Better prospects are needed in universities and industry to make the most of valuable talent:
Japanese science has a problem: there are too many PhD holders and not enough senior roles in universities for them to move into. This is partly caused by a well-meaning, but flawed policy to promote Japanese research that dates back almost three decades.
In 1996, Japan began a plan to boost the number of its academic researchers with a PhD but who are not yet in permanent faculty positions. The country aimed to produce 10,000 of these postdoctoral roles and by 2006 it had exceeded this goal, creating more than 16,000 positions. This leaves a fairly obvious question; what happens to a researcher after they've completed a postdoc? There hasn't been a serious enough effort to create a career pathway for these researchers in academia. Employment in industry is also an uphill battle for them because — although progress has been made — Japanese businesses on the whole still don't fully appreciate PhDs as a qualification.
Some comparison:
Many students here in Japan increasingly believe that finding jobs in industry, even in pharmaceutical firms and other research-related companies, is easier without a PhD. This is because there can be a belief in industry that it's better and easier for a company to train newly hired employees from scratch, rather than training someone who already has their 'own way of doing things'. In the United States, 40.2% of PhD holders are employed in private industry, but in Japan that figure is just 14%. Hopefully, the 14% in Japan will prove how PhD holders can contribute to businesses so that more companies employ doctoral graduates, something that could also lead to greater collaboration between academia and industry.
Earning a PhD demands an excess of patience, imagination, flexibility and expertise. Surely these are enviable characteristics for any candidate seeking promotion, be that in academia or private industry.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11, @04:55AM
I work with three engineering PhDs (I just have a BS, but ~20 years more experience). Two of them went through a fairly standard path of doing research for their advisor, tied to grant money brought in by the advisor.
The third (who reports to me) went back for a PhD after working for several years. We helped him get outside grant money (US Federal) to sponsor his PhD work and as a result he could pick a topic himself, not bound to money controlled by his advisor. Imo, he's by far the best researcher of the three. And, unlike many horror stories of changed research topics (etc), his PhD work ran straight through from start to finish.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by guest reader on Saturday March 11, @07:27AM (4 children)
When Ph.D. stands for Problematic Hiring Detriment [science.org]:
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Saturday March 11, @04:07PM (2 children)
Hiring practices in the "West" (including Japan) are based entirely on the Roman Cursus Honorum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursus_honorum [wikipedia.org]
They literally don't know what to do if someone steps off the track, once you step off "the track" you're done in that field, and there's only one track, and in Japan that track does not include PHDs.
The main problem with degrees in the USA etc is we produce far too many for the economy to adsorb.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Saturday March 11, @10:22PM (1 child)
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein (1994)
https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html [caltech.edu]
"The average American professor in a research university turns out about 15 Ph.D students in the course of a career. In a stable, steady-state world of science, only one of those 15 can go on to become another professor in a research university. In a steady-state world, it is mathematically obvious that the professor's only reproductive role is to produce one professor for the next generation. But the American Ph.D is basically training to become a research professor. It didn't take long for American students to catch on to what was happening. The number of the best American students who decided to go to graduate school started to decline around 1970, and it has been declining ever since. ...
The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists.
The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. ...."
"Disciplined Minds"
https://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ [tripod.com]
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."
The more competition for PhD jobs, the more people with PhDs have to be subservient to get them and keep them. Which is ironic considering that in idealized theory PhDs are supposed to be about scientific exploration in new directions.
The management of Covid, for example, might have gone differently if so many PhD biosciences researchers had not been scared into submission by this process -- and who then automatically deferred to authorities (especially ones in charge of research funding) who were pushing problematical strategies that violated decades of best practices for pandemic management that are increasingly being shown to have been based on fraudulent science, problematical assumptions, financial corruption and regulatory capture.
Things are especially bad for women because academic tenure-track poverty-level years conflict with having children:
"Women in Science" by Philip Greenspun in February 2006; updated July 2015
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science [greenspun.com]
"Why does anyone think science is a good job?
The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias. ...
A good career is one that pays well, in which you have a broad choice of full-time and part-time jobs, in which there is some sort of barrier to entry so that you won't have to compete with a lot of other applicants, in which there are good jobs in every part of the country and internationally, and in which you can enjoy job security in middle age and not be driven out by young people willing to work 100 hours per week.
How closely does academic science match these criteria? I took a 17-year-old Argentine girl on a tour of the M.I.T. campus. She had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, so maybe this was a good time to show her the possibilities in female nerddom. While walking around, we ran into a woman who recently completed a Ph.D. in Aero/Astro, probably the most rigorous engineering department at MIT. What did the woman engineer say to the 17-year-old? "I'm not sure if I'll be able to get any job at all. There are only about 10 universities that hire people in my area and the last one to have a job opening had more than 800 applicants."
And that's engineering, which, thanks to its reputation for dullness and the demand from industrial employers, has a lot less competition for jobs than in science.
What about personal experience? The women that I know who have the IQ, education, and drive to make it as professors at top schools are, by and large, working as professionals and making 2.5-5X what a university professor makes and they do not subject themselves to the risk of being fired. With their extra income, they invest in child care resources and help around the house so that they are able to have kids while continuing to ascend in their careers. The women I know who are university professors, by and large, are unmarried and childless. By the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility."
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12, @12:49AM
Thanks - interesting links.
One of the problems appears to be the rise of external funding as the only metric to promote or even retain people. The universities no longer take any interest in deciding for themselves who is useful to their mission. It's a death spiral - to my estimation we're in the 3rd generation. The first generation had supervisors who were experts actively doing their own research - the old school. The second generation were those had direct contact with the experts, but were immediately engaged in fund seeking upon graduation. The third generation are taught by these clowns - they have had no contact with anyone directly doing research. They are fearful corporate slaves with the dignity and originality scared out of them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11, @07:05PM
This is a crucial point. In recent years, the PhDs seem to want to escape into a cushy managerial role. They can't drop the grunt work quick enough. The problem is, science *is* grunt work. It is difficult, laborious, non-statusful fixing broken shit all the time. And ultimately the most rewarding thing you can do. So now we have all these minted PhD's angling to get committee responsibilities and become Director of Electrical Lab, Safety Officer and Faculty Representative of the Student Focus Committee. (I won't even go into the layers of new diversity/equity/inclusivity opportunities). Zero science, lots of students, a few smart kids wondering WTF happened?
So where does a real Scotsman scientist go nowadays?
(Score: 5, Funny) by istartedi on Saturday March 11, @06:27PM (1 child)
Give PhDs more time off and if they're male, let them have two wives.
It's probably not enough to fix Japan's demographics though. They're in real trouble if they don't get busy *away* from the office... or in the coat closet. It really doesn't matter. They just need to get busy. It's not a Christian nation, but maybe office Christmas parties would help. Every month. Christmas party. Get on it.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 14, @03:38AM
Speaking of "killing two birds", in Japan they often celebrate Christmas with KFC. https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/kfc-christmas-tradition-japan/index.html [cnn.com]
KFC parties every month. Might be killing more than two birds, and some might put on more than one stone... 😉