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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: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday October 08 2014, @12:05PM
(For those who don't know who Larry Summers is: He an economist who has been Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary, then President of Harvard until the faculty kicked him out of that position, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Obama administration, and came close to being Chairman of the Federal Reserve.)
Larry Summers has been pushing, for decades, 2 central economic ideas: Free trade, and higher education. His stated claim was that if all Americans got a good education, we could outsource all the lousy work (e.g. manufacturing iPhones), do all the cool work like scientific research and software development, and that would leave America richer. On that theory, he negotiated NAFTA, and then free trade agreements with China and much of southeast Asia, as well as pushing for the widespread use of student loans.
The reason this all was utter nonsense was that a lot of the lousy jobs can't be moved to another country, and there's limits on the number of good jobs available. If everyone in America has a PhD, then what you end up with is not everyone making a full tenured professor's salary, but with PhDs mopping floors for a living. This is the old Fallacy of Composition, where what's smart for one person (getting a good education in a field you can work well in) is not so good if everybody makes the same decision. So now we have an over-supply of highly trained people in just about every field of endeavor, which is why universities now can get away with paying their faculty less than $20K a year and not offering them anything more than a temporary position for the rest of their careers.
About the only exceptions to this are computer programmers, nurses, and doctors, all of whom are making decent money out of school in the US. They're busy trying to change that by making it easier to import indentured servants^H^H H1B visa holders. (Aside: Don't be mad at the foreigners who do this - they earn about 4 times as much here as they would in their home countries, which is why they're willing to leave their families and friends behind and take what they know will be an unpleasant job working for a US megacorp.)
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 08 2014, @01:00PM
"If everyone in America has a PhD, then what you end up with is not everyone making a full tenured professor's salary, but with PhDs mopping floors for a living."
Locally all the service sector hourly laborers are the kids who stupidly bought into the "degree is a guaranteed ticket to a great middle class job" so they all have bachelors in something. Next time you're in a bar or restaurant or coffee shop ask your cashier what they have a degree in (assuming they aren't obviously visually 16 yrs old), you might be surprised.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 08 2014, @04:24PM
This is a common theme in your posts, so let's ask what the alternative is. Should the smart, hard-working lower middle class kid in Wyoming, say, look at the labor market that exists when he's in 4th grade and say, gee, all the tech jobs are taken up, so I should limit my aspirations to flipping burgers at the local McDonald's? Should that 4th grader look at market trends and technologies and note that computers and information technology are growing by leaps and bounds and say to himself, "huh, it looks like there are and will be a lot of jobs in that field; I like working with computers so I'm gonna study hard and go get a degree in Computer Science;" then only to have you and others sit back and laugh at him, 'haha what a rube you thought you could study and go to college but now you can't have a job' when H1-B's take all of them?
Because I don't understand what you're driving at. How ought a young person direct his energies? Do you have a better prescription for career success than working hard at something you love and are good at, or alternately aiming for an industry that looks strong and looks like it will have plenty of job opportunities? Mostly what I get from your frequent comments is that you hold people who go to college in contempt, and that you think they're foolish for having been so caddish as to take out student loans to do it. Well, kimosabe, that is the world as it is. That's the structure of the society we live in now. Bashing the young for living in it instead of doing some other thing (which you have not shared with us) is like bashing people who are injured in auto accidents for being foolish enough to travel on roads.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 08 2014, @05:23PM
First step in fixing a problem is identifying it. So the business model of lets send all kids to college to get a degree and raise tuition until it impoverishes them for life while denigrating the vocational careers might, just maybe, result in a hell of a lot of human suffering. You won't be seeing that opinion much of anywhere.
Second step in problem solving is when you find yourself digging into a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. The only thing worse than being a burger flipper 4 life is being a burger flipper 4 life with $100K of debt and an economically worthless degree, but either burger guy or the taxpayer in some bailout will have to pay it back.
Third thing is work to live not live to work. "working hard at something you love and are good at" That means my grandma who really likes sewing will be sentenced to a torturous life in an inhumane textile sweatshop in Vietnam (because we closed them everywhere else, she's actually German, which makes it even weirder). Naah she did that file clerk / secretary thing and it wasn't so bad and sewed stuff on the weekends. Its even worse for STEM people. I have had jobs that didn't exist when I was in school... I suppose worst case is a "born astronaut" when we're not doing space as a nation, what is the most humane thing to do with those people, euthanasia?
Fourth thing is you need to live for yourself. Some paid counselor is ordered to give you advice to give yourself a financial death penalty and the kid is dumb enough to do it, well, enjoy the suffering. They're wrong to use a position of power to give bad advice, but the recipient is at least as wrong for not thinking for himself. The old peer pressure thing. Look at your own post "Well, kimosabe, that is the world as it is." No, that's for gullible people who will suffer because they'd rather suffer than think when they select as a life course.
"Should the smart, hard-working lower middle class kid in Wyoming, say, look at the labor market that exists when he's in 4th grade and say"
say something like, Dad picked up his truck from the shop this morning and the mechanic and shop owner got $5500 for an engine rebuild, its tiring dirty work but hey, $5500 is $5500, then he took me to lunch where the waitress with her degree in mathematics trying to pay off her $50K loan at the donut shop, got a $2 tip from my dad because its all he had left after paying the mechanic. Yesterday my school teacher indoctrinated me all day with how important it is to get a degree, man I can't wait till I'm in college, after all, everyone tells me if I get a degree, a job will magically appear that requires it, how cool is that?
Theres a "well known" and fairly obvious racket where you know the victims are going to get screwed. Its like going to a casino and having the gall to complain about losing. The way to win at the casino is not to play.
"is like bashing people who are injured in auto accidents for being foolish enough to"
get treated by leaches and astrology readings and homeopathy. After all, authority figures never lie, and thinking for yourself is wrong, so one of those three must be the right medical treatment for a car accident injury.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 09 2014, @04:44PM
Yes, VLM, but kids in this country are not taught to challenge and question authority figures. They're not. It's one thing for you, as a wizened, experienced adult, to glibly say, oh, well, gee, the kids should have known better than to take what their guidance counselor was saying at face-value, but it's entirely different when you're that kid, without the benefit of your life experience, to abruptly stand up, announce that their guidance counselor is a tool of the 1%, and to reject their advice entire.
See, you expect that kids should know what we adults do, which is that the whole system is a racket. You want them to challenge the conventional wisdom when every single thing within the confines of your average public school teaches them otherwise. It's not realistic.
Throwing stones at those who were marketed to as kids of 9 years old does not help. It hurts you, and prevents a better world. Kids follow what their parents and schools tell them. If that's wrong, we need to change that messaging. But blaming the kids themselves for believing what they're told makes no sense, and helps no one.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 14 2014, @02:55PM
VLM, I respect your input and advice on technical matters--you know so much more than I do in certain areas, and I learn a lot from what you post. But this hobby horse of yours on education, well, it's kind of incoherent.
I agree that higher education is a racket. It's BS designed to extract ever more wealth from the lower and middle classes to feed an insatiable financial sector that really produces nothing of value for anyone. But it's also pervasive. I challenge you to find a single blessed school district in this nation that isn't exhorting its students to work hard to get into a good college. Parents, too, overworked and over-burdened themselves, mostly parrot what the educational system and government are saying. So I put it to you again, where are the young people in our country supposed to get the message that they can do for themselves when their teachers and parents are telling them 24/7 to do something else? It's just not realistic.
For example, I live in Brooklyn, NY. I have two young kids in Pre-K and K in a public school. They're both bright and creative. The school they're in is a Title 1 school, meaning most of its students are from poor families. They won't get through the school what kids in wealthier schools will get. For me, that's OK because I supplement what they get all the time. But even if they were in the best school possible I would still be urging them to follow their own educational path because I don't trust the entire system--it doesn't teach you what you need to know to be successful.
But that's not a prescription for how to fix the nation's schools, or to deal with the enormous debt problem that awaits those students who complete the full course. We need a complete overhaul, from top-to-bottom, of a system that was designed to meet 19th century problems with 19th century solutions. If we don't get it, and get it soon, the whole world will suffer.
Washington DC delenda est.