The e-Astronomer (Andy Lawrence) visited Caltech last week, but I missed his talks since I was traveling myself. He posits an interesting comparison between young hopefuls in academia and The Industry — hanging around, trying to get noticed in notoriously competitive milieus:
Caltech is famous for being a tad competitive shall we say. I got entertained at lunch by various grad students and postdocs. They seemed relaxed, but with a pushy edge. At that stage, young scientists are desperate to get noticed, and are simultaneously confident and insecure – will the world decide you are a genius or a dullard?
The next morning I was doing LA tourism with my family. I found myself on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine St, staring at the sidewalk-stars and trying hard to absorb the vibrations of Hollywood history. In the glory days, this was the spot where starry-eyed hopefuls would hang around, drinking coffee very very slowly, just waiting to be spotted and carried off to stardom.
In some significant ways, trying to make a career in artistic fields (movies, theater, art, music) is very similar to academia. Most obviously, the number of people who would like to have such jobs is much larger than the number of jobs. And that means competition, like it or not. Occasionally you will hear the claim that we should be producing fewer Ph.D.s, since there aren’t anywhere near enough jobs for everyone who graduates. This is just a clumsy attempt to hide the problem by re-arranging the bottleneck to before grad school rather than after. We certainly need to be absolutely honest about job prospects — they are always bad, no matter what specialty one chooses! But there is no way around the fact that somewhere along the line, most people who would like to be employed as professional scientists or scholars more generally are going to be disappointed.
Still, the ways in which the academic pipeline differs from the road to Hollywood superstardom are equally significant — and we have it much better than young actors. Even though the numbers are discouraging, we do have a highly structured system, in which training is taken seriously and — equally importantly — there is a fairly clear point past which one recognizes that the chances for success are extremely slim. Unlike a struggling actor who hangs around doing local theater and occasional commercials, perpetually hoping for that big break, the up-or-out nature of academia tends to let you know with relative clarity that it’s time to look elsewhere. Really, it’s more like professional sports than it’s like Hollywood — we have a structured minor-league/intercollegiate-sports system, with explicit coaching and well-known paths to advancement.
Indeed, one could argue that in recent years the relentless up-or-out pressure has gotten soft, as more people take multiple postdocs and linger on for a while. (Or, in fields where they are common, adjunct professors and lecturers, which is generally a much worse gig.) From the point of view of the universities that are choosing new faculty members, years of postdoctoral experience provide a lot of data on which to base hiring decisions, which one could at least argue helps the meritocratic case. It’s no fun to be stuck in postdocs for years and years, but nor is it fun to be told that you have passed your sell-by date, no more jobs for you.
So to all those grad students hanging around in the lounge, trying to say clever things to impress the visiting speaker — it could be worse! You could be hanging around soda shops, hoping to be discovered by wandering tenured professors.
I think Andy may be confusing the Caltech’s brand of social awkwardness with “relaxed, but with a pushy edge.” The students are probably a lot more secure and self-content than he gives them credit for. But nice observations anyway.
At first glance I thought California & Lake was a Chicago reference and I was really curious where that comparison was going
California & Lake is not exactly Caltech’s address, but it’s the closest major intersection. We need a more evocative label for the location!
Well, Burger Continental, probably sort of a Caltech equivalent to Schwabs, is pretty close to California & Lake. Of course, if you consider that the main Caltech campus is bounded on the south by California, the bounding streets to the west, Wilson, or east, South Hill, lead to other interesting possibilities for the name of the Institute. In any case, hanging around Caltech looking for a path to permanent employ in astrophysics might be regarded as a form of “Hill Street Blues.” Sorry…
i don’t see why “rearranging the bottleneck” should be dismissed so quickly. it would save many people from wasting years of their lives earning a grad degree they don’t need and won’t use. yes, disappointment hurts no matter what stage of your life it hits. but if people are going to be shunted into other careers anyway, why not allow them to move along before they’ve put in that huge sunk cost? why set them up for failure and bitterness? (unless PI’s just don’t want to discourage the flow of free labor…)
Well, let’s imagine that we put the question to the people who would actually be affected by such a policy. “Dear Applicant: Ordinarily, we would have been happy to accept you into graduate school here at Awesome U. But this year we are only accepting one-fifth of our usual class size, since we care about you and would like to save you disappointment some day down the road. It’s true that you might have worked your way up and found a faculty job, but on the basis of your undergraduate transcript we don’t think your chances are as good as some other people’s. You’ll thank us later.”
Do you think that would be popular among the applicants?
Sean correctly notes that scientists-in-training have it better than aspiring actors. Here are two other reasons the grad students hanging around in the lounge can be a little less nervous:
1) It seems to me that the odds are much more in the favor of science grad students than for actors. Admittedly, this is based on only anecdotal evidence. As a former University of Chicago grad student who is very close to a graduate of the NYU Graduate Acting program, I’ve had a view into both worlds, and the difference in prospects is pretty clear. The actors get a role for a few months, and then they go back to waiting tables for a few months. It’s very discouraging. While I’ve seen some have some success (an HBO movie, a Broadway role), even they still struggle. At least post docs last a couple of years at a time. Moreover, just about everyone I’ve kept up with from grad school is doing well. To be fair, most are no longer pursuing tenured jobs at research universities (though some are doing so quite successfully), but that’s almost entirely by choice – and none of us are struggling. Which brings me to my second point –
2) Training in science opens up doors to many career options. Leaving acting is much harder. Several of my friends from grad school decided that teaching was far more interesting than research, so they’re now teaching at small colleges or high schools. The former scientists I know have left (again, almost all by choice, not desperation) to enter various industries that use their science skills, become science advisors at patent law firms or public policy organizations, join consulting firms and branch out into something entirely new, or (like me) join the “malefactors of greed” on Wall Street. The good news here is that if you’re a nervous grad student, at least you should know that you’re getting training and skills that are highly valued outside of academia.
Graduate school is such a huge investement of time on such specialized fields – it is much better to have the bottleneck before than after, especially in fundamental physics.
I say this because I have lost many good friends to the rat race. It is especially depressiong to watch friends who are as much in the long haul as you are, to be lost to the sytstem. There should really be better filtration before grad school than after – this is really a no-brainer, really.
Mark H. echoed my thoughts exactly, and he even has the same name and first initial of his last of someone I know exactly who decided that Academia is not for him and now happily rakes in the big bucks elsewhere.
On the other hand, for failed actors, you can always try politics.
ST & Curious — I’ve been running grad admissions for many years now. I can say securely that it is almost impossible to deduce from a graduate school application who’s going to wind up as a tenure track professor and who isn’t. We’ve had students who came in looking like a rock star, just to drop out and join the LaRouches (true story). We’ve had people who squeaked in off the wait list, who’ve turned out to be some of our most well-known graduates. The differences among these people are not easily quantifiable GRE scores or GPAs.
I just don’t trust us to make the initial decision about who is a worthy apprentice at the level of hair splitting that requires matching the numbers of tenure-track job openings a year. I do trust us to help students understand the job market, and to help train them for whatever career path they decide is best (teaching, industry, academia, etc, where “etc” does not include the LaRouches).
Note also, that matching that number presumes that a TT career path is the only one that is “worthy”, which is bogus.
As someone who spent many years within Caltech astronomy, I can tell you that Andy L. has hit the nail on the head in his description of those lunches!
It’s only a waste if you hate grad school, or don’t find it interesting or worth the time. Everybody goes through rough patches in grad school, but if you dislike it nearly all the time and are only sticking it out to get a “good job” afterwards, do yourself a favor and cut it short – move on to something else, because you also won’t like the “good job.” Don’t waste your life suffering. On the other hand, if you find grad school interesting, then it’s usually worth doing for its own sake, not for the pot of gold at the end. People who leave the field did not “waste” their lives in grad school, and most of the people I’ve known who have left don’t feel that way, even though they may be temporarily grumpy. (The grumpiness fades – lots of people are happier outside than in. I think making the job search process more humane would increase overall satisfaction much more than reducing the supply of grad students would.)
The only problem I see is faculty who think a tenure-track job is the only reason to get a PhD. This attitude does a great disservice to the students, most of whom, just by the numbers, can’t get such a job. We don’t need fewer PhD’s, just ones that are more prepared for non-academic jobs, both in skills and disposition.
I have a couple of questions. When people apply to graduate school in astronomy and physics, is the long-term goal of the vast majority to be tenured professors? If so, are they aware that their chances are so slim? If the answer to the first question is Yes, and the answer to the second question is No, the science faculties at all univerisites certainly have a reponsibility to make the facts known to all applicants. It should actually be part of the grad. school application process. Applicants should be sent the relevant statistics regarding their career prospects in academia.
Mark H above mentioned former grad. school colleagues moving on to different careers, including teaching high school. I don’t have a PhD, but I imagine that it would be a major bummer to bust my butt to get a physics PhD and then end up teaching high school physics. Besides that, if you consider the tremendous amount of taxpayer funding that is used to support universities, it’s a massive waste of public resources.
That, in turn, reminds me of an article that I read about 15 years ago about the beuaty school business. At the time beauty schools, which are all private businesses, were graduating aroung 300,000 people per year certified to cut hair. Unfortunately, the industry only needed about 100,000 new employees each year. This meant that 2/3 of the graduates would not be able to work in their chosen field. Since most of those 200,000 funded their beauty school education with federally guranteed student loans, they ended defaulting on those loans, which in turn cost the taxpayers quite a bit. The owners of the schools, of course, didn’t have to worry about that and made nice profts. It appears that the same phenomenon occurs at every level of education after high school.
The aspiring-actor/asipring-scientist analogy fails in one very important regard. The aspiring scientist (i.e. grad student) lends his vitality and intellect to the research work of his advisor, and he devotes prime years of his live to that effort, only to often discover that his own career impetus has expired even as he has enhanced the CV and reputation of his advisor. In other, snarky words:
“Thanks for writing those papers to which I added abstracts and introductions. They really helped me to obtain a favorable decision from the tenure review committee. I hope you enjoy your new career in [management consulting / mortgate-backed security analysis / taxi driving]. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to start on my summer conference itinerary: Les Houches for two weeks, then a festschrift at Erice, then a workshop at the Institute d’Etudes Scientifique de Cargese.”
“Rearranging the bottleneck” just reinforces the increasingly outdated concept that a PhD is preparation for an academic research career and nothing else. If I had to go back, I would almost certainly do a physics PhD again (albeit perhaps in a different subfield), and I would almost certainly actively pursue a non-research career again; and from talking to many of my former grad school colleagues, now also in alternative careers, I’m not alone.
Besides, if you cut the number of grad students, how are all those poor faculty going to get their research done?
(Now, I do know a couple of folks on their third or fourth postdocs who need to have it gently pointed out that there are reasons all their faculty/researcher job applications have failed, and that it’s not going to get better.)
Just wanted to point out that it is nearly impossible to know prior to grad school whether an academic or research career is something you would be happy doing for the rest of your life. The first time a person is really living the day-to-day life of a researcher is during grad school (after classes are over). So in order to make informed decisions regarding academic or industry (or otherwise) career paths, the grad school stage is pretty critical.
I find it interesting that all the discussion has been about rearranging the bottleneck to “before grad school”. Why not reduce the flow between grad school and postdocs?? As far as I understand it, the number of available postdoc positions matches the number of graduating PhDs. Seems like the big cut is then going from postdocs to faculty jobs.
Growing up in the sixties I wanted to be both Fred Hoyle and Eric Clapton. So 0.5/2 aint bad. By the way Sean, your title is better than mine. Rats.
Reducing the number of PhD’s is a flawed argument-because PhD scientists aren’t just needed in academia. As a PhD physicist or mathematician you are very useful to many areas of private industry-optics or the defense industry for example. In most cases the work from your dissertation probably won’t be directly applicable, but you might still find yourself working on some interesting applied physics problems. Also the national labs hire PhD scientists in large numbers. I work at Sandia which has about 10,000 employees and Los Alamos is about the same size. Jobs in the national labs might call more directly on your physics skills and there are opportunities to work on exciting projects (quantum computing, nuclear fusion, solar energy to name a few). So I don’t think the number of PhD’s should be reduced. What should happen instead is educating students to the fact they have other opportunities besides academia where they can still work in scientific or at least applied science research. What they should do if they are going into something more esoteric (like say general relativity) is put some time into beefing up other skills that will be useful in the “real world” so they will be competitive inside and outside academia.
At the risk of saying nothing, I can see both sides of the more/fewer PhDs argument.
What would be nice is to know if there is any rationale at all underlying the current number of PhDs graduating in (say theoretical) physics. It clearly isn’t to prepare precisely the right number of tenured faculty, we’ve established that. Also, the idea isn’t just to give the opportunity to anyone who just wants to study more physics. Getting into a PhD programme isn’t easy, nor should it be, and plenty of good candidates are turned down from grad school, I’m sure.
Finally, although people have underlined how useful PhDs are outside of academia as well as being fun to do and providing us with new professors, I’m not enlightened as to whether the optimal amount of PhDness is leaking out into the wider world. Maybe we need less, or indeed much more. Does anyone know?
In short, I suspect there is very little reason deciding the total number of PhDs graduating each year, and it is simply market forces of one kind or another that fixes it. But if anyone knows of an overall strategy, I’d sure be interested in what it is.
Fewer grad students means that universities need fewer advisors, and can lay off faculty. Or is there any reason why universities should accept decreased productivity?
Some of the above posts are anecdotal of the form: “my friends from grad school are happily doing other things than Physics”. Selection, of course; people don’t keep up friendships with whiners, they keep up friendships with people who enjoy their companions and the moment, whatever that moment is. One comment above, that it would be a “major bummer” to get a Physics PhD only to become a high-school teacher, very clearly shows this kind of attitude. There are Physics PhDs out there, I’m quite sure, who enjoy their high-school teaching, and others who don’t. Of course enjoying the people you’re with and the moment is as good a way to improve your chances of doing well in academia as it is in any other endeavor; there are considerable numbers of positive thinkers who would not be in their academic posts if they didn’t have their genuine collegiality and interest in their students on their side. You have to be very good indeed at research to get away with being unpleasant to be with.
Like the financial – the education systems needs revamping – from the bottom up – not everyone should or can continue at higher levels – The capacity for complex thinking and the strength to take on unpopular trains of thought and to endure – is not the present day trail to a happy under the umbrella tenured position.
One of the horrors of slavery is having a master who is not as smart and knows it.
At first glance I thought California & Lake was a Chicago reference and I was really curious where that comparison was going
Anyone who’s hanging out at California & Lake in Chicago, waiting to be noticed by a big-time agent or a tenured professor, has been slightly misinformed.
From my experience, the problem is student awareness. It is not the university’s job to tell a student that he or she will never make it in academia prior to even entering grad school. From my perspective, I was not aware about the dismal prospects for landing an academic job basically up until the point when I was applying for postdocs. Most of the advice I had received was from professors who had long since cleared the bottleneck and were comfortably enjoying their job, perhaps having lost perspective of how difficult the inbetween time really is. Plus, many of them were older professors who got their job at a time when (and this is a quote from one of my previous advisors) “a PhD alone was enough to get a job as a professor”. Times have changed, and most students aren’t aware of this until too late.