"PhDs issued" grows exponentially (since each professor can issue PhDs to multiple students), but "job offers" grows only linearly.
This supply and demand imbalance tilts the power balance almost 100% in favor of the professor in any interaction with grad students. Professors have acquired essentially unlimited and arbitrary power to dictate conditions, and grad students have no choice but to comply or leave academia -- throwing away a lifetime of work and preparation.
More at http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/full/nbt.2706.html
[1] http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/images/nbt.2706-F1...
After all, a near-steady-state academic job market is not new these last decades, labor markets should equilibrate unless there's some kind of barrier, grad students are heavily foreign-born https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_born_scientists_and_en..., and many of them hope to immigrate (same source). What changes to the rules would improve the bargaining position of both native and foreign-born workers? (At the expense of employers like this one.)
An alternative factor is people gambling they'll make it big, like musicians and athletes. This must be part of it, though professors aren't rock stars or drug dealers.
1: you are expected to feel privileged for doing something you vaguely enjoy. (how many people actually enjoy running columns and NMRs at 12am?)
2: you are expected to be altruistic in your ambitions. Curse those vaguely better paid lizard people who are working in industry to forward some profiteering enterprise rather than "science"
3: there are huge barriers to entry (tech excluded) so you will not do something entrepreneurial and make a name for yourself without the university. To make sure of this, we will name claim on anything you do for the next 10+ years anyway.
It's no wonder to me that many of the talented people. Leave to go do banking or consulting - they work less for more!!
2. Many forms of basic science cannot be done in industry. Take my field, high energy physics for example... there's only one supergiant particle smasher in the world and it's not owned by IBM. Anyways doing public science may or may not be altruistic, but I don't see that as a problem of science. In my case I just _actually_ enjoy what I'm doing (see 1) any benefits for the public good are just a bonus.
3. Entrepreneurial options vary pretty widely depending on the field. Regardless, I don't think most people get into science with the master plan that they will make a magical new discovery and then sell it and become a billionaire. If that's your plan, again you're doing it wrong.
Also a lot of people you find in the sciences simply aren't that motivated by money. Many of the ones who go into banking either found out along the way that they weren't into it. Or regrettably often, they just got forced out of their field by competition so had to take a fat paycheck and boring job as a consolation prize.
2. I'm sure they said that about rocket science, too. Of course, SpaceX is repeating all the same mistakes that academia is so perhaps it will go the same way.
Science shouldn't be done privately but if academia keeps messing up like this it will eventually move there if anyone cares about it.
> Also a lot of people you find in the sciences simply aren't that motivated by money.
It doesn't matter what people think they're motivated by. This is a capitalist economy. If you don't care about money, then you don't care about the reality you live in, and, sadly, that's true for a lot of day-dreamy scientists. How money flows is important, and people being exploited is a form of malfunction of such an economy that should always be mitigated.
Science is often not something you can arbitrarily knock down into a 9-5. E.G: The enzyme assay has to get done after you prep, and the prep is an 8 hour block of time after your cells are ready, and you have to do 10 hours of enzyme kinetic work... So you stay up all night. And it took you 10 months to figure out that this is the correct procedure, and now you have one year left in your contract, and you probably ought to be publishing and getting ready to give lectures for academic positions... So that's a straight month of 6 nights a week 100 hour a week work.
You hold postdocs strictly to labor laws, and they are going to be at a disadvantage to the postdocs that are crazy enough to do what needs to be done. You hold all postdocs strictly to labor laws, and hard science simply doesn't happen.
I experienced this as a grad student, too. You essentially were at a disadvantage if you had a social life.
But you can extend this all the way down to high schoolers (or before?), where the kids out partying/socializing would be at a disadvantage to the kid studying alone in his room.
I don't get it. Why can't this be done by multiple people in 8 hour shifts?
The medical profession is also pretty insane for making its residents work crazy hours and get almost no sleep for 24, 36, or even more hours a shift. It never made sense to me, especially as these people are risking their and other people's lives by going without sleep for so long.
The way we structure our research institutions is arbitrary: we can and should restructure them if they aren't working.
This is simply bad management. This task should be handled by a team that is managed by simple tools available since people stared to write shit down. So your paper have a few more authors and the Prof can claim he rightfully needs more postdocs, more postdocs get employed, have real lives and will by simply being able to sleep be vastly more productive. Real science will get done faster, better, with better paper trails and attract smarter people to the field that will currently simply not stand for this kind of shit.
Further people working 100 hour weeks make so many mistakes their work flat out can't be trusted. And should automatically be rejected by any sane review board on that basis alone. Not that it will be but as has been shown many times 'modern' science is fairly broken.
Living under a bridge would be better than enduring this kind of stress. People have to take a step back and look at their lives. Nobody can work so much consistently without mentally and/or physically damaging themselves in significant and lasting ways.
Though I'm not surprised that this letter came from someone in the chemistry department. ChemE especially has a reputation within Caltech as one of the most difficult paths for both undergraduate and graduate work. The ChemE specific classes usually require a much bigger time commitment and the tests are notoriously difficult.
We split up and it took years for both of us to recover.
I don't mind once in a while having to start growing cells in the morning and hanging around for until evening to collect the results. The expectation that you should always be working that kind of hours... well, it doesn't make any sense to me.
The one that really bothered me is that some of the professors would come in on Saturday morning and call their students. It wasn't that they needed them. They were just bored and lonely.
Society benefits from scientific research. Dismiss its wage problems at your own peril. Sadly, a lot of research is outsourced to universities because labor is cheap. Why pay someone loads of money when you can contract with a university lab? It might be good in the short term, but the talent is leaving research in search of greener pastures.
It's far worse than this. In my field, even in industry I have had far more lucrative offers from quantitative hedge funds than any industrial research labor. Let alone staying in academia, where it literally starts to become a factor of four (or more) difference in salary between a postdoc and finance.
The only reason I did not bite is because I am fortunate enough to have no college debt even after undergrad and phd. Most are not in a position to be so picky.
The sad reality is that right now, those concerns can be dismissed. There is a huge supply of good researchers (especially foreign researchers) who are willing to work under poor conditions just to get a shot. Until there is more money in the system / more positions / fewer people in academic science, you are going to see PIs with unreasonable expectations because they know they can get away with it.
Not only that, but they know the next lab down the road is working just as many long, hard hours.
I left my research position studying hereditary influences on cancer development to work in auto finance. Lots of people in my position doing the same. The talent pool is shrinking.
If this is what we setup, we absolutely deserve to lose scientific progress over it. Then, perhaps we'll learn, figure it out, and set it up right. Expecting people to sacrifice themselves for the greater good while they're being exploited is both foolish and immoral.
I am currently transitioning from academia to industry, having just recently finished a PhD in high energy physics (looking for a job in data science). When I mention the lack of a job market in academia as a reason I am transitioning, people don't understand and look at me funny. If anyone is young and thinking of going into high energy physics, do yourself a favor and just don't. The glut of postdocs needed by the LHC, combined with the terrible failure of the SSC, has created a particularly terrible job market for high energy physicists in the US.
People complain about H1Bs, but the situation faced by international postdocs is far worse.
The only way this behaviour would be "wrong" is if candidates were mislead when they entered about what would be expected of them.
If you aren't willing to sacrifice, then don't. You can make a rational choice and walk away with your pride and future intact. But don't pretend someone was wronging you by asking you to sacrifice.
The main factor is a sort of culturally normative and ingrained rite of passage / hazing ritual / bullying / dominance effect, which primarily serves to inflate the boss professor's ego at the expense of the grad students. Getting a PhD was difficult and grueling for the professor, so they are damn sure going to make sure it's difficult and grueling for their own students.
The only way they themselves got through it was internalizing the attitude that a grueling work and study schedule is simply normal and simply the price of success.
This exercise of extreme and essentially arbitrary power over how the students live their lives, far beyond what any normal job could remotely require, is very gratifying to many professors. They've worked so hard, suffered themselves, and now THEY have this absurd power over others.. It makes them feel important and powerful at a very primal level to tell their students they have to live under these extraordinary conditions, and then see them obey.
They can literally choose whose career will live and whose will die, whose dreams will happen and whose will be broken and swept away without a thought.
To fix this, the professors need to have a lot less arbitrary power over their students. There needs to be another route to a PhD besides enduring poverty and years of ritual self-humiliation and long form ass-kissing. Only then will the culture shift, as the "grind mode" professors are replaced by new professors who didn't have to grind.
We had one like him few years back. One person in a large team was enough to demoralize all, team lead dropped out, few left. All this took months. Yes that one guy was marginally more senior, but the abuse cost a lot more in team productivity output than the seniority experienced output of that one problematic employee.
So yea, if it was my call, people like that will be out asap and off to be given proper medical help, rather than poisoning the team environment for everybody.
It is the lowest tier of theater which demands the greatest sacrifices, because it can, because the people making it are desperate for work. The budgets are also smaller, so more responsibility is heaped onto smaller crews.
The best people get to work with the best theater companies, which have the best working conditions. They have to, or the best people would not work with them. This is often but not always formalized with a union contract.
Top theaters are usually union houses. The actors and stage managers belong to Equity, the crew to IATSE, the designers to United Scenic Artists, etc. In most cases, getting your union card is synonymous with making it into the "big leagues." On union shows, breaks, working hours per day, advance notice required for a call, which tasks can be assigned to people with specific positions, etc. are strictly regulated. Your work is held to an extremely high standard, but the hours in which you are expected to perform it, and the kinds of things that can be made your problem, are strictly bounded.
At higher levels, staffs are larger and more specialized: roles that would have been solo in a lower-budget world are a principal and several assistants on Broadway. Tasks that would have fallen to you by default have dedicated personnel, and you may in fact be expressly forbidden from doing them by the union contract.
There is immense upward pressure on the quality of your work because most engagements are short-term. Even if it's very hard to get fired, you still need to cultivate a network that is impressed by and likes you if you want to keep working.
The theater community, particularly at the top, has an admirably low tolerance for this kind of abuse.
[also, people in athletics are not this dumb and figured out that you do not want to train 24/7 because that's not how the body works. That's not how the brain works, either, trust me]
This has nothing to do with discipline. I guarantee that this is hilariously inefficient, scares off all the good potential scientists because they actually have a shred of self-respect, and is probably contributing to a lot of social and mental problems in the country as a whole. The "work until you die" rhetoric has always been moralistic, not scientific.
This, this right here, is the only explanation anyone should need for perceived lack of scientific progress. How can anything useful at all grow in an environment like this? It's a miracle when it does.
Maybe I'm wrong about the "no pay" but even then I would still consider it involuntary.
It's hard to see what you mean by involuntary here. It's a work for education arrangement, and the amount of work is large, but people are free to leave. It's a bad deal in a bad system, but its hardly involuntary.
