This is only surprising if you expect that every postdoc should stay in academia, or would want to. Being in academia is not the only way to do research, and is not a prerequisite to using your degree. The private sector is a thing, and postdocs leaving academia can do perfectly good work in their field while actually making a grown up salary.
These are good arguments about phd's not going into academia. But a postdoc at a university is an underpaid training position for the most part. Not a worthwhile sacrifice if you want to work in the private sector in my field. Maybe it's more important for industry jobs in biology or something.
Personally I think it's a warped system that takes advantage of cheap labor from developing countries. And it feeds itself. The more temporary research staff professors can hire, the less permanent research staff universities need.
That's mostly reasonable. But for some people at least, the PhD doesn't give them all the skills they are looking for, so they might do another post-doc (2-3 years at slightly better than PhD lifestyle), before jumping ship.
They should have stayed rare, but they’re a way for universities to get free money from the government as well as a temporary (but sadly permanent) fix for academia’s deep structural problems.
So Yale's PhD count grew a bit, but nowhere near as much as the rest of the country's.
----
But mostly, PhDs used to be way rarer in the back in the 50s (along with college degrees in general). If you look at Figure 1 in this NSF report (https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf25300/figure/1#), it shows the number of PhDs tripling in just 15 years from 1958 to 1973. After 1973 it slows down to merely doubling over the next 50 years.
Admin growth might be a factor, although I'd want to look at national data first. Your own article says "... Yale had the highest manager-to-student ratio of any Ivy League university, and the fifth highest in the nation among four-year private colleges" so maybe it's an outlier.
63 years ago, they were rare, but my father was able have his professor and department secure funding within a few months. ( yes, Engineering has a lot of money available from the defense department ).
50 years later, the Molecular Biology postdocs were not so lucky. Not even an honorarium. "Maybe in a few years..."
Just to raise the number from 0, I did exactly that. The post-doc was in a research institute, a department that focused on usability. It seemed worthwhile to learn how to really do user tests and usability evaluations in practice, in the best way possible academically (or so I thought) but with real enterprise projects. Contrasted a lot with the quite theoretical PhD.
We can always argue about whether it was worthwhile ofc. Moneywise, definitely not (though the pay wasn't all that bad compared to industry compensation in my countries). But I learned what I wanted to learn, and the issues the position had were speficic to the place, not the concept of the position, if that makes sense.
A postdoc can also act as temporary employment when one can't immediately find a position outside academia. They tend to be very low commitment as a result of the laughable compensation.
Nope. All it takes is the first tenured professor to say "Well, yes, this was all good work you did for the last year... but we are not going to put your name on the paper... wait... where are you going? Are you leaving?"
"The door will not hit me in the *ss on the way out."
generally you are somewhat right, but it's complicated by country. for example it would be less surprising that a UK-style 3 year PhD might want a couple more years training after.
> But a postdoc at a university is an underpaid training position for the most part.
That's not really true or fair. You're talking about a person who's done likely 4 years of undergraduate and between 4 and 8 (median 5?) years of graduate studies and gained a Ph.D. This person is without a doubt "an expert" in their field. Does that person still need training? Sure. But who doesn't?
You're also talking about someone who is probably in their early to mid 30's. Eventually people want to start having a life. And you're expecting them to make pennies? I'm not joking. Here's a list of CS Post Doc stipends[0]. Go to Berkeley or Stanford and make $66k-$80k? I've gotten more money as a PhD Intern! You're going to get more than double that in industry before we talk about RSUs.
I think this is something we need to take quite seriously here. There aren't really good reasons for people to choose this path, especially considering how disruptive it is to your life (have fun moving again in a few years :). Maybe we can hope that those who go are just really dedicated to research and following their passions. So dedicated that they are willing to put off normal human things like starting a family, maintaining relationships[1], or even just building one's net worth (or paying off student debt). Some people want to become a professor[2] so will do that.
But the big thing I see is that there's nothing to attract the best people. (We can extend this to even just professorships[3]). So who are becoming the postdocs and professors? Who are becoming the people that educate the next wave of people? If you are at the top, you likely aren't going the professor route, you're likely going to industry where you'll likely get 2x-3x the pay AND more freedom in your research. Even if you're pretty mid you can get 2x-3x the pay in industry with an honestly less stressful life (but you may not be doing research or likely have more restriction of what research you can pursue). This, seems pretty disastrous. At best, unstable. There's not a lot of professor spots but I think we need to have some incentive system such that people at the top are encouraged to carry on their research for the public as well as educate future researchers. As a business you want to be greedy and capture top talent, but that's also because you should be thinking much shorter term. At social levels, we have to think generations.
TLDR:
So are we confident we are getting "cream of the crop" (even if shared with industry) in academic positions? Are we sure that's even true at highly prestigious institutions?
I think the answer is "no", we should not be confident in that outcome.
[1] Good chance you met your partner while doing a PhD and yay now you both need to find post docs but they are competitive and so good luck finding one in the same place? Hope you like long distance relationships or are willing to let one partner make a bigger sacrifice.
[2] Which weird thing that we train someone to become an expert researcher and then as a professor we give them such high and diverse workloads that they will often have little time for research and instead will more be managers. The research skill degrades with time and only keeping up at a high level is not sufficient.
[3] In CS a post doc is also often a way to elevate your status. Like you got your PhD from a lower tier university and so doing a Post Doc at a much higher tier can make you employable at a more prestigious university. Because prestige still matters a lot, especially since it is tightly coupled with things like equipment access.
[side note]: I think with the competitiveness that it is a bit odd we still have these strong notions of prestige. Just to put things in perspective, if every graduating PhD at the number 1 school, they likely graduate enough people that you could fill all available faculty positions available. Given how prestige matters, it should be clear how high prestige graduates permeate into lower prestige positions. More clear when you start to consider things like how many top universities are in not the greatest living locations. https://drafty.cs.brown.edu/csopenrankings/placement-rank.ht...https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/
Training is how the low pay is justified. I certainly agree it's not a good deal, more of a supply and demand effect. Are you saying I'm wrong about the definition? It's pretty universal: https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf21327
I do agree it probably gets used more as an easy way to get experience, the usual thing organizations crave in their new hires. But it isn't the only way. Top graduates can get temporary research faculty positions or even go directly to tenure track. Or in STEM fields, a few years in industry is seen as positive. Industry and Government research labs also have their own "postdoc" positions which can be pretty much normal pay.
It’s not universal. Nsf is a narrow view of academia. There are other countries that pay postdocs properly (ie comfortable own place with kids) with benefits and pension.
> Are you saying I'm wrong about the definition? It's pretty universal: https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf21327
Yes, I would say it is inaccurate to say that a post doc position is about training. Unless you're referring to them training undergrads and grads.
I think there are 2 key things we need to note about your source
>> Which items or job requirements are most commonly used by institutions to define postdocs?
This is in the context of __hiring__. So they are looking at listings. I don't think just because you are saying that this job will provide training means the job is a training position. Or what we'd commonly associate with a training program, a junior, or anything like that.
>> Is intended to provide training in research?
The wording here is important. Personally, if you asked if a postdoc was __intended__ for training, I would agree. But if you asked if I thought you should expect to be trained during a postdoc I'd be more hesitant. Certainly that depends. If I hired you as an L4 at Google, and said there would be training, what would that mean to you? Do you think it would be fair to say? What about at an L5 (senior)? L6? L7? L8? Certainly not at L9 or L10, right?
There's lots of things that have an __intended__ outcome but don't have the outcome. Momentum is a bitch and when we're talking about institutions, well momentum is a really powerful force. So I wouldn't take that source as a cout de eta for concluding that a post doc is about training the post doc. Honestly, I feel like a postdoc is closer to taking a L5 and saying we're training you to become an L6 or eventually L7. And certainly that's not a "training position" in the context of paying someone as if they are inexperienced. You can always gain more experience.
> Government research labs also have their own "postdoc" positions which can be pretty much normal pay.
FWIW, if you work at a government lab like LBNL or LLNL and take a __staff__ position then your compensation is going to be much closer to the base pay of a big tech. It's quite common to see these people jump ship and triple their salaries (sometimes they return. Often because it is nice to work at labs). I've seen people do this fresh out of PhDs, no postdoc involved. The postdoc positions pay lower.
It isn't just job ads. For half the schools there was a formal definition. Also it has this part: "In 2001, NSF and NIH established a formal postdoc definition as “an individual who has received a doctoral degree (or equivalent) and is engaged in a temporary and defined period of mentored advanced training to enhance the professional skills and research independence needed to pursue his or her chosen career path.”
And yes you should expect to receive training. In the sense that you have a right to it and the supervisor has an obligation to provide it. You seem to be mistaking my criticisms of these jobs for defenses of them.
> “an individual who has received a doctoral degree (or equivalent) and is engaged in a temporary and defined period of performing independent research.”
Would be just as accurate.
Btw
> “an individual who has received an undergraduate degree (or equivalent) and is engaged in a temporary and defined period of mentored advanced training to enhance the professional skills and research independence needed to pursue his or her chosen career path.”
Would be an accurate description of a PhD student too.
The official definition could also be accurate if describing an Assistant Professor (professor before tenure is granted)
So this is why I'm pushing back on the definition. Calling it a "training position" is just an excuse to have cheap labor and be exploitative.
Let me give an anecdote:
I was a PhD 1995-2001 at UCSF. I made $25K/year plus UC benefits.
Then I was a postdoc at Berkeley 2001-2004. I made $76K/year plus UC benefits plus the service clock for the pension started.
Then I was a staff scientist at LBL 2004-2007. I made $100K/year plus UC benefits and the service clock for the pension continued (I have enough service credit to get some thousands of dollars a month after I retire). It was an exhausting job and I did not enjoy having to simulateously publish, travel, and get grants to hire people to do research for me. I concluded this was not enough to buy a house and raise a family, so I left for industry.
I worked at Genentech 2007-2008 and made $120K ("Senior Architect") plus full benefits (which were pretty good).
I then moved to Google as an L5 (I had wanted to work there for ~10 years before I got hired) and started around $140K plus stock options, benefits, and retirement. Over the decade I worked there (2008-2019) my pay was increased signficantly every year, ending around $250K (including the year that Eric Schmidt gave everybody a 10% raise. thanks eric) along with ever-increasing options and then RSUs, worth millions (about $200K/year), excellent benefits, and saving a ton for retirement. There were a lot of side benefits- on the job training, free phones, etc. I really lucked out getting hired and promoted and being there during a growth period; I don't ever expect to have a role like that again.
This was the first time I truly felt like I could have kids and a home in the Bay Area without going deeply in debt.
The first few years at Google were stressful, I worked about as hard as I did at LBL, but every bit of hard work was compensated in some way or another- additional pay, access to resources (I basically could use all of the idle cycles in prod at Google- 1-3M cores- to do protein design, and publish). Every bit of research work that led to publications had far more impact (mainly due to the employer's position in research) than before, and I felt supported by the infrastructure to do ambitious things.
I spent a year at a Startup, making $250K and similar benefits to Google. I was employee #11 and have (worthless) equity- if they IPO I might get somewhere around $1M depending on how diluted my shares are and how big the IPO is. I am not allowed to sell the shares on secondary market.
Now I am back at Genentech and make more than I ever have in terms of base pay, while the stock (Roche stock) isn't nearly as valuable as what I got from Google. Fortunately, all those previous years helped build up a big buffer that will help pay for my kids to go to college (hopefully, some of my payment will go to help somebody else's kid get financial aid).
I'd actually love to return to LBL because if I do, my career will actually form a correctly nested path: LBL -> Genentech -> Google -> Startup -> Google -> Genentech (I am here) -> LBL. I'm sure I could get rehired there but at this point, why would I want to work harder for less money and publication credibility?
Looking back at my postdocs, while I learned a lot, I did not like the power dynamic with my PI, and really only persisted for 3 years with the goal of getting a much higher paying job.
>You're also talking about someone who is probably in their early to mid 30's. Eventually people want to start having a life. And you're expecting them to make pennies? I'm not joking. Here's a list of CS Post Doc stipends[0]. Go to Berkeley or Stanford and make $66k-$80k? I've gotten more money as a PhD Intern! You're going to get more than double that in industry before we talk about RSUs.
Now maybe I'm out of touch, being a postdoc and all, but hasn't the tech industry been suffering mass layoffs this past year or so that really make it a bit unrealistic to label salaries above the American median as "pennies"?
I don't think the person you are replying to was expecting this. Rather, I read their comment as agreeing with you that the benefits and compensation were low enough that few people would be interested in the position except as a stepping stone into a better faculty position.
Prison labor = Slavery.
PostDoc research with no publication acknowledgement? = Slavery.
( U.C. Berkeley score is -2 Post Docs. )
Play music for free at Music festival? = Slavery.
As a grad student, for the duration of your thesis work, you're locked into a specialty at a specific institute that isn't necessarily first-tier, may need to work at a level of intensity that prevents you from attending to a proper job search, and may end up under a professor who doesn't adequately support your career (e.g., with reputation and favorable recommendations).
In short, many things can go wrong, but you're focused on finishing. Under those conditions, if you do go straight into an industry job, it may be a shitty job that's not much better than a post-doc.
A brief stint as a post-doc gives you an income while you repair your career. This may involve changing specialties, developing your own research idea, working in a more prestigious institute or under a famous professor, or searching for industry jobs. Whatever it is, my own advice would be to only consider doing a post doc if it serves a credible purpose, otherwise, getting paid to get older isn't worth it.
In my field (physics), it was customary for grad students to work for their PhD advisor as a post-doc if they didn't already have a job lined up. I know lots of people who did that. It may inflate the number of "postdocs who leave academia" if it's not really a new job and their intention was to leave academia all along.
It's not as if there is a surplus of academic job slots that are going unfilled. The pyramid where one professor trains multiple grad students quickly becomes unsustainable.
Indeed, and in my field, it even had a name: The "Birth Control Problem." In fact, the problem extends to post-docs. Professors were even training multiple post-docs. I saw that quite clearly.
I was lucky to have role models: My parents were both industrial scientists, so the idea wasn't foreign to me. And I figured that I could always become a coder if things didn't work out. ;-)
Re-reading, I may have been unclear: I meant that some people take temporary post-docs with no intention of staying in academia.
You should absolutely only do a postdoc on the supposition that you will get a tenure track faculty position afterwards. It makes no sense financially or emotionally to do one if your goal is to go into industry.
But how can we know that we picked the right person for the job if we aren't at the very least absolutely sure the alternatives were worse?
The human mind resists accepting decisions made without a proportional amount of effort put into those decisions. If we only get one candidate for the job, we will either hire them and deal with constant nagging doubt, or we will lower our standards to get more options we can reject to feel good, but at which point we've now created false hope in the remaining candidates and an illusion of more opportunities existing than actually do.
Humans are messy, and so everything is always fucked. Even when it's not, we find a way to make it so.
This is not how industry works, at least not in the US. Hire a good person, they sink or swim, life goes on. It’s only the harsh narrow bubble of academia that pits smart people against each other this way.
Maybe you haven’t been privy to conversations about whether certain people are sinking or swimming.
I would rather keep a consistently mediocre individual than an inconsistent one because I know what I can and can’t trust the former with. I have to keep
checking in on the latter. But I’ve met more than a couple loudmouths who disagree. Who think they can raise their stock by pushing someone else’s down.
Whether you see actions or not, I assure you that time and energy are being wasted on regrets.
I absolutely am in those conversations and see the time and energy, and some of it is mine, across a sizable organization. I am absolutely not saying that industry is a friction-free meritocracy, and of course there are politics everywhere.
What is unique to academia is the static supply of jobs. When people don't leave, new people face a huge uphill battle to join, and that battle is largely against their competition, not the institution that they seek to join.
If you can afford it, and that's your passion, great. But (at least in the states) you are instead a student with a doctorate degree now in play and saddled with a lot of student debt (150k average), I'm not sure it makes sense. That unfortunately is roughly 77% of folks out there (at least as of 2020).
I don't think I ever remember a time when the walls of the pyramid were shallow enough that the base could support all of the people at the top.
2 out of 5 people getting all the way to the end and discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.
A lot of people convince themselves that what they aren't feeling now will finally come to them after one more milestone, and as long as there enough milestones ahead of them they can play for time until it happens. Or they hit Sunk Cost and feel like they can't tap out now because they'll look like idiots, ignoring how much bigger an idiot you look like for wasting X more years of your youth and saddling yourself with even more debt. Or existential crisis with much the same outcomes. "Who am I even if I'm not..."
* discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.*
It’s not the research or teaching that drive people out of academia. It’s the endless and humiliating scrambling for money. Everyone who’s not a psychopath hates that part of the job, and the people who are any good at it have options outside of academia.
>2 out of 5 people getting all the way to the end and discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.
Research and teaching can take place outside of academia.
>A lot of people convince themselves that what they aren't feeling now will finally come to them after one more milestone, and as long as there enough milestones ahead of them they can play for time until it happens. Or they hit Sunk Cost and feel like they can't tap out now because they'll look like idiots, ignoring how much bigger an idiot you look like for wasting X more years of your youth and saddling yourself with even more debt. Or existential crisis with much the same outcomes. "Who am I even if I'm not..."
Learning can exist for the sake of learning and doesn't necessarily need to be reflected in career choice or identity.
For many it’s not easy to accept that "who you are" doesn't have to depend on the prestige of a title or a position, and that's often where people get stuck.
I think that all postdocs should stay in academia, why else would you do a postdoc? I assume (maybe wrong?) that most of the postdocs had intended to stay when starting the postdoc.
You can do research during your postdoc with chill timelines and pretty much 100% autonomy on your topic and then bootstrap a company with the ideas you've developed during said postdoc? In many countries the postdoc owns the IP of the research they're doing
Sunk cost? Selection bias? I don't think you can get a PhD by accident, you have to really want to work in academia (or a specific industry). And I doubt getting a second post doc position is all that hard (as long as you're willing to travel), given they're capable of getting the first one. My understanding is that universities quite like being able to hire cheap, hard working, disposable researchers.
People who go into academia are probably willing to live the life of an underpaid researcher. The fact that they have the post-doc title instead of the professor title probably is that big a deal, nor is the salary going to change their decision. The lack of autonomy is probably annoying, as is the lack of stability. Having to worry that they might change labs and maybe cities every 3 years, and not knowing for sure if they'll get a job is probably the only thing actually making them quit.
Seconded. Ex post doc here. Any post docs reading this, I would say - academia is a sort of gravy train for the middle class (in the UK). If you want a comfortable life without doing much of worth, you’re not really driven in your work, stick with it. You’ll have to fight for your lectureship but once you’ve done that you can live an easy life with the only difficulties stupid bureaucracy, politics, and cynicism.
However, if you have a bit more energy in you than that, have some ambition, leave asap. Startups are a great alternative. Big co research labs are another. Or just get a day job that you love and do research in the evenings. You could even get paid to do real research via patron etc if you do well.
I think academia in the uk is part of the social structure designed to maintain the status quo. The academics get good pensions and don’t do much, and in return they don’t challenge the ruling classes. Part of the class system.
There are some exceptions to this rule, some good places doing good research, but they are a tiny minority.
> Being in academia is not the only way to do research,
No, but (and I'm not in this space, so totally ignorant), is it not the case that if you're not associated with a Uni in some form that _PUBLISHING_ your research is all but impossible?
You can definitely publish outside academia. I assume you mean in scholarly journals specifically, and are questioning whether or not you need the backing or credentials of an educational institution to get past the gatekeepers—you can. It's just that, outside academia, where publishing is kind of a job requirement, there's not as much incentive to do so, and you may not always be allowed to do so by your employer.
Indeed. In other news, the overall pass rates for my (translated into US terms for the first three) middle school, high school, university and post-graduate degree were all approximately 50%. So this doesn't seem particularly bad.
