Hyperopia in academics?

Last week, the cheery state of being a post-doc was made even cheerier with the release of a new publication on the state of post-doc-hood. Others have not met this news with as bright of an outlook (here and here).
Here's a choice of two good songs to set the mood as we dive in -

Some of the most exciting tidbits from the report include:

• Postdoctoral appointments for a given researcher should total no more than 5 years (barring extraordinary circumstances)

• They suggest the cumulative term should be five years, meaning not stringing together multiple post-docs of at least 2-3 years.

• The title of ‘postdoctoral researcher’ should be applied only to those people who are receiving advanced training in research

• After 5 years, post-docs should either start a permanent position externally or be promoted internally to a staff position with a different and appropriate designation and salary.

• The postdoctoral position should not be viewed by graduate students or principal investigators as the default step after the completion of doctoral training (postdoctoral positions are intended only for those seeking advanced research training)

• Beginning at the first year of graduate school, graduate students should be made aware of the wide variety of career paths available for Ph.D. recipients

• The NIH should raise the NRSA postdoctoral starting salary to $50,000 (2014 dollars) - currently salary starts at $39,264 increasing to $54,180 (after 7 years of experience)

• Adjusted annually for inflation (currently 1.3% in the US)

• Appropriately higher where regional cost of living, disciplinary norms, and institutional or sector salary scales dictate higher salaries

• Benefits should be appropriate for level of experience and commensurate with benefits given to equivalent full-time employees including health insurance, family and parental leave, and access to a retirement plan

• Host institutions and funding agencies should take responsibility for ensuring the quality of mentoring through evaluation of, and training programs for, the mentors and postdoctoral researchers should be encouraged to seek advice from multiple advisors

• Just as graduate students are counted and tracked, postdoctoral fellows should be counted and tracked. Additionally the NSF should serve as the primary curator for establishing and updating a database system that tracks postdoctoral researchers, including non-academic and foreign-trained postdoctoral researcher

In order to achieve these suggestions, the overall conclusion of the report appears to be that we need to reduce the number of post-docs. In particular, it appears that the authors suggest overhauling graduate training so that PhD students begin training for non-research careers in graduate school and only PhD students who want to run their own R1 lab should pursue post-doctoral training. These changes would then change the post-doctoral experience so that is no longer a (supposed) broad training for a wide range of careers and no longer a period of soul-crushing disillusionment of the research experience where training scientists decide to (or are forced to) pursue other career options. By reducing the number of post-docs, the remaining future R1 PIs could receive higher salaries during their training. Another reason to reduce post-doc positions, besides paying them more, is that there are not enough jobs that they are training for:

"New faculty posts have not kept pace with the number of postdoctoral scientists in training, so there are, at least in some fields, far more postdocs than available research jobs"

That quote was quite interesting to me, so I decided to take a look at the current state of hiring in my own field. I found job postings for psychology faculty positions at one of, if not the most comprehensive wiki of aggregated tenure-track openings in psychology. Before diving in, I realize that it may not list every job available since it is focused on jobs in the US primarily, Canada secondarily and then elsewhere.

A total of 657 positions posted across the different areas of psychology.



657 positions sounds like a lot of jobs, for just one year of hiring, but let's dig into those numbers a bit. These 657 jobs represent all areas of psychology, from across the US, Canada and other international locations. A given scholars background will likely limit them to less than half of these positions (unless they have a clinical degree and studied social neuroscience from a developmental perspective in which case they may be able to apply for 70% of positions). After limiting yourself to the positions in your area of psychology, you must now limit yourself to the ones you are actually qualified for. The positions on the wiki include all types of colleges and universities from primarily undergraduate and teaching focused schools to R1, research focused schools. Without teaching and mentoring experience (or a desire to teach), you're ruled out from the teaching schools, while without independent funding and multiple high profile first author papers, you're ruled out from the research schools. After you've found your area of psychology and your niche of school type, in order to apply to all of the remaining positions, you must be willing to move anywhere. If you'd like to have some choice in where you live, you may find yourself with few options. Let's look at an example. If you are interested in teaching at a liberal arts college in Minnesota, Wisconsin or Iowa and have a background in cognitive neuroscience, there are 7 jobs you can apply or approximately 1% of the available jobs. If you want to be more selective and only want to live in Minneapolis/St. Paul, there are 2 jobs available.

Now let's think about the competition for that job. According to a recent survey by the APA, 9564 PhDs were awarded in the US in psychology (in 2009/2010) which is about 14.5 PhD graduates per open position this year. However, another report states that approximately 47% of psychology PhD graduates go on to complete post-doctoral training. If we take the 5-year max for post-docs suggested by the report about, that means we have a total post-doctorally trained pool of psychology PhDs of about 22,475, who together with the recent grads would make up 42 times (talk about "hyper-competition") the number of open positions.  This is not to say someone has a 2.4% chance at attaining a tenure track job as the estimated chance is way higher (like 3 - 5 times higher).

Another interesting report on the issue comes from post-docs themselves who organized a conference in Boston back in October, called the Future of Research Symposium. The report is an amazing read with a ton of fascinating links to other research studies and on-line discussions about the state of science, the academy and research.

The broad conclusions of the report are similar to the previous report:

1. We recommend increased connectivity among junior scientists and other stakeholders to promote discussions on reforming the structure of the scientific enterprise.  

2. We advocate for increased transparency. This includes the number and career outcomes of trainees, as well as the expectations of the balance between employment and training in individual postdoctoral appointments.  

3. We call for an increased investment in junior scientists, with increased numbers of grants that provide financial independence from Principal Investigator (PI) research grants, and increased accountability for the quality of training as a requirement of funding approval.

But before we view these conclusions as unrealistic, one of my favorite quotes on this topic came from a Boston Globe article, where Professor emeritus Henry Bourne says of the recommendations from these reports:

“I suspect that many scientific leaders and some institutions will applaud this document but promptly work to negate its rules. And they will succeed in doing so, with ridiculous ease. The reason is simple: It is clearly not in the interest of established investigators or their institutions to pay postdocs more and give them good jobs after their so-called ‘training,’ ” 

Or represented graphically: 

Jorge Cham - PhDcomics

After reading through the issues raised here and through the links, one may think academia is acting shortsightedly, or myopically, but in reading through everything, oddly enough, its the ones who are in it for the long haul who make it to the position to be myopic. The people who made it, are the ones who trundled and worked and grinded through 4 years of undergrad, 2 years of masters, 4 years of PhD, 5-7 years of post-doctoral training, and 6 years of probationary untenured work finally achieve job security at the young age of 39-41 years old (about half of the average American life expectancy) and reach the top of the pyramid.

Edit: 1/16/2015 Brian Kurilla from GeekPsychologist recently reported slightly more optimistic chances for obtaining employment after graduation.