Toward More Comfortable Bottlenecks

Jessica at Bioephemera posts a provocative quote about the way we train and employ young people who are seeking careers in academia:

They’re doing exactly what we always complain our brightest students don’t do: eschewing the easy bucks of Wall Street, consulting or corporate law to pursue their ideals and be of service to society. Academia may once have been a cushy gig, but now we’re talking about highly talented young people who are willing to spend their 20s living on subsistence wages when they could be getting rich (and their friends are getting rich), simply because they believe in knowledge, ideas, inquiry; in teaching, in following their passion. To leave more than half of them holding the bag at the end of it all, over 30 and having to scrounge for a new career, is a human tragedy.

— William Deresiewicz, The Nation

The author goes on to bemoan this “colossal waste of human capital” — all those talented young people spending time getting Ph.D.’s, then not eventually landing faculty jobs, when they could be going right into productive careers in some other field.

I’m sincerely unsure what to think about the occasional complaints one hears along these lines. On the one hand, I firmly believe that the grad school/postdoc/junior faculty years should be enjoyable ones, not days of peril and gloom living under a cloud of uncertainty. If there were a way to make the journey easier, I would be all for it. I can think of small ways to do so, and am certainly in favor of such incremental improvements.

But on the other hand, I really can’t think of any sensible major improvements, for a simple reason: there are many people who would like to be academics, and few available jobs. Short of multiplying the number of college professorships by a factor of three or so, I’m not sure how to address the primary cause of this anxiety — the difficulty in getting jobs. If you knew you were going to land a tenured spot at a good place, it would be much easier to bear the indignities of grad-student/postdoc level salaries for a few years. Deresiewicz says, “If we don’t make things better for the people entering academia, no one’s going to want to do it anymore.” But if that were true, why are there so many “highly talented young people who are willing to spend their 20s living on subsistence wages when they could be getting rich”? These seem to be contradictory worries.

Obviously one thing to do would be to dramatically cut down on the number of people who get into graduate school. But that just moves the bottleneck around, it doesn’t change its overall size. And I don’t want to be the one who says to a somewhat-promising-but-not-superstar-quality grad school applicant, “Sorry, I’d enjoy working with you, but we’ve decided not to admit you because in our judgement your chances of eventually getting a faculty job aren’t quite as good as some of our other applicants. So you see, it’s for your own good.” Generally the people who advocate this kind of strategy are the ones who have already been admitted to grad school. (If you’re waiting for Deresiewicz’s solution, here it is: “The answer is to hire more professors.” Well, okay then.)

Again, I honestly don’t know what should be done. I would love to improve the lifestyle and general well-being of students and postdocs in any feasible way. Not sure what that way would be.

81 Comments

81 thoughts on “Toward More Comfortable Bottlenecks”

  1. Sean, apropos of comment #14, I’m not sure I follow why you object to reducing graduate admissions to bring them into better balance with the available positions.

    George

  2. I’m a poor chemistry PhD. I left college teaching to go into Christian school teaching. Despite student loans whcih I can barely afford to pay back, grad school was worth it. The lessons I learned about intellectualism, academics, and the philosophy of learning were worth more than all the academic knowledge I learned. Poor at the moment, yes–but happy. My hope is that I can impart this philosophy of education to others who might not be going into grad programs. Cumes, hoop-jumping, and the rest–how else can we really learn that we need to really learn?

  3. The population is larger than the 70’s, and more people go to college, so therefore there should be more physics faculty and correspondingly higher funding levels. In addition, student-faculty ratios should be closer to 1:8 (or so) than 1:30, and professors should teach all classes. All these factors point towards more faculty positions…

    Being able to conduct research is useful. So is having a strong mathematical background, and the ability to think analytically. All phd graduates shouldn’t be expected to strive to become permanent faculty. They should strive to become strong researchers with the background and self-initiative to see problems through. The number of students isn’t a problem. However, viewing the career advancement of all those students as a collective process of attrition is a problem.

  4. Matthew Saunders

    Sean,

    interesting, I have never thought of academia in the way you have presented it — that failure/not succeeding is a part of it. I wonder if academia could adopt, somehow, the business model of a Facebook — they’re making money off of selling NOTHING. Perhaps, with the advent of the internet, with the ability to make a living off of catering to the long tail instead of the thick part of the bell curve…perhaps school should be encouraging and helping those academics to build up a web presence, instead of being held down to one physical location (University, College, Country, whatever). That might mitigate some of the petty politics and the stupid tribalisms that can infect science? Hmm.

  5. “But on the other hand, I really can’t think of any sensible major improvements, for a simple reason: there are many people who would like to be academics, and few available jobs. Short of multiplying the number of college professorships by a factor of three or so, I’m not sure how to address the primary cause of this anxiety — the difficulty in getting jobs.”

    The obvious solution, while keeping the total amount of money spent constant (whether one wants to change that is another question) is to have fewer temporary positions and more permanent ones, giving people a permanent job at a lower age. When one goes to work in business or industry, the standard thing is a permanent job right away, perhaps after a trial period of 6 months. And these people have much less of an idea about what awaits them than someone in academia does. Any talk about temporary positions being necessary for one to prove one’s worth is bullshit. The only reason they exist is because funding agencies don’t want to make long-term commitments. Think of the people you know. Is there even one example of a person whom you thought was worthy of a permanent job in grad school, but later turned out a disappointment, or vice versa (not that the latter case would even have a chance of being observed—huge selection bias here)?

Comments are closed.

Scroll to Top