any other work place?
> why would academia be any different to any other work place?
If anything it should be worse. Companies realize a profit which the pay some of to their employees. Education, on the other hand, is a net loss operation.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadIOW the "psychology" / "liberal arts" over population. I'm not trying to knock any of those studies, but there is a large excess where I'm from.
I totally get that people don't want to leave their speciality, but the PhD will normally give students a bunch of skills that are hard (but not impossible) to get elsewhere.
I have a psychology PhD, and now work at a tech company (I always loved stats, and discovered coding during the PhD due to laziness, so may not be a typical case).
Having graduated in 1992 with his PhD, his book came out in 1998, as he moved through a series of temporary positions. He's tenured at a major university now, but he does have to live in an out of the way and rather drab college town. It's no picnic.
And then 2 years later they will be asking you to find them a job. :)
It was worth it for this one though, just one main thing; still I almost didn't click it, I often don't.
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I see that same mentality reflected in far too many places, no one wants to hire for a career anymore; and that's what 'tenure' is at a college. The 'contract' in society between the working class and those who employee them is beyond broken.
Our society is not so affluent that, if what you are genuinely excited about is medieval German poetry, you can reasonably expect to be supported with that passion unless you win a very specific academic track lottery (or have other sources of income).
You are right in that a decision has to be made in what areas we consider important enough to allow a sustainable career from it. In your example, I would certainly not fund a person for studying Medieval German poetry only; but more funding for research into history? Sure thing.
I had a few friends who had some ideas but their professors weren't too happy with those. They found a way to incorporate some of the buzzwords for a giant grant our university had, pitched it to the professor, who submitted a grant application, and got them funded on the idea. Professor was happy (he had money), students were happy, but at the end of the day, the process was idiotic.
Yes, but this stops happening when economic growth is non-existent.
The Western economy (developed countries generally), outside of Silicon Valley and a small number of bright spots, is not really growing.
First let us dispense with certain lies that nearly everybody believes.
The statistics about growth you always hear in the news or from politicians are fraudulent. All economic growth ultimately derives from technology - more output for less input or doing more with less. In the 1930s the growth statistics looked very bad but were actually better than they appeared because a host of new technologies were invented - artificial rubber, secondary oil recovery. Measuring this sort of thing is meaningless because every new invention is only discovered once. How the invention of the steam engine and vulcanized rubber impacts on the price network is unknown until it actually happens and the two inventions contribution to economic growth cannot be compared until they enter the price network egro...
The growth stats were always at best a guess at the underlying reality.
The real economy has not grown significantly since the early 70s. People who correctly point to the massive increase in computational power as marvelous should contrast that with with real energy prices in the same period. That is what the hoi polloi feel, and they are more correct about that than a supertanker packed with econometricians and politicians. This is why the hated Trump is so beloved, notice how the campaign slogan isn't 'Make America Greater', it is 'Make American Great Again'. This admission of a failure is fascinating (for a politician) and utterly ignored by the press.
I don't believe it is 'the end of the world' (there was some growth after all) but people really need to pull their heads out of the asses, academics in particular. Unless we realize there is a problem we cannot adjust our positions in order to fix it.
The fact is that the ideas in your head need to pay rent somehow.
If the net affect is that they do not, then society fragments, which is an appropriate strategy to deal with failure through complexity. I note that the Roman Empire had a very high basic literacy rate. Normal people could read and most often poor children went to a kind of elementary school.
That all got fucked when the Empire fell. It didn't happen immediately but we ultimately went 5 centuries in which only a tiny tiny elite, sometimes in the low hundreds or thousands had the ability to read and write. There is a small island off the coast of my country that held the only copies of most old Greek and Roman texts, but for that 'seedbank' saved by the monks and a passionate illiterate king (Carogolian Empire), you would know nothing of Seneca, Cicero, all the myths and legends of the Ancient World and much more besides.
Kenneth Clark did an excellent documentary on the subject if you're interested.
The episode is: Civilisation (1969) Episode 1 "The Skin of Our Teeth", from 13:35.
Things can and do go backwards.
The pre-modern world required the presence of a class of cheap laborers as there were so many tasks that could not be automated. Productivity was low and there was no way that the basic needs of society could be met without everyone pitching in.
In today's day and age, we have highly automated agriculture and are doing more of it. Productivity has skyrocketed. And yet, we burden our population with arbitrary schedules (e.g. 40 hour weeks, limited vacation time), making most of society incapable of enjoying the real fruit of modern life: the ability to survive without working a dumb job all the time.
You state that ideas need to pay for rent somehow. I agree completely: they do need to. But what if we provide a certain basic income to everyone so that its not something one has to worry about? We have not seen the results of this kind of experiment.
Your comparison to the Roman empire is also interesting. I didn't think that most Romans were literate or familiar with the classics! However, as I noted earlier, productivity of labor in Roman times was still not as high as today, so maybe its not an apt comparison.
Economic growth is real, just partially measurable at best.
The affluence of a society is contingent on two things. Generating wealth and the transmission of said wealth.
Did you know that Singapore's founding father forbade the gathering of most statistics when they were getting started? There's an interesting story there. He didn't trust modern economists and Singapore turned out alright.
> The pre-modern world required the presence of a class of cheap laborers as there were so many tasks that could not be automated. Productivity was low and there was no way that the basic needs of society could be met without everyone pitching in.
Yes, with the exception of the aristocrats or ruling class and the freedoms afforded to them by slavery. For most of human history a necessary evil in order to coordinate a more complex society and only recently has invention and innovation been separated from the patronage of the ruling class (with mixed results).
> In today's day and age, we have highly automated agriculture and are doing more of it. Productivity has skyrocketed. And yet, we burden our population with arbitrary schedules (e.g. 40 hour weeks, limited vacation time), making most of society incapable of enjoying the real fruit of modern life: the ability to survive without working a dumb job all the time.
I agree that is a problem, both individually and collectively. Right now we have a bunch of crude heuristics being used because we don't know or aren't willing to trust in a better way. I can only say we should experiment more.
On an individual level I'm invested in creating a Tiny House with zero rent/bills. Then in generating an inflation adjusting passive income stream from another project of mine. This shall, coupled together, allow me to live as I please for the rest of my life if I choose. I call this a zero marginal lifestyle, where any efforts on my part are 100% profit for me. This is what the aristocrats used to give their inventor friends in patronage, the security of having resources and no concerns about continuing to exist. That enables you, hypothetically, to give your full brain to something. I estimate it takes 150k - 250k to accomplish such a thing.
> You state that ideas need to pay for rent somehow. I agree completely: they do need to. But what if we provide a certain basic income to everyone so that its not something one has to worry about? We have not seen the results of this kind of experiment.
I think it very much depends on the mental models of the those people you give the basic income to.
For example giving basic income to ISIS members is not about to make the world a better place.
I think basic income should be unconditional on 'what' you spend it on, but that it should be conditional on 'general purpose'. How to achieve that I don't know.
Perhaps take inspiration from Heinlein's Starship Troopers. All citizens receive basic income but becoming a citizen requires some duty, work or deed that benefits the collective.
Recognition of good work is important in a society where money matters less. Google had this problem a while ago when it was trying to convince their millionaire engineers to keep working. By and large they appear to have succeeded by being flexible and offering meaning in the spot in Maslow's Pyramid that used to be occupied by accumulating income. If any Googlers have any comments on this that would be great.
I do know most rich people who stay rich are motivated by purpose and not by gathering of resources or at least not directly.
What you do not want is the Roman problem of Bread & Circuses. You never want your society to go down that rabbit hole. You shall require some stern measures to prevent that from happening. If a society descends into miasma you fix it without worrying ...
And where do the English and Economics professors that teach those STEM graduates come from, hmmmmmm?
The real issue is that we graduate too many PhD's for too few positions because PhD's are nice slave labor for universities.
This kind of overgraduation is true now in almost every field. We're either going to come to grips with the fact that there simply aren't enough jobs or things are going to collapse.
I would say that if you put all your eggs in one basket, you shouldn't expect sympathy when they break.
> funding regulations meant the grant couldn’t pay my salary as its lead researcher
I've never, ever heard of anything like this occurring. The most I have seen are cost sharing pieces where a grant cannot more than a certain % of your salary. But these are often known upfront by the PI!
> The two disclosed who had submitted a grant proposal and whose book was near publication—all of which are needed for tenure. I was the only one in the room with books, articles, and a recently awarded grant.
This strikes me as a highly bitter position to take. There is far more to tenure than only the number of grants, books, articles, etc. Were the articles published in high impact journals? How much $$ was the grant for? A researcher 5 years younger might get a tenure-track position with no prior grants, but a hot research topic, a few good publications and an excellent pedigree.
> My financial reality still makes it hard to keep up with conferences. I haven’t had access to professional development funds since 2010
The author states he has funding grants but these did not explicitly cover several conferences? I'm very surprised by this, and this is not at all consistent with my experience. I had funding to attend conferences as a first year graduate student.
> There are jobs in the southern US and in the UK, which would take me away from family and a new relationship that I cherish. I don’t need to start building a life from scratch in my late thirties. I definitely don’t need to do it for a nine—or three-month contract without benefits, or costs of moving. And if we’re talking about the US, I don’t need to be dealing with signing religious codes of conduct or dealing with campuses where eighteen-year-olds can carry concealed guns.
The sad truth of the matter is: if you want to get a tenure track job, 99% of us will not truly have a choice in location where you live. Expect to move across the country (or across countries!). That is quite apparent when you sign up. You take what you can get. A friend took a position in upstate NY, and he hates the cold...
Having just recently attended an academic conference as a non-academic (but not submitted anything this time), I was wondering whether non-academics do, or should, feel guilty about publishing at these venues. It was very apparent how other people there were looking for jobs and using their publications and presentations as a part of that process. If non-academics publish in journals and conferences, should we feel bad that we're potentially taking away spots from those these venues are "meant for"?
In fact I'd say non-academics publishing in conferences and journals can be good for academics even from an egoistic standpoint, as it can help break the popular perception of science/academia as an ivory tower of self-absorbing smartasses out of touch with reality. And better popular perception of science indirectly means more funding. So as an academic I would definitely see an increase of submissions by non-academics as good news for my interests.
> I've never, ever heard of anything like this occurring.
It's a Canadian academic, so perhaps Canadian federal conditions are different from what you're used to?
There are some really odd interactions between funders' and universities' rules. Many places won't let non-permanent staff be the "lead researcher"/PI/whatever on grants, particularly if the grant or contract has specific "deliverables" or if the grant runs longer than than employee's contract.
These policies are probably well-intentioned--you can't really commit to an employee doing three years of research if they may not even be employed here next year--but they can lead to aggravating catch-22 situations where people could have the job if there was funding, but they can't get the funding because they don't have the job...
The simple fact is that right now the average professor is graduating more than 10 phd students, only 1 of which can become a tenured professor at a research university. The job options in academia other than tenured professor are horrible and exploitative. I know many post-docs who have gone into industry after slaving away at temporary and low paying jobs for over 6 years. These post-docs were very bright and dedicated people, but the tenure track position requires lots of luck in addition to skill.
As you note, academia has become increasingly exploitative, even when most individual professors remain well meaning.
In addition, many people considering grad school or who have recently begun it seem not to know quite how bad the situation is, or quite how bad it can be to be in your 30s and to have effectively wasted the career part of your 20s.
It was the academic equivalent of Old Economy Steven. Very triggering.
Given that one of the few factors capable of really changing an exploitative labor market is labor organizing, she might have a point.
For engineers, say you got rejected by Google, there are still hundreds of engineering teams you can apply to.
Should there be a policy to force retirement? Is it fair?
No, artificially creating jobs does not seem like the solution. We should be requiring all schools, for all degrees, publish relevant employment figures for that degree. And for doctorates, that should mean giving percentages that have tenure after X years and the percentage employed in jobs that required their doctorate.
Informing students lets them make the choice. If they are getting a PhD for the love of it, and don't care, power to them. But they should be given real data for their job prospects.
The bottom line is that there are way too many graduates for the size of the academic job market, and even if the number of newly minted PhDs dropped by half, there would still be too many. In some fields, the number of new PhDs could drop nearly to zero before it made sense to get one.
In a way that mirrored what that professor was doing -- teaching stuff that was last relevant in mid 80's, doing absolutely the minimum required, reading off the slides all lecture, then have TA grade everything. It was scary imaging the wasted potential and thousands students over decades who missed on what could have been a useful course.
That was a state college, so besides taking parent's money and wasting them, they were taking state' money (although they'd been a lot less of that lately).
Most professors were very good and not saying we should not have tenure, as that would undermine the ability to do some green field research that perhaps doesn't have dollar signs attached to it, but at the same time, I think a few bad apples like that are ruining the image and idea behind it.
I think most of my great profs did not have tenure. Maybe 1 or 2 did.
Seems like somebody with enough smarts to do that could just go work in industry, make a bunch of money, then retire and do what they want.
That said, there are many good reasons to pursue a PhD. A PhD in engineering/sciences gives one training in research, and there are tons of awesome applied and basic research jobs that require a PhD that aren't professors. Working at NASA JPL was amazing, and it required a PhD. If a person wants to do research, then a PhD in engineering/sciences opens many doors.
I think more graduate students need training in career planning and that they need to have realistic expectations. Too many people think they will win the lottery.
start your own school, lady.
donald trump did it. you're worse than donald trump?
However, it was very clear to everyone in my grad program (as well as to my friends doing physics PhDs across the street) that this requires 1-2 competitive postdocs (3-6 years at low salary) and a stiff competition to a tenure track. And you do not usually get a choice: i.e., if you get offered a position, you grab it, be it in Maine or Texas (I decided to avoid this race and went to the industry; there are pros and cons to both paths).
IMO, the tenure system, at least in the US, is highly inefficient. Things are pretty top-heavy (older, tenured professors who originally were expected to retire by ~60, often do not) and graduating PhDs with decent, but not stellar results have a very hard time on the academic research track.
>Until 1982, retirement of faculty members at many universities was mandatory at age 65. Because of amendments to the ADEA, in 1982 the minimum allowable mandatory retirement age was increased to age 70. In 1986 Congress made additional amendments to the ADEA, prohibiting any mandatory retirement ages for most workers in the United States. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737001/
I might've even put up with postdoc hell, and the "6 year job interview " that is the tenure process if I thought it would have come to something. But, when you have 50 people competing for the same three openings in a year, and only one chance per year to apply, the odds don't look very good.
I don't know if it was wasted time or not. It was a long time to not be in the workforce, but I learned a lot of skills while working on what turned out to be dead end research projects. I have a job now that requires merely a fraction of those skills. But maybe I wouldn't have gotten the job without my half phd. Or maybe I'd have a better job if I finished.
I'm still pretty frustrated by the fact that what was presented to me as a failsafe career path was anything but failsafe. This is pretty much the same problem with all of higher education and the current economy in miniature. Just as an undergrad degree no longer garuntees a good job a phd no longer garuntees a tenured job.
This is grad school in a nutshell, in a lot of fields. I've seen three common responses to this cognitive dissonance:
1. Deny the brutal reality of the job market.
2. "But I couldn't ever be happy doing anything else!"
3. Leave.
One of the strangest things about my grad school experience was watching very intelligent people spend years of their lives, and sometimes borrowing money they could never pay back, to pursue a degree even though deep down, they understood that it was a really bad idea. The rationalizations they came up with were pretty transparent to anyone who wasn't also in the grad school bubble.
I suppose I sound harsh, but when people ask me if they should go to grad school in the field I did, my answer is always "not unless you are already independently wealthy and never need to work again."
Most of the rest were PhDs jumping straight to industry to avoid chasing tenure for years.
I am not a "failed mcdonalds cashier" if I choose to quit and something that pays more, even if I started out in that particular field.
I asked, because at the time I was considering leaving to pursue a graduate degree myself.
Of course, I didn't literally speak to every quant in on the street, but I sampled from the ones who were around me. Most people were quite open about the situation but glad they had left; some were still very bitter.
I have never seen this happen at any conference. It makes the author sound like a crackpot.
"There’s nothing quite like having an established academic decide that hearing eight minutes of the allotted twenty would be sufficient. As a self-funded under-employed contingent, I wasn’t going to say anything useful anyway."
How would this established academic know they're self-funded and under-employed?
Well, it's not like the academic world, even when it was much better itself, has done much to protest and assist with the same and much worse situation in blue collar (and even office) jobs.
First they came for the McDonalds burger flippers, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a McDonalds burger flipper...
et al
I think these struggles are endemic to nearly all professions but it seems to me that in academia, there's fewer opportunities to get tenure-track (or non-tenure, but decently-paying) positions once you've deviated from the usual path, even before you factor in the scarcity.
Many older professors who have tenure, and who have great influence in their departments, entered academia when it was the case that "there are always jobs for good people." That's their worldview, and it's just not true anymore. But because they think that way, when they see a candidate who has been looking for a job for several years, they assume that candidate is not one of the good ones.
It seems to me that the sciences are different, because postdoc positions seem to be a normal part of one's career progression after a PhD. But in the humanities, that's not the case.
I'm not sure that I understand this. In your field is having a PhD (but without a masters) considered a negative?
I like to think that tenure isn't quite dead yet. Depends on the college, naturally. (I deliberately use the word "college" instead of "university"; I find that the liberal arts college at my university is more organized than the computer science department.)
Eventually the college loan bubble will burst, and universities will no longer be able to be run like businesses.
Can you explain this sentence?
If you mean, "Students will be less likely to get crazy loans," I can only imagine that would encourage universities to "be run like businesses.)
I've long been expecting someone like the NYT to do an exposé on the "dark money" of F&A. It would seem to be ripe given he current discussion of the cost of education.
So when they hear an indirect rate of 65%, they think the university is taking 2/3 the money. When in fact, it's about 1/3 due to how it's calculated.
Actual ratio seems to be around ~1:50 based on openings.
Edit: Link to source: https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tabl...
To take it further, the underlying issue is that it is now compulsory for people to have a college degree in america to keep up with their expectation of a normal middle class life style.
Decades ago, you didn't need to be college educated to live the American Dream.
The collapse of those jobs has left citizens to scramble for what's left. this leads to all sorts of secondary effects such as the reduction of extra curricular activities, teaching the test, rote memmorization to survive tests, and cram schools.
This pattern exsists already in many third world and developing world nations, and it is a shit show. Our worst scams when it comes to education are horrifying. (Search: vyapam for the most recent education related scam in india.)
The education problems in america are a jobs/employment problem.
These arguments lead to one historically known outcome.
this is relatively vague as if u do read the article, there are more and more adjunct and temp faculty positions at universities, not more tenure-track positions. besides, the pie of r&d grants in term of nih or nsf budgets did not grow much in the past decade. also i dont see there is major possibility for anothe UC system or ivy league to be duplicated in the next decade or so - it takes much longer time to build an oven for a bigger pie.
I'm just wondering: this guy was from Canada. What's the situation like in Europe? Especially Germany?
This is more of an issue in Germany (where I work now) than in the UK (where I did my PhD).
As for tech company research arms, look carefully at who recruits where you intend to go, and who your potential advisors publish with. If you land in a place with good connections, it increases your chances of landing a gig like that.
Not getting a PhD does not prevent you from working in the field or from reading the literature. IMO the only reason to get a PhD is that it will open jobs that otherwise wouldn't be available.
For the most part, loving the field is a terrible reason to get a PhD, especially in the humanities. I encourage students considering this decision to do so based on the job market - what options will be available, what is the pay, what will you be doing in that job. And make your decision assuming you are below average.
Get a Masters and go into industry. You will love the work you get to do in the field. Over time you'll learn what big unsolved problems are that we are currently facing. You might find one that particularly interests you and start thinking "man, I'd love to have a lot of time to really dig in and solve this problem, something my job never provides" Then you go back for the PhD where you get that time.
The work ethic that you learned will be invaluable and you'll have something solid to pursue.
In my opinion the two biggest wastes I saw when I was in my PhD program were: 1. most students had no work ethic. It was always "I fucked around all week and then rushed to do research before meeting with my professor" 2. not having any idea what kind of research the world needs. And why should you if you never go out and experience the world?
This is data from observing how friends, relatives, and aquaintences with PhDs in CS, EE, and Robotics are doing. None on the academic track, by choice.
My brother-in-law with the PhD in econ (MIT, no less) chose the academic route, and has faced the tenure struggle.
I maybe understand it for a humanities subject, but for STEM no chance for me.
I don't have tenure when it comes to working in the industry. If I'm a good enough employee I'll stay on, if I'm a bad enough employee I'll be replaced.
Tenure just seems to protect mediocrity. Can someone help paint this in a different light to me?
If your work is so crazy that it is completely inexplicable to another person and you cannot articulate it's value, then how are you going to find people to help you?
This seems like a really really uncommon situation.
In my college, there are professors who are in a nontenured position who do this sort of work. The difference is they can communicate the value of their work, set milestones for their research, and explain to people why they have or have not reached them.
If that cannot be done, or it falls on death ears, you have a much bigger problem at hand: the problem of academics not being able to recognize ground breaking research.
I enjoy teaching but I didn't get my phd so I could spend my entire career doing nothing but teaching entry level courses.
So I need to get a tenure-track job so my teaching load is less and I will be able to teach higher-level courses. But to get a tenure-track job I need to get published. But to get published I need time to write which I don't have because I don't have a tenure-track job...
So I'm giving it one more year before I give up on the career path I've been working towards for over 15 years at this point.
Shouldn't everyone be hired with the intention that they do research in their field?
It's not like universities don't have the money to have you teach 4 classes a semester and give you teacher assistants.
The profit margins have room for expenses like this.
I think my big issue is that I'm on the brunt of what happens when tenure gets to run wild.
I'd also love it if you could email me some information about your research, I'd like to understand what topics there are available for study in the humanities realm.
The type of research R&D shops perform is (reasonably) constrained by the profit motive. There is value to society by empowering individuals to pursue topics in a broader sphere. Even economic benefits, though I philosophically disagree that for an idea to have merit it needs to be profitable.
Just a random example; modern cryptography comes from "the mathematics of the algebraic structure of elliptic curves over finite fields." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_cryptography
Somebody was reading up on that field of research and discovered it could be used to encrypt messages. Out of that blossomed a whole new sector of the economy. But the mathematicians who initially pioneered the work had no idea it would ever be used that way. They were just happily studying one of a thousand random and seemingly pointless avenues of mathematical exploration.
They don't realize it, but they are auto-constraining themselves to research that may eventually produce a profit. Example, IBM's research journal: https://www.research.ibm.com/journal/
Tenure is one way of protecting academic freedom. You seem to be thinking of it in terms of job security. As many tenured professors that have been fired over the years for reasons like the university having financial difficulties can tell you, tenure does not provide job security. Of course there is a correlation between the two.
> When you work in industry, your job is to do what you're told.
You are told to publish, are you not? It's the same principle except your job has extra steps.
I'd also like to point out colleges aren't the end all be all of R&D. The industry does R&D as well and they do crazy R&D without tenure. I've met people who have started companies just so they could do what they want, moved to companies just so they could research one thing, or even convinced their current boss as to why a certain piece of research would be of value.
I think this is a much more complete answer then what I've been told before, but it's still quite fishy.
Are you in the US? I'd say it's pretty clear you can get crucified for stating an unpopular opinion.
"I'd also like to point out colleges aren't the end all be all of R&D."
And they shouldn't be. They should primarily do work that the private sector is not willing to fund.
"I think this is a much more complete answer then what I've been told before, but it's still quite fishy."
There are no doubt advantages and disadvantages of tenure. Whether tenure is a good system is definitely up for debate, but the tradeoff is that some research will not be done and some topics will not be addressed in the classroom. There's little incentive to risk your career by jumping into controversial situations. Perhaps we are willing to move to a different model.
In my college experience, which has only been one year, I've met a few types of professors.
There is the kind who LOVES teaching and who is amazing at it. This is the only kind of teacher that I'll give a real life example of. If you're going to NJIT and need a math teacher you're going to want to look for these two names: Jimmy Hayes and Kenneth Horwitz.
Both don't only want you to learn but they also want to be the one who teaches you. If I could have every professor I meet conduct themselves like this I'd have no problem with tenure. And that's coming from someone who failed the class taught by Hayes. The reason I'm giving such praise to these professors is there is absolutely no way my failing grade was their Hayes fault, it was my own (I had some problems going on in my life at the time).
They spent all the time they could preparing us for the exams and also gave us points back if we did something that was incorrectly graded and we could prove it was right.
Next there is the kind who "believes in the system". They teach because they enjoy it, they are usually charismatic and good at teaching but that isn't their main focus. They either do this while engaging in research or other projects to help the school or further their field.
I have no problem with this second group. It is again someone who puts time and effort into their job. Someone who cares about their work. It's altogether someone who is furthering humanity while not harming others around them.
The last professor is someone you don't want. It's the professor who is tenured. That's how all of us students refer to them since these seem to be the only kind of people, in the eye of a student, who actually has it. They are the professor who comes in 15 minutes late to class, consistently, refuses to answer emails or questions, and leaves randomly through the semester.
I've actually had one of or physics professors come in on the first day 15 minutes late. He started the lecture (for the class that was meant to be taken along side of Calculus 1) by saying "So does everyone here know how to take the derivative." When everyone is confused, he does a 10-second-basic drawing of what it was. Asked if anyone had any questions. He scanned the room full of raised hands and said "Ok" then went on with the lecture.
This happened 10-15 times across the semester.
Another incident was that the physics department cobbles together a "sort of practice exam" for each test. I found this out from a friend as my teacher had never talked about nor handed this exam out.
The last story I'll share of this horrible professor took place around the time of the 3rd exam. I took the exam and went in the next class to get my scores only to find he had absconded with the only copies of our exam on a "business trip"; we had to wait 3 weeks to get our exam scores. (I had given up at that point and started randomly answering on the exams. For this test I got 17/20 placing me in the top 20% of the test takers.... that might tell you a bit about our exams)
So this is my problem with tenure. It's often the WORST of the worst you notice have it while the best of the best struggle to get it since it seems they aren't one to shut up and play ball with the stupid processes needed to get it.
It's a quirk of our system that excellent world-class researchers are obligated to teach basic materials to undergraduates, and sadly not all of them are very good at it. Further, while poor grading reviews don't help someone seeking tenure, a poor publishing record and no grants will kill it. The incentive is to prioritize research at all costs. One of the best researchers I know is also one of the worst rated instructors in course evaluations I've seen.
This quirk is why coursework from non-research universities might on average be better in your standard topics. For 101 stuff, you're better off being taught the material from someone who is a great instructor but isn't on the research frontier than the other way around.
This is mirrored in the CS department where I am. One full time professor was given an offer by the school, a "retirement package." It was rumored to be in the 250k range. He is unanimously refereed to as "the weed-out professor" by everyone of my peers since he is the only teacher for one of the mandatory CS classes.
Sadly he has not taken the retirement package and has one of the highest failure rate classes in the college.
He has not been fired due to his tenure.
This is the reason why I and many other students have this distaste for tenure: because whenever we are confronted with it, it is because our lives are made infinity more difficult because of it.
In the years to come as students who have been poorly treated by tenured professors seep into administration of colleges there will be problems because of this.
I can't fix it and I don't mind at all if professors loose tenure as an option. That being said, if the research community wants to keep it they are going to need to shift public opinion of it and that will only happen by hiring professors who are good at teaching to replace the brilliant researchers in that regard.
Can you imagine a private sector narrative that could give rise to CRISPR? That's the sort of blue sky r&d that tenure is designed to protect - basic science r&d is impossible to value.
There's lots of research funded by private companies.
That being said, I'd say that it is possible to do the same research without tenure. Are you saying that you'd never be allowed to research something as important as CRISPR technology had you not received tenure?
If that is the case then that's a problem; if researchers cannot research certain things then there is a larger problem in the academic world and I'd need to be convinced that tenure is the best solution for it.
Whether it's academia or industry, after working at the same place for some 8 years or so, I think it's only human that you get a feeling that your employer "owes you" for your commitment. And perhaps they really do? But people lose their jobs all the time, why would academia be any different to any other work place?
If anything it should be worse. Companies realize a profit which the pay some of to their employees. Education, on the other hand, is a net loss operation.