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Carolyn Johnson reports in the Boston Globe that in recent years, the position of postdoctoral researcher has become less a stepping stone and more of a holding tank as postdocs are caught up in an all-but-invisible crisis, mired in a underclass as federal funding for research has leveled off, leaving the supply of well-trained scientists outstripping demand. “It’s sunk in that it’s by no means guaranteed — for anyone, really — that an academic position is possible,” says Gary McDowell, a 29-year old biologist doing his second postdoc. “There’s this huge labor force here to do the bench work, the grunt work of science. But then there’s nowhere for them to go; this massive pool of postdocs that accumulates and keeps growing.” The problem is that any researcher running a lab today is training far more people than there will ever be labs to run. Often these supremely well-educated trainees are simply cheap laborers, not learning skills for the careers where they are more likely to find jobs. This wasn’t such an issue decades ago, but universities have expanded the number of PhD students they train from about 30,000 biomedical graduate students in 1979 to 56,800 in 2009, flooding the system with trainees and drawing out the training period.
Possible solutions span a wide gamut, from halving the number of postdocs over time, to creating a new tier of staff scientists that would be better paid but one thing people seem to agree on is that simply adding more money to the pot will not by itself solve the oversupply. Facing these stark statistics, postdocs are taking matters into their own hands recently organizing a Future of Research conference in Boston that they hoped would give voice to their frustrations and hopes and help shape change. “How can we, as the next generation, run the system?” said Kristin Krukenberg, 34, a lead organizer of the conference and a biologist in her sixth year as a postdoc at Harvard Medical School after six years in graduate school. “Some of the models we see don’t seem tenable in the long run."
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday October 07 2014, @08:20PM
We used to have something called a Masters Degree. As the name would suggest, someone that received it was considered to have Mastered their field, absorbed the accumulated knowledge of his tutors and be ready to practice. That was the highest academic credential in America, going above that required more than school, it required getting out in the field and practicing and earning a professional reputation.
Then we imported the Prussian 'doctors.' Their .phd (piled higher and deeper) degrees did not just indicate MASTERY of what had gone before, no, it involved new research, pushing the frontiers of knowledge! And they went to school longer, so their degree was better. Nowadays, you can go flip burgers with a Masters. If you want academic credentials you want to make them call you doctor.
Do you think all the .phds we are issuing today are going to people that have really pushed the frontiers of their field with original and important research? If they were, science would be a bit more advanced than it is. The fact is most of them are doing what used to require a Masters, and the extra time they spent in school had little if any positive effect on their performance. It's a game. If you want a decent job you have to pay the education mafia, and spend years in their care, in order to get a piece of paper with the right formula on it. And if you want to keep advancing you need to spend more money, more time, and get more papers. We passed the point in most areas where the level of education being expected made any sense decades back, yet the expectations only continue to rise.
And actual quality of education, in the old-school meaning of learning things that are useful or practical or enriching to your life, that's going down. No coïncidence I am afraid.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Informative) by boristhespider on Tuesday October 07 2014, @08:33PM
There's a difference between a postdoctoral researcher (which this article is discussing), and people with PhDs. There are certainly people getting PhDs for, frankly, uninspiring and unimpressive work. Those people have little or no chance of getting a postdoc, and even if they get one their chances of having more than a year is basically zero. (Most postdoctoral positions now are advertised as either 2+1, or more and more frequently, 1+1 - meaning that you start a job knowing full well that your contract is for a year "with possibility of extension" and have to immediately start applying for a new one. It takes upwards of 10 or 11 months to get a postdoc in academia through the normal channels; you apply from September to November for positions starting in August and September.) The concern is for people who are actually postdoctoral researchers, qualified in their field and highly competent and pursuing interesting research. There simply isn't the money available to employ this number of researchers but, even if there were, the setup is insane; there isn't the job security. And I'm not just meaning "Oh, they could be sacked at any time"; that's true for anyone. It's that *every single job* a postdoctoral researcher gets is fixed-term. If you're lucky, you get a 2+1, and if you're really lucky you might just get something like a 5-year, but those are scarce and it takes luck, and a fuckload of arse-licking, to go with ability before you get one. This means there's no real future in an academic job unless you happen to get lucky, or have schmoozed the right people, early on, or both - and even if you did, you're still looking at a decade of moving around once every 18 months or 2 years. Which doesn't sound bad until you realise we're not just talking moving city, we're talking moving *country*, on a salary which is OK but certainly nothing particularly stellar, for a position somewhere you may well not speak the language, knowing that it will run out and you'll be forced to move on again. And then at the end of it there's probably no job waiting for you. It's far from an ideal lifestyle and it's far from an ideal setup - something definitely has to change, and the answer isn't changing topic and attacking diminishing standards. (Which at BSc and even MSc level are irrelevant for research anyway. Either you can do research in your field, in which case you're way beyond MSc, and a PhD has barely ever prepared you properly for it, or you can't.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @08:55PM
What you are describing is an oversupply problem.
Meaning you are being treated as contract work. You can fire them and 10 will be standing in their place tomorrow.
Some people I talk to are getting degrees in things where there are maybe 50 or 60 positions in the whole world for. Yet they are competing with 5000 other people with the same skills and same degrees.
So the buyer (in this case the schools themselves) can be picky. They can rotate thru dozens of people and find someone who works better/cheaper. Getting the coveted 'tenure'. Until then you keep rotating.
In economic terms when supply goes up price goes down. You are on the wrong end of the demand curve. It is one of the reasons I picked the particular profession I did. There are thousands of open positions for it. My wife is going for an accounting degree. Her logic is sound, all businesses need an accountant and she is competent at it. It is why I do not discourage her.
(Score: 2) by LaminatorX on Wednesday October 08 2014, @06:06PM
What makes it so infuriating is that the same institutions that are abusing the oversupply situation are quite happy to take people's money to churn out the glut of graduates.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:57PM
"on a salary which is OK but certainly nothing particularly stellar"
Dude.... its usually like $30K in expensive areas where houses cost $750K+ for example and rent is like $2K/mo for a small apartment. And its $30K in 2014 when I was getting $33K in 1995 before I finished my BS degree, for guys with PHDs and published research.
Its not "nothing stellar" its literally like working at McDonalds but with better benefits and better working conditions.
(Score: 1) by boristhespider on Tuesday October 07 2014, @10:15PM
I'm talking from a European perspective, where the salaries are normally above national average, if not by much. Though postdocs I looked at in the States something like eight years back were paying $50k+ - again, not a huge salary but at least a step up from #30k. Which of course might reflect the relative level of money available in theory at that time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @08:33PM
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:48AM
Is that Inconsolata?
That's so better that the previous.
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