Shocked face… No surprise to anyone who has actually worked in that environment.
Absolutely. It’s a shit show.
And interestingly, making the general public more aware of this is likely quite important. Because 1, they have very idealistic views of what research is like, and 2, just about everyone is entering research blind to the realities. It’s a situation that needs some sunlight and rethinking.
IMO, a root cause is that the heroic genius researcher ideal at the base of the system’s design basically doesn’t really exist any more. Things are just too big and complex now for a single person to be that important. Dismantle that ideal and redesign from scratch.
I kind of suspect things were always too big and complex for one person to address but the rampant individualism of our society obscures that history.
Possibly, but when scientific knowledge and problems were smaller, one person could actually make a mark alone IMO. And if they happened upon a new discovery or insight then they’d appear to be geniuses, all alone.
At some point, when the work to make a discovery requires more than one person and the amount of theory involved in understanding its significance is too much for one person to be authoritative on all of it, then it’s a team sport.
The headline says researchers but it makes more sense if you name the progressions.
Most researchers start their careers as graduate students. Graduate students are poorly compensated and, despite the name, very little support or good advice for their advisors, on average. They receive plenty of negative feedback and insecurity, though.
Then graduate students graduate (or drop out), either with a Master’s or PhD. At this next tier of employment they either do a postdoc (basically just doing the last 2 years of a PhD again but with even higher expectations) or join the private sector. Neither the public sector nor private sector have enough positions, let alone well-paid ones with acceptable work environments, to take on the number of graduated graduate students each year. This forces many out right off the bat.
If someone continues to try to become a professor after doing one or more postdocs, this difference becomes stark. There are between 10-20 postdocs that want to be professors for every open professor position.
If someone goes the private track, (1) most of your explicit training goes to waste, as your environment was academic and all of your advice came from the 1 in 10 postdocs that got a professor position, and (2) you now get to try and navigate corporate petty bureaucracy in addition to doing work for whatever the company’s lords deem profitable. Many burn out rapidly in this environment, as while you actually tend to get paid and treated better than a graduate student, this usually comes at the cost of losing all motivation for the research itself. And when you want to advance your career, you get to learn the basic corporate lessons that everyone else does: you can’t advance much within the company because an incompetent boomer that is friends with the CEO is sitting on the position you want and even if they weren’t, the company sees no advantage in paying more for an employee they already have. That’s money they can’t use to “snipe talent” and “reinvest”. So again, the positions available dwindle through that path. So instead you end up making a series of external moves, sometimes purely lateral. You might even find a company where you live the research, but it will almost certainly then be one that offers you worse pay and advancement opportunities. This is usually because the most appealing research has a socially positive impact (or at least rationale) and the companies doing that research know this and adopt a non-profit “sacrifice yourself for the cause” paradigm that, naturally, does not apply to the C suite.
If you are a researcher that didn’t go to grad school, the system is the same but they put career advancement caps on you more quickly and often, regardless of how skilled you actually are.
Oh, and I almost forgot: God help you if you are minoritized in any way. Academia has no real workplace standards, they let people at all levels get away with sexual harassment and discrimination all the time. The usual status quo is that nobody wants to know what a given professor did to a student. They don’t ask and they don’t do any real follow-up to reports. So your experience as a graduate student or postdoc is dictated entirely by whether your advisor is, of their own accord, a good person with good advice and no unseen vices or bad habits. The corporate world is obviously little better outside of the threat of a lawsuit or state investigation.
So, reviewing this, we can make some conclusions:
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At every step on the career path, you are expected to accept questionable pay and working conditions so that you can get slightly better ones at the next step. But there are not enough positions for most people to actually reach the steps they want to. This necessarily leads to dropout.
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The environments themselves are not great due to a glut of workers, there is a large reserve army of labor to do these positions.
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The system functions to maximize the size of this reserve army labor pool through media and communication monopolies. There are very few ways for good career information to get passed to students, postdocs, etc. The only people they ever hear from at the “next level” are the small minority that got into the higher positions. If you had 15 postdocs that didn’t become professors telling you it’s a scam vs 1 professor telling you that you just need to work hard, there would be fewer applications to grad school.
Am I the only one think that the root cause is because lots of upper management treats universities as state owned business. Universities’ management always try to expand and lure more students. They don’t care if their students’ career and their future. Even a factory owner who don’t care about their products will slow down the production if the sale doesn’t go well. University should not allow to accept more students if certain percentage of their graduated students cannot find a jobs.
I just feel heart broken to see passionate talents get mistreated every year again and again.
That’s a great point and that I can’t believe I forgot to mention! To add to that, universities themselves use research as a cash cow (they take a large share of nearly every research grant of a faculty member) and as a marketing tool to get more students (tuition), prestige, grants, and so on. The fact that universities market themselves at all is ridiculous.
In the US they are also usually heavily financialized and local real estate behemoths.
100% spot on, sadly. The level of misogyny and other types of bigotry was the most surprising, when taken relative to the university environment in general.
This is a beautiful synopsis.
We built a system based on “scarcity,” and then manufactured scarcity.
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Based on what I hear from my colleagues’ experiences, most of them still want to continue doing research, but there aren’t enough research jobs and funding available for all of them.
Yep. There’s a whole world of people happy to work very hard on research for the rest of their lives … and instead we have them writing emails wrangling spreadsheets for … ??
Sometimes “shitty” work needs to be done, obviously … but I think it’s far less obvious that the pool of things that need to be done lies entirely in the random inefficient shit the business world just accepts. Instead, that’s just where the money flows.
In life, we can all be artists or scientists, as long as you have:
Wealthy parents.
Oh look, an article about me.
Got a PhD, hated it. Started working academia, hated it. Tried a corporate lab, hated it even more. Realized I was extremely burned out on the whole world of research and got into something far more tangible.
Very happily doing hazardous materials safety and handling now.
It’s almost like the publish or parish model puts an unnecessary burden on researchers and contributes to the ongoing problem of low quality or even outright incorrect research as researchers try to manipulate results to make them publishable.
Other 40% must quit in the eleventh year.
Maybe some of the women were also not trackable anymore because they changed their surname, in contrast to them not publishing anymore. Didn’t read all of it, did they account for that?
I think (I am not that deep into science publishing) every author gets an ID under which they publish. Even with a name change this ID stays the same.
