Academia: Exponential Growth & Post Docs Till 40?

[twofish-quant]

Companies are downsizing, and jobs are being shipped outside the US. So job prospects, overall, are not well in these fields.

One thing that's good about a Ph.D. is that it will get you at the head of a queue if you want to switch countries. This works if you want to get into the US, but it also works if you want to get out.

Something else that is happening is the decline of relative US power. If you have a committee full of Americans, you can appeal to patriotism to keep jobs in the US. If it turns out that the people who are running the company aren't American, then appeals to American patriotism aren't going to work, and increasingly the people that make decisions about where the jobs are, aren't American.

I've seen this dynamic in multi-national companies. If you want to make a decision as to whether to move a plant from the US to India, then it's going to *have* to be based on economic decisions rather than on nationalism, because appeals to "keep jobs in America" won't appeal to the Indians involved in making the decision.

 

[twofish-quant]

What's probably going to happen in science is that the science PhD glut will become better and better publicized, and fewer students will pursue science PhDs in years to come.

At which point you may have a boom-bust cycle which just wrecks the system.

Or you end up with an economic death spiral. Fewer Ph.D.'s -> less economic growth -> fewer Ph.D.'s -> less economic growth

Ironically, it may also mean better wages and working conditions for the postdocs that remain, due to the laws of supply and demand.

Supply and demand aren't "iron laws" rather like everything else in economics, they can be modeled. The rules of supply and demand that work in perfect markets don't work with science hiring, but it's not hard to come up with other models.

 

[twofish-quant]

I wonder whether there has been a push to make PhD's in science a professional degree program with a license. I would assume, if done right, whatever institutions grant the license could artificially decrease the poll of graduating students and cause an increase in salary. Much like the AMA limits the poll of doctors.

1) Personally, I think that would be a horrible thing to do. One thing about physics Ph.D.'s is that out of necessity, they often are employed in industries with weak or non-existent professional licensing which gives people a strong dislike for professional licensing.

2) It's not going to work because graduate students are cheap labor for the tenured faculty. If you reduce the number of people coming in, then a lot of research just isn't going to get done. Also why would tenured faculty *want* to increase graduate student salaries?

3) And also, I think it would be bad for research. Once you start limiting the number of people coming in then things are going to get even more political than they are. This has been really horrible for economics academic research.

4) And then you have to get to "core values." Something that I've always been taught is that education is good for society, and if the economic system doesn't reflect this thing something is massively messed up with the system and it's got to get changed.

 

[twofish-quant]

After all, universities pour a lot of money into graduate students (paying tuition + for TA duties), and they offer tenured faculty significant benefits, so I can't help but wonder why there's less in between, since I've heard time and again that the in between phase produces a lot of the best research (in between when you're too old and too young to do anything impressive).

Karl Marx answered this quite nicely. People with power make up the rules so they'll make them up to maximize their power at the expense of people with no power. So what ends up happening is that either you have power or you don't, and that kills any sort of "middle class." I studied a lot of Marxism, and much of what he had to say makes sense. The big problem is that the obvious solution that he gave for how to fix the problem i.e. "have a revolution and shoot the old guard" doesn't work, so it's not clear what to do from a social point of view.

From a personal point of view, if we are in a situation in which the rich get richer and the poor are getting poorer, then first priority is self-preservation and do what I can to get in the door, and then once I get in, figure out what to do next.

 

[chill_factor]

Part of it is the "second Einstein effect". Once you have one Einstein that works out general relativity, then there isn't a job left for a second Einstein. One other thing is that in physics, once you figure out some fundamental law, you are done. Once you've worked out string theory or quantum gravity, you let everyone know, and you are finished.

In economics, the rules change so often, that knowing how derivative markets worked in 1980 is only of marginal benefit to knowing the rules in 2012. So you have to rederive all your models every few months.



Has headed. The bus left decades ago.

The US became a post-industrial service economy decades ago. Citigroup has roughly the same head count as GM, and Morgan-Stanley has roughly the same head count as Chrysler. One thing that changes public perceptions of finance is the fact that finance is not unionized. When you talk about an auto company, the fact that you have a union makes people aware that not every in an auto company is a auto executive.

Because financial companies are tight lipped and non-unionized, the only people that people on the outside see are the top executives, which makes people assume that everyone that works in a bank is a managing director.

the 2nd einstein effect is for mostly theoretical and basic sciences, i assume?

what about for experimental applied sciences?

 

[JakeBrodskyPE]

Has headed. The bus left decades ago.

"An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today." --Laurence J. Peter

 

[Locrian]

the 2nd einstein effect is for mostly theoretical and basic sciences, i assume?

what about for experimental applied sciences?

It's not even really true for theoretical science. Most of physics (materials, condensed matter, etc.) doesn't function by producing a few huge discoveries that leave everyone else with nothing to do. Most of physics discovery is incremental in nature.

Negative index metamaterials, giant magnetoresistance, high temperature superconductivity. . . these things created tremendous numbers of jobs in their areas, many including permanent positions.

Even Einstein doesn't really demonstrate this stuff about the second Einstein effect. In many cases - special relativity, brownian motion, Bose-Einstein condensates, possibly even general relativity - Einstein was the "second Einstein".

It's complete nonsense that has no basis in fact.

 

[Locrian]

Organic electronics is another awesome example. Twofish wants you to believe that the field died when Heeger created it, but it's the exact opposite. The discovery of the way those materials function has been the basis of tremendous amounts of research.

Saying that "once you figure out a fundamental law, you are done" reflects this absurd reductionist philosophy that our universe can be pared down to a few simple rules from which all else forms, and if we could discover those rules we'd be finished. The past 60 years of physics has been a triumph largely because that philosophy has been such a failure.

 

[czelaya]

1) Personally, I think that would be a horrible thing to do. One thing about physics Ph.D.'s is that out of necessity, they often are employed in industries with weak or non-existent professional licensing which gives people a strong dislike for professional licensing.

2) It's not going to work because graduate students are cheap labor for the tenured faculty. If you reduce the number of people coming in, then a lot of research just isn't going to get done. Also why would tenured faculty *want* to increase graduate student salaries?

3) And also, I think it would be bad for research. Once you start limiting the number of people coming in then things are going to get even more political than they are. This has been really horrible for economics academic research.

4) And then you have to get to "core values." Something that I've always been taught is that education is good for society, and if the economic system doesn't reflect this thing something is massively messed up with the system and it's got to get changed.

I'm not asserting that licensing would be a good thing. Personally, I think the strict licensing of many professions does exactly what you're stating. It protects a few at the cost of others. However, I'm in no way saying that certain benchmarks should not be achieved by practitioners of a particular field, but to large a degree, I feel that current licensing laws don't add outstanding benefits to society.

1.) Could you elaborate on your 1st comment?

2.) Couldn't post docs fulfill those obligations in the form of an accreditation program once you receive a doctoral degree? Much like a residency.

3.) Really? But economic programs aren't professional licensed programs... are they? Please elaborate? What about medical physics programs? Don't they pay generous salaries and it seems that research in that particular field is advancing.

4.) Well it seems that the market is over saturated with PhD's and is primarily due to the to easy access students have to fund their education (well-from my point of view anyway). However it does seem that society is not kind to researchers. Is it society or the researchers themselves that need to change?

I've always been more drawn to free market oriented views and not been fond of Keynesian or socialist economic schools, respectfully. In all honesty, my adherence to libertarian views is driven from my personal experience and the morals I've cultivated from those experiences. The price mechanism is far too powerful of an efficient system to allocating scarce sources.

 

[chill_factor]

Organic electronics is another awesome example. Twofish wants you to believe that the field died when Heeger created it, but it's the exact opposite. The discovery of the way those materials function has been the basis of tremendous amounts of research.

Saying that "once you figure out a fundamental law, you are done" reflects this absurd reductionist philosophy that our universe can be pared down to a few simple rules from which all else forms, and if we could discover those rules we'd be finished. The past 60 years of physics has been a triumph largely because that philosophy has been such a failure.

Would you recommend condensed matter physics as a good field to go into if the final goal is employment in this specific technical field in industry?

 

[Choppy]

2.) Couldn't post docs fulfill those obligations in the form of an accreditation program once you receive a doctoral degree? Much like a residency.

3.) Really? But economic programs aren't professional licensed programs... are they? Please elaborate? What about medical physics programs? Don't they pay generous salaries and it seems that research in that particular field is advancing.

I think one of the key differences is that medicine and medical physics provide very specific services that require those rendering them to assume a lot of responsibility. Ultimately that is one major factor that puts them/us in a favourable negotiating position when it comes time to work out salaries.

In medical physics the residency is where the physicist is supposed to be learning all the practical, clinical aspects of the profession. Thus you can take people who know all the theory they need and then place them in various practical scenarios where they are supervised by someone competant who is ultimately willing to assume responsibility for the services provided.

How would an analog of this work for academic research? I can tell you (or at least make a reasonably objective argument for) what makes someone competant as a clinical medical physicist. In academia, the traditional credential for "competant researcher" has always been the PhD. So what would a post-doc 'resident' be working towards? And what issue would a 'residency' solve?

 

[twofish-quant]

It's not even really true for theoretical science. Most of physics (materials, condensed matter, etc.) doesn't function by producing a few huge discoveries that leave everyone else with nothing to do. Most of physics discovery is incremental in nature.

A lot depends on the area of physics. There are some areas (string theory and mathematical physics) that are prone to the "second Einstein effect" than others. But even in areas that are more communal, the number of jobs produced is relatively small, and the jobs that are produced are often not directly related to research.

If you increase the number of string theorist from 5 to 100, then you can use the extra ones to research other approaches, but if you increase them from 100 to 10000, it's not clear what the other people will do.

Negative index metamaterials, giant magnetoresistance, high temperature superconductivity. . . these things created tremendous numbers of jobs in their areas, many including permanent positions.

But we are still talking about thousands of jobs in a nation with 30 million people.

Even Einstein doesn't really demonstrate this stuff about the second Einstein effect. In many cases - special relativity, brownian motion, Bose-Einstein condensates, possibly even general relativity - Einstein was the "second Einstein".

But we are still talking about 100 or so people that changed the world. The fact that a small number of physicists can change the world is paradoxically not a good thing when it comes to generating large number of things for physicists to do.

 

[twofish-quant]

Organic electronics is another awesome example. Twofish wants you to believe that the field died when Heeger created it, but it's the exact opposite. The discovery of the way those materials function has been the basis of tremendous amounts of research.

Yes, lots of research, but how many new spots for researchers? Hundreds? Thousands? The point is that physics is something that a small number of people can do lots of stuff.

Saying that "once you figure out a fundamental law, you are done"

Once you figure out a fundamental law, you are done figuring out the fundamental law, and you don't have to pay someone to rediscover it.

You can find people to figure out something else, but it's not like building a car in which you have to keep making new stuff to replace old stuff from breaking down.

 

[twofish-quant]

1.) Could you elaborate on your 1st comment?

With a physics Ph.D., I can't get hired as a doctor, lawyer, accountant, or civil engineer because of licensing (not to say that it's a bad thing for the world that I can't be hired). However, I can get hired as a software engineer, car salesman, and without too much trouble as a stockbroker, because those either have no licensing or minimal licensing requirements.

Couldn't post docs fulfill those obligations in the form of an accreditation program once you receive a doctoral degree? Much like a residency.

Trouble is that the "accreditation" is a Ph.d. Also there isn't a well defined set of skills, like being a doctor or lawyer.

Really? But economic programs aren't professional licensed programs... are they?

Effectively they are. You get a job based on what peer reviewed publications. The problem with economists (and to a lesser degree physicists) is that it's hard to come up with objective criteria for competence so when you have to make decisions, it can get very subjective, very quickly.

4.) Well it seems that the market is over saturated with PhD's and is primarily due to the to easy access students have to fund their education (well-from my point of view anyway).

And for physics Ph.D.'s people have easy access because it's necessary to have graduate students to do research. The other thing is that I *don't* think that there are too many Ph.D.'s. The problem is an issue of market structure and demand.

However it does seem that society is not kind to researchers. Is it society or the researchers themselves that need to change?

It depends. Personally, if the US isn't kind to researchers, then eventually people will move elsewhere, and that will be bad for the US.

I've always been more drawn to free market oriented views and not been fond of Keynesian or socialist economic schools, respectfully.

I'm a free market Marxist that looks as markets from a physics point of view. You can mathematically prove that assuming A, B, and C with definitions D and E that F must occur. However, reality is messy in that you never have exactly A, B, and C and you have to be careful about definitions D and E because the technical meaning of D might be different from the meaning that most people assign to it.

In all honesty, my adherence to libertarian views is driven from my personal experience and the morals I've cultivated from those experiences.

One trouble with extrapolating from personal views is that economics has a nasty habit of changing. Based on the experience of the Soviet Union in 1960, one could naturally assume (incorrectly) that central planning was the ideal economic system. Similarly the fall of the Soviet Union led people to assume that free market capitalism was the way to go, but that hasn't seem to work that well recently.

The price mechanism is far too powerful of an efficient system to allocating scarce sources.

Under some mathematical situations, and under some definitions of "efficient" then yes it works very well, but because it works in some situations, doesn't mean that it's some universal law that works universally well in all situations. You look at a a market, you figure out how it works, you write some equations, and if you look really closely, you can often figure out a way of making money from that understanding.

The other thing is that "efficiency" isn't a unalloyed good. If you are juggling chain saws then you really want your shoes to have a lot of friction, because it means that you won't slip. We are at the point that many financial transactions happen in milliseconds and that makes people wonder if too much efficiency is a bad thing.

The other thing is that markets don't come into being fully formed, and a *lot* depends on the specific market rules. I know of one situation in which the behavior of the market is obviously impacted by what time the brokers go to lunch, and that has to be taken into account when writing equations that describe that market.

The fact that markets are incredibly complicated is I suppose a good thing, because it means lots of pretty high paying jobs for physicists trying to model them.

 

[deRham]

Karl Marx answered this quite nicely. People with power make up the rules so they'll make them up to maximize their power at the expense of people with no power

I kind of suspected this too; in some theoretical fields, I don't think it's possible to "exploit labor" from the lower level guys, but I think it makes a lot of sense that once the middle batch grow larger, it's probably the top that will have to take the cut (not the bottom, because it has, and always will, remain the largest in population). I imagine once someone gets tenure, there is little chance he/she will support the idea of fewer tenured faculty, at least not vocally.

I imagine some tenured faculty make ~ 100-120K, and I see no reason why it's not economical to reduce the number of those drastically, and have more researchers making around 70-80K who have not strictly temporary but far from permanent jobs. I admit these numbers are not necessarily reliable (I've heard of one tenured faculty member at a pretty top notch school state his salary as ~ 130K), but they at least serve to illustrate.

 

[twofish-quant]

I kind of suspected this too; in some theoretical fields, I don't think it's possible to "exploit labor" from the lower level guys, but I think it makes a lot of sense that once the middle batch grow larger, it's probably the top that will have to take the cut (not the bottom, because it has, and always will, remain the largest in population).

This is where economic growth and science comes in. If you can make the pie bigger, then there going to be less argument over who gets what, and you can have extremely unequal societies in which the people with power get most of the stuff, and it doesn't matter because there is so much stuff that everyone else ends up with something.

I imagine once someone gets tenure, there is little chance he/she will support the idea of fewer tenured faculty, at least not vocally.

Ahhh... But the beauty of the system is that it's a system. If you had one person or a small group of people that made all of the decisions, you could protest and pressure them into changing their decisions. But the beauty of the system is that there isn't an easy choke point. Suppose people wanted to change the tenure system. It's not even clear where to start, even if people wanted it. In order to change something like that, you need a lot of people making coordinated decisions at the same time, and that's nothing that one or two people can do even if they wanted to, which they don't.

That makes it a clever system because you don't even have to feel guilty from benefiting from it. Someone that benefits from the system can say (and even say truthfully) that they can't do anything about it.

I imagine some tenured faculty make ~ 100-120K, and I see no reason why it's not economical to reduce the number of those drastically, and have more researchers making around 70-80K who have not strictly temporary but far from permanent jobs.

The problem with cutting is that once you start eliminating jobs, people stop spending, which eliminates more jobs which gets you in a vicious circle.

There are two political problems:

1) People who make 100-120K are going to fight the changes tooth and nail

2) People that don't make 100-120K also have an interest in fighting those changes. The problem is that the people that want to cut education and science spending aren't going to stop once they've reduced salaries. Once you've reduced salaries for tenured faculty to turn them into non-tenured, then the next step is going to eliminate those jobs so that no one makes anything.

This isn't an academic issue. Rick Perry in Texas has been very active at trying to cut spending to UT Austin, but his "war against tenure" hasn't been well received among adjuncts and graduate students, because he hasn't been able to convince anyone that he won't stop once he has gotten rid of tenured faculty. It doesn't help that the people that are in this camp tend to think that the world is 6000 years old.

I admit these numbers are not necessarily reliable (I've heard of one tenured faculty member at a pretty top notch school state his salary as ~ 130K), but they at least serve to illustrate.

A lot depends on the department. Business professors often make $200K/year and football coaches can make $1M/year.

 

[mal4mac]

With a physics Ph.D., I can't get hired as a doctor, lawyer, accountant, or civil engineer because of licensing (not to say that it's a bad thing for the world that I can't be hired). However, I can get hired as a software engineer, car salesman, and without too much trouble as a stockbroker

Is becoming a stockbroker that easy? In the UK, at least, daddy better have the contacts and money:

25% of UK merchant bankers and stockbrokers went to Eton.

96% of top stockbrokers went to public schools.
4% went to grammar schools
0% (The vast majority of kids!) went to comprehensive schools.

Figures from: "Money/space: geographies of monetary transformation" by Andrew Leyshon, N. J. Thrif"

... these are 1986 figures, but I don't think much has changed.

I went to comprehensive school and was seriously applying for jobs in technical industries & academia around 1986. I often wondered if I should have applied for a stockbroker job. Now I see that I would have had 0% chance! Makes me feel a bit better... I never had a chance of earning easy big bucks :)

I suppose it's obvious - those with big money and power are going to make sure that the jobs that easily provide big money and power are kept for their kids.

 

[Mute]

I imagine some tenured faculty make ~ 100-120K, and I see no reason why it's not economical to reduce the number of those drastically, and have more researchers making around 70-80K who have not strictly temporary but far from permanent jobs.

One of the major reasons people put up with the length of time required to land an academic job is because once you finally have it, you have it for as long as you want. If you eliminate the permanence of the position, it's harder to justify the years you spend going after this job. You have to make up for this somehow. You either have to retool the whole system so that people don't spend years of their lives trying to become professional researchers, or you have to increase salaries for the positions to remain worth going after. You might even have to do both.

 

[ParticleGrl]

One of the major reasons people put up with the length of time required to land an academic job is because once you finally have it, you have it for as long as you want. If you eliminate the permanence of the position, it's harder to justify the years you spend going after this job. You have to make up for this somehow. You either have to retool the whole system so that people don't spend years of their lives trying to become professional researchers, or you have to increase salaries for the positions to remain worth going after. You might even have to do both.

I strongly disagree. The current system is loaded with people who would pursue a career in physics regardless of how awful the outcome. If postdocs allowed for more a stable life, but tenured positions paid less, overall utility would improve. The worry is that if you cut tenured pay, you still won't do anything to improve the generally poor postdoc conditions, so nothing changes.

But even if tenured profs made half of what they do now, you'd still have people chasing the positions. CS and economics professors make substantially more than theoretical physics professors, even at liberal arts colleges, and yet the physics professorships are much more competitive.

 

[George Jones]

football coaches can make $1M/year.

See
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1086.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I don't see what problem making postdoctory a career solves. Yes, if you were one of the lucky few who landed such a position, you'd be in good shape, but once those positions filled up, they will become exactly as hard to get as faculty positions are today.

Some things to think about:

Each professor graduates of order 10 students. Only one of them is needed to replace him. That fact that many of the other 9 would also like to replace him doesn't change how many are needed. In times of growth, that 1 might become 1.5 or even 2, but it can't be 10.

Next, the normal path for PhDs is to enter industry. That's why the political bodies are funding physics. Congress does not care about the spectrum of glopolium, but they understand that research on he spectrum of glopolium produces PhDs that then go on to aerospace, energy, finance and other fields. They know, as do the leaders of these industries, that this might not be the PhDs first choice. Their attitude is 'So what? As that great philosopher, Willie Nelson once said, "Ninety-nine percent of the world's lovers are not with their first choice. That's what makes the jukebox play."'

For some reason, physics graduate students are amazing at denial. They read the above and are sure that because they have been at or near the top of their class all their lives, that the odds don't apply to them. It's impossible to get a PhD in physics and not understand exponential growth, and anyone who is even slightly observant can compare the number of faculty hires in their department with the number of graduates.

Finally, I am continually astounded at the number of people who confuse the purpose of a research university with the purpose of a trade school.

 

[chill_factor]

A lot depends on the area of physics. There are some areas (string theory and mathematical physics) that are prone to the "second Einstein effect" than others. But even in areas that are more communal, the number of jobs produced is relatively small, and the jobs that are produced are often not directly related to research.

If you increase the number of string theorist from 5 to 100, then you can use the extra ones to research other approaches, but if you increase them from 100 to 10000, it's not clear what the other people will do.



But we are still talking about thousands of jobs in a nation with 30 million people.



But we are still talking about 100 or so people that changed the world. The fact that a small number of physicists can change the world is paradoxically not a good thing when it comes to generating large number of things for physicists to do.

whats wrong with non-research technical fields? just like mechanical engineering needs people mostly to size a valve and design nails (exaggerating here but you know what I mean) and not to design new rockets, physics, especially condensed matter/materials, biomedical and optics, needs people to build, design and operate complex machinery or complex processes in semi-routine jobs, and do so competently.

even some high school level problems in physics, are very hard for many people to actually apply to real world applications.

 

[deRham]

If you eliminate the permanence of the position, it's harder to justify the years you spend going after this job.

You wouldn't be "spending years going after this job" - why should you? As ParticleGrl suggests, a lot of people pursue the career because heck, researching physics is just pretty awesome to some people. So they wouldn't be doing it just to get a permanent job.

because he hasn't been able to convince anyone that he won't stop once he has gotten rid of tenured faculty.

Yikes. Yeah, obviously we don't want to just get rid of researchers altogether. I don't even propose getting rid of tenure myself. What I do believe is that tenure is an elite thing, and it isn't so bad if the middle is widened and the elite is slimmer; after all, the IAS consists of some of the most elite positions around, yet its faculty is downright scarily accomplished, and I can hardly complain that they're put on a pedestal.

My main problem is that the current system just seems less efficient in a way. For a field like theoretical mathematics, I just can't see a graduate student or postdoc providing enough "cheap labor" to justify even having them around; they're around because they're steadily building publications and skills that will hopefully result in significant results. Keeping more of these people around to actually continue with their research can only result in better productivity overall.

But the beauty of the system is that there isn't an easy choke point.

Very good point. At least I'm beginning to see why it's so hard to change the system.
The crux of my belief is this: whether it be admission to an undergraduate or graduate school, getting a job, etc, at some point when you just make it too hard to get a position, you'll weed out talent and introduce a high level of luck and randomness. Some of that is always there, but pointedly creating a lottery-jackpot scenario is crazy. I never used to object when I was young and thought the reason it's so hard to get is that only the most talented are chosen. {This goes back to my point about the IAS. I'm not complaining how they're treated. They're probably the reason the fields I study even exist.}

 

[Mute]

I strongly disagree. The current system is loaded with people who would pursue a career in physics regardless of how awful the outcome.

By why are they willing to pursue it? Part of it is a misguided love of science above everything else, perhaps, but part of a person's ability to rationalize doing multiple postdocs upon postdocs at all is that they can potentially ultimately obtain a permanent position. If you were to take away the permanence of that position, then it becomes harder to rationalize spending so much of your life to go after it. If professors then start getting fired because they no longer have that job security, then it becomes much harder to rationalize to yourself that you should spend all of your youth going after this job. Sure, some people will still do it, but I think most people would opt at that point to look at more lucrative options, since you'd have just as much job security in industry but a much higher salary. A love of science can only carry you so far. I think that the number of quality candidates going after faculty positions would drop in this case. As a result, to really remain competitive with industry, the salaries of non-permanent faculty jobs would have to go up - or hiring from other countries will increase. If university administrations could get away with eliminating tenure without increasing salaries or foreign hirings and still have quality candidates, why haven't they tried?

But even if tenured profs made half of what they do now, you'd still have people chasing the positions. CS and economics professors make substantially more than theoretical physics professors, even at liberal arts colleges, and yet the physics professorships are much more competitive.

To a certain point I'm sure you can decrease a tenured prof's salary and people will still chase the positions, but there is a limit to how much you can decrease it - and that's if the position is permanent. If the position is not permanent I suspect that eventually the salary will have to increase to remain competitive with other options, all other things being kept the same.

Under the current system you can exploit some people all of the time, but if you change the system by removing one of the best 'rewards' of the long and arduous process of getting a faculty position, I think most people won't be as willing to be exploited anymore.

 

[deRham]

but once those positions filled up, they will become exactly as hard to get as faculty positions are today.

I suppose it comes down to a judgment call; it will certainly become just as hard to get for those remaining. However, I'm hardly proposing that every last person in the planet should have a faculty position.

To be totally honest, I think many people who pursue a PhD in, say, theoretical mathematics (I imagine this is true for physics) would not even want to put up with the stress of achieving amazing publications at the levels which many mathematicians work at. For instance, I think even if you offered them a position at Harvard pure mathematics PhD, they'd probably end up leaving or something, because it's intense enough that few would even want to keep up with that pace (despite the many who would like to try to get admitted).

I think the problem is when people show themselves very capable of handling the pace, rigor, etc and still have an absurdly low chance at continuing their research. It's hard to deny that's wasteful.

 

[deRham]

If you were to take away the permanence of that position, then it becomes harder to rationalize spending so much of your life to go after it.

To be clear: we don't even have to reduce tenured professors' salaries or the permanence. I just mean that tenure sounds like hitting a jackpot, and a few superstars can have that. I think we'd just have a total of more productive researchers if they had a reasonable way of pursuing their research other than hitting that jackpot.

If you were to take away the permanence of that position,

There is clearly something between permanent and strictly temporary, which probably would be a desirable enough alternative for someone who spent 7 years doing a physics PhD out of liking it, instead of doing a different job which pays much more for roughly that energy.

 

[ParticleGrl]

I don't see what problem making postdoctory a career solves. Yes, if you were one of the lucky few who landed such a position, you'd be in good shape, but once those positions filled up, they will become exactly as hard to get as faculty positions are today.

I think you don't understand the proposal. The idea is to have career postdocs who work in place of some of the graduate students. That means a team of 2 or 3 physicists (1 full professor, 1 or 2 "permenent postdocs") train 3 or 4 students over their careers, instead of 1 professor training 7 or 8 students. The hope is that the extra postdocs, because they are well-trained scientists, keep productivity in the lab up and reduce the need for students.

Next, the normal path for PhDs is to enter industry. That's why the political bodies are funding physics.

The implicit assumption I made when I heard "PhDs in physics enter industry" was that phds in physics enter industry TO DO PHYSICS. After all- most of the numbers report on the salary of "physicists" at early career, mid career, late career. You don't see numbers for "physics phd working in management consulting, physics phd working in insurance, physics phds working in finance."

The political bodies fund physics to get research done, not to produce physicists for the finance industry. The system is set up to get research done cheaply, hence the production of lots of students, most of which are just waste products of the research machine. The funding agencies don't care at all about the number of students leaving the field or else when professors write grants, they'd list all the phds they've sent into the world of finance/insurance,etc.

For some reason, physics graduate students are amazing at denial.

I think its more likely that the system is full of people suggesting that science is an amazingly great career path, and that not enough Americans go into math and science, etc. Look at the statistics the UT system uses to encourage its physics majors (posted earlier in this thread, I believe). If everyone (including your professors) tells you what a great career path science is, why wouldn't you believe them? If everyone says there is a huge shortage of American scientists, why wouldn't you believe them? The people I know in phd programs all put too much faith in what scientists told them about career prospects. You look around and say "well, not everyone gets to be a professor, but surely all these physicists go on to work as industrial physicists of some kind."

Very few people at the university seem to be willing to say "science is a dead end career path. Odds are, after a very short career you'll have to reinvent yourself to get a job in a field unrelated to science."

Finally, I am continually astounded at the number of people who confuse the purpose of a research university with the purpose of a trade school.

The problem is that companies doing hiring treat the research university like a trade school. Need an expert on finite element analysis of fluids? Hire a recent phd who did exactly that. Need an expert on RF electronics, hire a recent phd who did exactly that. So if you do a phd in an area without specific industrial demand, odds are you are just wasting your time honing a skill set you'll never get/need to use.

If you want to work in a traditional technical field and you don't treat the research university as a trade school, you aren't likely to find the job you want.

 

[Vanadium 50]

The political bodies fund physics to get research done, not to produce physicists for the finance industry.

That's simply not true. One of us has worked at the agencies, and one of us has discussed this in depth with members of Congress from both parties. The reason physics is funded better than, say, art history, is not because Congress is more interested in the spectrum of glopolium than the development of pre-Impressionism. It's because people who get degrees on glopolium are likely to work important projects in industry - projects that they can tax and projects that will employ others.

PI's are evaluated on how many students they produce and how well these students do post-PhD.

While in the past, they were interested in how many physicists worked at Raytheon and Schlumburger, now they are also looking at places like Chase.

I'm curious - did you really think that some place in industry would pay you to do particle phenomenology when you graduated? If not, did it not occur to you that developing some more immediately useful skills would be a good idea?

 

[deRham]

The reason physics is funded better than, say, art history, is not because Congress is more interested in the spectrum of glopolium than the development of pre-Impressionism. It's because people who get degrees on glopolium are likely to work important projects in industry - projects that they can tax and projects that will employ others.

On what basis? Is it clear that in a majority of such cases, the pursuit of a 5+ year physics graduate degree had them contribute to more/better projects in industry than would have been the case if they never obtained the degree?

I'm sure for many people the path is worth it even if they take jobs outside physics, but even for instance twofish-quant has said that he was developing useful skills even as an undergraduate (emphasis: quite distinct from getting a physics PhD), and that it wasn't forced and came somewhat naturally.

It's perfectly possible to obtain a physics PhD with an emphasis in representation theory, geometry and topology and hardly anything employable. That's exactly what at least some people I know (note, in a physics, NOT mathematics department) seem to do. How do these cases fit into the above scheme?

 

[ParticleGrl]

I'm curious - did you really think that some place in industry would pay you to do particle phenomenology when you graduated? If not, did it not occur to you that developing some more immediately useful skills would be a good idea?

No, I assumed having a broad physics background (thermo, electrodynamics,mechanics, etc) would make me nicely trainable for calculational/numerical work in engineering/science areas, or for inter-disciplanry work in engineering. When I asked several different professors in the field what their students did when they finished their phd, these were the examples they gave me. I took them at their word.

Oddly enough, neither my advisor nor any of my collaborators answered the question with the truth- i.e. "most of my students work for banks." I didn't find out until I started to track down former students to get advice on breaking into a work field. To be fair, this seems to be largely because they didn't know- which is another reason why I am doubtful that grants are awarded based on how many phd students an advisor sends to non-scientific companies (or to scientific ones, for that matter)- do the funding agencies have better data than my advisor and his collaborators have on where their own students ended up? If this information is useful for getting money, why don't professors keep really good track of it? If funding agencies are keeping track of this information, why isn't it published somewhere?

 

[chill_factor]

the thing with industry, according to someone working there (my closest experience was lab serf) is that they want VERY SPECIFIC PEOPLE.

if you want to do optical communication (for example) in industry at anything other than lab serf level, your MS or PHD thesis had better be, in optical communication. if you want to do OLEDs and displays, your MS/PhD had better be in OLEDS or display technology.

And if you did your MS/PHD in theoretical astrophysics, then start practicing your banker face.

 

[Vanadium 50]

If funding agencies are keeping track of this information, why isn't it published somewhere?

Do you remember the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Ark is being placed in a huge warehouse of a million identical boxes? Same reason. You have information scattered across grant proposals, mail-in evaluations, panel reports, site visits, etc. Most of it is correct, but some of it is wrong, or even self-contradictory.

If your goal is to rank N proposals and not do too bad a job of it, this is fine. If you want publishable quality data, you're going to have to pay someone to sort this all out.

 

[dipole]

So it sounds like if you want to get a PhD and aren't the next Feynman, you should do it in a field that is valuable to people other than other Physicists?

Threads like this scare me.

 

[ParticleGrl]

You have information scattered across grant proposals, mail-in evaluations, panel reports, site visits, etc. Most of it is correct, but some of it is wrong, or even self-contradictory.

But that doesn't answer the fundamental question- how can they possibly have better information on where my advisor's former students are than my advisor does himself? It seems like the proposal information has to be mostly self-reported.

Also, consistently professors I interact with seem to be in touch with their students still in the field (for obvious reasons), but rarely do they know what the students who left are doing now. If this knowledge is lucractive I would assume they would at least keep a spreadsheet somewhere with what their students are doing. Is keeping track of students normal behavior, and I just had a particularly strange subset of collaborators?

 

[Pyrrhus]

ParticleGirl,

Why don't you try consulting?

Many of the big consulting groups hire PhDs (in pretty much any technical area).