
Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects - sz4kerto
http://www.nature.com/news/many-junior-scientists-need-to-take-a-hard-look-at-their-job-prospects-1.22879
======
chriskanan
The longer students stay in a PhD program, the less likely they want to be
professors. Typically many first year students say this, but the numbers
quickly drop off in later years.

When I was a PhD student, I gave a few talks and blogged about this issue. I
would present all these statistics in my talks about what they needed to do to
be competitive, and people just absolutely hated me for it. One person said
she wanted to punch me in the face. That said, she emailed me years later to
tell me that she became a professor, despite those statistics. If you have a
lot of tenacity (doing a postdoc), are willing to settle for a school that
isn't top-50, and are reasonably productive (a few papers per year) it is
doable. Every single one of my friends that graduated and still wanted to be a
professor, is one now, but it took 3-5 years of additional work. This is true
for my friends in psychology, computer science, EE, and neuroscience.

Of course, now all my other friends say, "Why the hell did you choose to be a
professor where you work 80 hours per week and make less than most
undergraduates with CS degrees, even when your area of expertise is AI?"

Lastly, I want to add that a PhD is a degree in learning how to do research
and in becoming one of the world's foremost experts on a particular topic.
There are lots of great things to do with a PhD that aren't being a professor.

~~~
disinterred
When you become a _tenured_ professor, the amount of work you do is far less
than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary. The only real
commitments are the classes you have to teach and if you minimize the amount
of teaching you do, you'll barely be working at all. I knew a history
professor that would come into the university for his 1 or 2 classes per week
and then would go home for the rest of the day(s). He made 100k+. Not to
mention that there are some professors at my university who make close to or
over 300k/year and do not teach, but they are much more rare and have fat CVs.
The other side of the coin is that before you get tenure, you may be working a
lot for very little and only when you're close to 40 (on average) will you be
granted tenure.

~~~
chriskanan
I'm going to disagree with this for science and engineering. All of my tenured
colleagues work very hard. You have to if you want to keep running a lab,
which is the main reason why people choose to become professors. If you stop
working hard, you will stop getting funding and PhD students. The department
will make you teach more and can make your life difficult if you are being a
drag on the department, even if they can't fire you.

That said, for the liberal arts, history, etc., things may be different. They
don't tend to have large labs and their goals are different. I honestly don't
know.

~~~
ptero
Things are different for those doing _theoretical_ science where the main
instruments are pen and paper. External funding is often not required at all.
This might not please the department, but the tenured professor would be just
fine.

When I did my PhD I worked in Math and CS (plus had friends in Physics with
similar observations): many professors on the theoretical side had no need for
and were not interested in getting grants. They would get some minor travel
money for conference expenses and pay themselves over summer so they would not
have to teach then, but even if they got nothing they would be just fine on a
base salary. And I am talking about reasonably well known full professors, not
some young researcher at the end of a rope (career-wise).

Things are different when you have experimental labs to run. That is when you
need external funding and have to do all that is involved in getting it
(proposals unlimited, etc.)

~~~
Ar-Curunir
You can't get students without grants. Most professors want students, because
they like doing research, and so have to apply for grants.

~~~
ptero
> You can't get students without grants.

That is definitely not true for many non-experimental science departments.
Many students are TAs and as such care not a bit about grants. When I was
getting my PhD I had to teach 4.5 hours/week (often structured as 6 and 3 at
alternating semesters), which gave me my stipend and free tuition (and was a
useful skill to polish). Maybe I spent another 4-5 hours preparing for classes
and grading (we got student graders but I seldom asked them anything as
grading was quick enough).

I was paid by the department and it did not matter to me whether my advisor
got grants or not; what mattered were research interests and his guiding of
research. This was the picture across the department; changing advisers was
quick and based on mutual interest, not financials / grants.

~~~
munin
That's a very light TA load. It's far more normal to have a 20-30 hour a week
commitment to your TA responsibilities (multiple lectures, grading a few
hundred assignments every few weeks, etc) so it's a lot harder to fit research
around that.

~~~
ptero
Are you serious? Can you share the school and department? This is an honest
question -- I always thought 4-5 lecture or classroom hours was normal. That's
what I had and that's what my friends had. Most of us never even used graders
assigned as grading duties were light and it would often be more trouble to
explain how you wanted it graded anyhow.

I have never heard of a 20 hour TA load. Again, just wondering.

~~~
munin
Every CS department I have ever heard of has a 20 hour TA load as standard.

~~~
chibg10
I was in a stats department for grad school. My assistantship load was
nominally 20 hours, but I managed to teach a course as a GI in probably ~10
hours/week (doing my own grading). It took more time commitment if it was my
first time teaching the course, and when I had to write/grade exams.

I'd imagine my experience wasn't an uncommon one.

------
simonbarker87
When deciding to do my PhD I did so under the assumption that I wouldn't work
in academia afterward. I evaluated it like a any other job offer at the time
and decided that the tax free pay, coupled with the freedom to run my project
how I wanted and work on what I wanted (within reason) for a fixed period of
time was a better offer than a grad scheme with BAE, Nissan, Seimens etc.

Doing a PhD built a large array of skills that I didn't have from my undergrad
and allowed me to learn practical skills in a fairly low risk environment and
explore other avenues. It let me realise that I wanted to start a business, it
taxed me mentally like nothing before, it prepared me to hold myself
accountable and that if I don't do the work then it doesn't get done and gave
me the breathing space to work out what I wanted to do that my undergrad
didn't.

As the article says, I don't think a PhD is only valuable for a career in
academia, it can be an excellent bridge to industry if you are prepared for
that at the end.

~~~
neel_k
This is basically the same thing I did, except that I worked as a programmer
at a startup before going back to school for a PhD.

It was better than doing a startup by a stupidly huge margin. Startups are all
about risk-minimization and risk-mitigation, since risky things mostly fail,
and so use up your runway without moving you closer to success. So in a
startup you are highly incentivized not to take big risks -- and research is
always a risk. So you are driven to take an engineering mindset, where the
apex of skill is to solve a new problem using only old, entirely proven
techniques.

In contrast, after my first project as a PhD student, my advisor straight-up
told me that I needed to shed the engineering mindset to succeed. Inventing
new techniques was the goal, and so you need to adopt a mentality of
confronting problems head on (rather than designing the system to avoid
confronting them).

Basically a PhD puts you in an environment where you can take on big, poorly-
understood and poorly-defined problems and attack them over and over again.
Going from a blank sheet of paper to a solution (or clear failure) in six
months 10 times over is an amazing way of improving your skills, and IME it's
really hard to get this experience in industry (even though it's really
valuable to have this experience in industry).

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>In contrast, after my first project as a PhD student, my advisor straight-up
told me that I needed to shed the engineering mindset to succeed. Inventing
new techniques was the goal, and so you need to adopt a mentality of
confronting problems head on (rather than designing the system to avoid
confronting them).

That sounds heavenly.

~~~
spaceseaman
If you have the mindset for this type of work, then a PhD is an amazing
experience. There are only a select few places that give you that much
freedom.

If you don't have this mindset, a PhD will make you very angry, and you'll
feel like you've wasted several years of your life.

------
yannis7
Academia nowadays is a high-tech bureaucracy; you are forced to churn out
documents (papers) that need to cite other documents, and you're evaluated
based on your position in the inter-document citation network.

Then you have to write other documents (grant proposals) to grab money to
write more documents (papers) by gaming the inner mechanics of some comittee.

If partner-track investment bankers are overworked, depressed sociopaths with
Lamborghinis, then tenure-track postdocs are investment bankers with crappy
bicycles.

Needless to say, I left academia 3 years ago and never looked back.

~~~
loarake
-Working for a big tech company: you're writing code to deliver more ads to more people so the company can grow and deliver even more ads to even more people

-Being a truck driver: you're moving boxes around

-Being a professional hockey player: you and your team are moving really fast with a disk shaped object trying to put it in a net while people try to prevent you from doing it

-Being a stock trader: making money by spending your whole life reading company reports and hoping you're right about whether they're doing well or not

-Being a quant: using your hard earned computer science skills to move money around and turn a profit instead of helping humanity

Almost every human endeavor can be trivialized if you choose to only see one
side of it.

~~~
Robotbeat
Baker/cook: you're making food for people, either to nourish them or give them
joy.

Farmer: you're making food for people.

Construction worker: you're making buildings for people to live or work or
play in.

I think the problem is that many of our jobs are crappy, not that almost every
human endeavor is equivalent to pushing paper around. Nurses, doctors, etc,
are doing important work as well. The bad part is when it's 90% paper (common
in healthcare in the US).

Find you a tech company that is actually building something physical, not just
selling ads.

~~~
emodendroket
Curiously none of the jobs you mentioned are well paid (well, I guess it
depends on who you mean to include, since owning a farm or being Mario Batali
probably isn't bad). But besides that I think we could do the same thing,
really. A cynic could say a farmer just grows surplus corn to collect
subsidies on ethanol.

~~~
Robotbeat
Most farmers don't grow ethanol. And ethanol is a fuel, it isn't just paper,
regardless of the subsidies.

As far as being well-paid: farmers are fairly well-paid. They have to work
hard and use a LOT of what you might call automation (combine harvesters and
the like).

But to your point: I sometimes am persuaded by the conjecture that we
developed BS paper-pushing jobs for people since we've automated away farming,
much of manufacturing, etc. Office Space comes to mind, too.

~~~
emodendroket
Well, a lot of people work on a farm who are not by any stretch of the
imagination rich, and someone operating a large factory farm is probably not
the image that comes to mind when you think "farmer," is what I meant to say.

As for the ethanol, it's a fuel, but without the subsidies and legal mandates
would there be a good reason to use it? I'd always heard it's not really
efficient and the environmental impact is negligible-to-negative, even though
on the surface being renewable is good.

~~~
Robotbeat
Ethanol mandates really kicked off in the W administration. I think it's worth
remembering that at the time, the primary motivation was probably more
geopolitical than climate: ethanol is domestically produced, as are many of
the energy inputs (such as electricity and natural gas). The US now produces a
non-trivial amount of ethanol, enough that if it were removed from the market,
we'd probably import significantly more foreign oil.

But I digress.

------
asafira
Hey, so I'm a PhD student (in Physics) at Harvard that has been looking into
these issues (as graduate council president in the department), and I really
don't like the bickering that occurs between (roughly speaking) die-hard
academia pursuers and the others that feel there is a lack in support for non-
academic jobs. Here are by far the most compelling issues that I think need to
be fixed that both sides should be able to agree on:

1) Professors really, really need to be open to talking to their students
about what they want in their career and what's sort of career path they are
considering. Not having this discussion is prevalent but honestly somewhat
outrageous.

2) Internships really should become more widely accepted within greater
academia (i.e., outside CS). There are a huge number of great arguments for
them, including

a) Exposure. There are a huge number of PhD candidates that have actually
never had a job, or even just have never been exposed to what their greatest-
interest career is post graduate school.

b) Their length is a drop in the bucket compared to the total length of a PhD.
(3 months vs 5.5 years average in my Dept)

c) professors worry their graduate students will become less interested in
research after an internship. My thought: great! I am super happy that person
found something that makes them happier.

The biggest argument against internships has always been something like
'professors can't just be super flexible with their students, they have their
own constraints (grants, etc.)' I'm not proposing that professors go through
crazy great lengths to make sure their student can get an internship. I simply
think that should become an accepted part of the culture and be an ok thing to
discuss with your adviser. Right now, students are literally scared at the
reprocussions of even bringing it up.

Disclaimer: I interned at Waymo last summer.

~~~
JepZ
Well, I think there is a common misconception among academics: They think that
theory must be pure and that people who work tend to muddle the theory.

What they seem to ignore is that theory is an abstraction within the human
mind and that the real thing is something practical.

So in my opinion the academic path should be accompanied by a real/practical
job (within the field of study). Apart from supporting the student with a
salary it would bring alternative career paths much earlier to the table.

~~~
asafira
One issue here is that there aren't always real/practical jobs within the
field of study, though. Furthermore, I would claim that people who do
experiments often are ones that are doing "real things"

------
jartelt
During my PhD studies, most students I talked to were aware of the lack of
professorships available. The issue, however, was that certain
departments/professors really frowned upon PhD students exploring jobs in
industry (some departments were great though). I was in engineering and the
professors were generally helpful with trying to connect you to people they
knew in industry. Departments like Psychology were the opposite though. Some
students would search for industry jobs without telling their advisor because
they feared they would be ignored and not supported throughout the rest of
their PhD if they said they were going into industry. Some of the tenured
professors only cared about increasing the number of academics who studied in
their lab. They didn't care much about whether the students were happy or were
following their interests.

~~~
eegilbert
I agree with most of this. However, I might take issue with the motivation you
ascribe to professors: "only car[ing] about increasing the number of academics
who studied in their lab." Another explanation, one that I find myself feeling
sometimes, is simply mismatched incentives. Practicing academics and students
headed to industry simply have different incentives, and that can add friction
to the relationship.

I think it would be helpful and useful for departments to consider other ways
to facilitate industry pathways that don't so heavily rely on the advisor.

~~~
throwawayjava
_> is simply mismatched incentives_

For me, this is kind of tautologically impossible -- the adviser's primary
objective should be the success of his/her students.

I understand that makes me pretty wide-eyed and most people/places don't work
like that, but I'm talking about shoulds.

------
fergie
Its a bit unfair for professional football to be portrayed as an unreasonable
aspiration pursued by naive working class kids.

In actual fact the UK currently has around 4000 professional footballers, many
of whom will play for a couple of years before moving on, and some of whom
will play for a couple of decades.

The UK currently has 14,000 professors the vast majority of whom will fight
tooth and claw to hang on to those positions for a lifetime.

So there are more professors than footballers at any one time, but due to
football's higher turnover, and shorter tenure, many more people will be a
footballer than a professor over the course of their career.

The bottom line is that professional football is actually a relatively
attainable goal for young British men, and should probably be more encouraged
as a realistic career option.

...and when you do put in your application to Oxford, Cambridge, Google, or
Facebook, your long-gone 3 year stint as a utility midfielder at Dundee United
is only going to make it more interesting.

~~~
ced
True, but there's probably 10 times more young men who would like to be
professional footballers than professors.

~~~
kerbalspacepro
But both are probably strongly determined by genetics, so the size of the
people that "want" something probably isn't entirely relevant. It's the people
that have the natural talent under the people that can do the work.

------
henrik_w
I have an M.Sc. in computer science, and worked as a SW developer for 5 years
before going back to do a Ph.D. I stayed with it for one year, but decided it
wasn't for me. I really liked the idea of learning more, but realized working
in industry was even better for me.

I found that a lot of Ph.D. projects are driven by what you can write papers
on, not necessarily what somebody somewhere really needs. Also, you can learn
without being at a university.

More here: [https://henrikwarne.com/2016/03/07/ph-d-or-professional-
prog...](https://henrikwarne.com/2016/03/07/ph-d-or-professional-programmer/)

------
hobofan
> Permanent jobs in academia are scarce, and someone needs to let PhD students
> know.

If you are studying on a PhD level and have not figured that out already,
that's kinda on you.

~~~
mattkrause
Someone posts this glib comment every time academic careers are discussed.
It's true, and yet harder than you'd think.

Suppose you know that only 1 in 10 PhDs in your field end up in a tenure track
job. A decent fraction of your classmates are interested in industry--or never
want to see the inside of a lab again. Maybe this reduces the competition down
to one in six or seven. You're in a pretty good program, definitely in the top
15 percent of the field. It's certainly not that easy, but...you're not
obviously worse than most of your classmates, you work on a hot topic and you
work hard. What are your chances?

Very few grad students get any kind of personalized career advice or
discussion of their prospects. They should obviously think about this, but
more senior scientists also have a responsibility to provide mentorship and
frank assesments.

~~~
hobofan
The average age of a PhD student is 33 years and even at normal speed, no
breaks/hurdles and starting right out of high-school, you are 25(?). Something
about applying this babysitting attitude of "somebody needs to tell them" to
highly educated individuals of that age just doesn't sit right with me.

If I were a PhD supervisor, I would probably find it ridiculous that one of my
responsibilities would be "pointing people to the universities careers
service". I'm also not sure why you would expect a supervisor to be able to
give good career advice when some of them have only ever experienced academia
themselves.

~~~
hycaria
That's higher than I thought, but I guess that's US numbers. Are they starting
it way later (and if so what are they doing in between) ? Or is it simply a
long time spent in PhD ?

~~~
jogundas
Europe Physics adds up as follows: finish school at 18 + 4 BSc + 2 MSc + 4 PhD
= 28

------
dotdi
Sad but true.

I once had dreams of a career in academia and research. I'm a molecular
biologist turned computer scientist turned software engineer in industry. I
now have a very good salary, interesting challenges, plenty of work-life
balance and good prospects for the future, and that's pretty much directly out
of university.

In my opinion, I would have to give up on all of the aforementioned benefits
(sans interesting challenges) for at least the next 10 years if I wanted to
stay in academia, and on top of that, add the nice non-zero chance of just
getting stuck and be forced out of the academic "track".

All my advisors told me it's a pretty bad time to go into academia, and I
doubt it will get better, sadly, I might add.

------
wiz21c
What about starting a PhD at 45 ? I mean, just for the fun of being a student
again, the fun of working on your own little project . Does it open
possibilities, in the sense of a career reboot ? (I'm totally OK with earning
much less money than I do right now)

~~~
yannis7
it will definitely be fun, both being a student + working on your own project.

From my experience, for some reason PhD advisors tend to work well/really like
mature students. No hard data on this, just an empirical observation across
3-4 labs I've worked in before I left academia.

With regards to career prospects (outside academia ofc), you definitely gain
respect but anything more than that largely depends on your area of research.
Which one is it, if I may ask?

~~~
wiz21c
I'm looking at anything involving computational geometry; and if I have spare
time, ethics :-)

~~~
bpicolo
Have you considered bootstrapping the field of computation ethics ;)

~~~
wiz21c
I guess it already exists a bit (Asimov's laws or robotics ?) but I'm afraid
no one is interested.

------
Animats
The growth area seems to be academic administration. As I pointed out
previously, Stanford is building a new "campus" in Redwood City.[1] It's all
administrators. 2700 of them. More administrators than Stanford has faculty.
"School of Medicine administration; Stanford Libraries and University
Archives; the major administrative units of Business Affairs; Land, Buildings
and Real Estate; University Human Resources; Residential & Dining Enterprises;
and the Office of Development" will move there. This is in addition to all the
administrators and staff back on the main campus.

Don't become a doctor - become a Medical Administrator! It pays better.

[1] [https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/](https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/)

~~~
Cacti
Wow... 16,000 students, 2,100 faculty, and 12,100 admin.

If you need evidence that we're in a college/university bubble, that's a
pretty good indicator.

------
gravelc
I always tell students in my field (molecular biology) to at the very least
learn to code at a reasonable level and pick up some data science skills.
Something transferable.

At any given time in my department, there'd be five times the amount of post-
grad students to full-time staff. Maybe more. It has to be obvious that there
likely isn't a job at any level at the end of it. Not just high-flying jobs on
the path to professorship, but even low skill technical stuff.

As in other fields, women are at a significant disadvantage if they want to
have kids (presuming they've made it though the initial cull). The key time
for scoring a good number of first author papers in the very best journals is
late 20s and early 30s in their post-doc positions. Given every higher
position is so competitive, they simple lose out due to the time taken off.
Makes me quite to sad to see very very talented scientist friends passed over
for this reason.

~~~
tome
> The key time for scoring a good number of first author papers in the very
> best journals is late 20s and early 30s in their post-doc positions.

I think it's really a black mark on the system that it should be OK for
researchers to still not have a permanent position in their early 30s ten
years after completing their undergraduate degree.

~~~
s0rce
But understandable considering the incentives. Grad students and postdocs cost
so little but accomplish so much, the whole system relies on them. Just need
to keep selling them the promise of opportunity. Unless something changes I
can't see this getting better anytime soon. The cult aspect of many top PIs
strongly condemning people leaving or considering non-academic positions also
doesn't help.

------
VLM
The "STEM shortage" phrase means pay is too high for the very few STEM jobs;
it means a shortage of income equality, not a shortage of warm bodies. There
are obviously far too many warm bodies in STEM fields.

There is also a peculiar birth-death problem in academia where over the
lifetime career of a professor, that prof should birth exactly one new
qualified student to replace that prof. Otherwise we're dealing with a pyramid
scheme. And one of the metrics of "success" of profs is how many qualified
grad students they're birthing to provide short term cheap labor and long term
hyper over supply of qualified candidates to be profs. We're merely seeing the
breakdown of a pyramid scheme. One way to fix it is ban grad student labor.
The undergrads, most of whom are going in to industry anyway, can be the lab
rats. Or the prof can hire more postdocs.

~~~
jessriedel
Why would we design a system where only eventual professors have PhDs?

~~~
s0rce
Maybe not 100% but what fraction of PhDs are professors, maybe 3-5% at most,
what about fraction of MDs working as medical doctors, I'm guessing its much
much higher (with higher wages) since they limit enrollment in school and
residencies (they don't rely on cheap grad student/post-doc labor).

~~~
jessriedel
Why would we think these fractions should be closely related?

And attending surgeons _definitely_ rely on cheap resident labor.

------
amenod
Is that really news? Obligatory joke:

Taxi driver to passenger: "Well, someone looks happy today!"

Passenger: "I just got my PhD! :)"

Taxi driver wistfully: "Yeah, I remember the day when I got mine..."

~~~
laxatives
A professor of mathematics noticed that his kitchen sink at his home leaked.
He called a plumber. The plumber came the next day and sealed a few screws,
and everything was working as before.

The professor was delighted. However, when the plumber gave him the bill a
minute later, he was shocked.

"This is one-third of my monthly salary!" he yelled.

Well, all the same he paid it and then the plumber said to him, "I understand
your position as a professor. Why don't you come to our company and apply for
a plumber position? You will earn three times as much as a professor. But
remember, when you apply, tell them that you completed only seven elementary
classes. They don't like educated people."

So it happened. The professor got a job as a plumber and his life
significantly improved. He just had to seal a screw or two occasionally, and
his salary went up significantly.

One day, the board of the plumbing company decided that every plumber had to
go to evening classes to complete the eighth grade. So, our professor had to
go there too. It just happened that the first class was math. The evening
teacher, to check students' knowledge, asked for a formula for the area of a
circle. The person asked was the professor. He jumped to the board, and then
he realized that he had forgotten the formula. He started to reason it, and he
filled the white board with integrals, differentials, and other advanced
formulas to conclude the result he forgot. As a result, he got "minus pi times
r square."

He didn't like the minus, so he started all over again. He got the minus
again. No matter how many times he tried, he always got a minus. He was
frustrated. He gave the class a frightened look and saw all the plumbers
whisper: "Switch the limits of the integral!!"

------
harry8
Data so absent that they have to draw an analogy to a different data set
without any supporting evidence that such is valid. This is Nature not the
daily Mail.

What is the statistic? How many PhD students have jobs in Academia 5 Years
after being awarded? Surely they have /something/ that might be indicative
they can publish that's better than footballers? Surely..?

~~~
aqsalose
Article cites one hard number:

>Global figures are hard to come by, but only three or four in every hundred
PhD students in the United Kingdom will land a permanent staff position at a
university. It’s only a little better in the United States.

~~~
harry8
But I claim that number is really pi (or tau/2 if you must). Will you take
theirs one rather than mine as an argument from authority? This is Nature, not
the damn daily mail. Digital extraction required![1]

    
    
      [1] Vernacular expression "Pull your finger out!" Meaning to stop being lazy.[2]
      [2] Jokes you have to explain, suck.[2]
      [3] People who put footnotes on their jokes are terrible human beings.[4]
      [4] There is no [4][5]
      [5] citation needed

------
rdlecler1
University has become a bit of a Ponzi scheme. I’d love to see PhD programs
drop to 3-4 years from 5-7. Especially in programs like biosciences where
there are limited job prospects. Universities sell a romantic idealism knowing
the likely outcome. Most students are too young or captivated to really do
their due diligence. There should be labels on a PhD like the anti-smoking
labels on cigarettes.

------
jxramos
I feel for the students facing this reality, but I think this comment in the
article can lead to dead-ends.

"""Our survey, for example, shows that one-third of respondents do not have
useful conversations about careers with their PhD supervisors."""

I remember speaking once with a few professors about what their work was like
in industry. I was caught off guard when I was told they never worked in
industry and had their whole careers in academia. Silly assumption on my part
of course, but it was jarring nonetheless to be told so much point blank. It
really put into perspective for me the angle at which advice was coming from.

------
geebee
Overall, this is overwhelmingly true, to the point that I feel slightly
embarrassed to want to discuss edge cases. But here we go. We already know
that prospects for humanities and social science PhDs are extremely grim[1].
However, economics might not be so bad[2].

Prospects for science are better, but we need to distinguish between fields.
Computer Science PhDs encounter a completely different market from Biology
PhDs. In a field like Biology, there is probably great variance even between
sub fields.

There was one more great link I wanted to share, but I can't remember were it
is or find it. It ranked graduate degrees by degree and university (i.e., MBA
from Stanford, JD from Harvard, etc). You don't see any PhD or MS degrees on
there until around spot #30, which was a PhD from MIT. Unfortunately, that's
not granular enough - a "PhD" from MIT makes about as much sense as a
"Masters" that includes the MBA degree. You can figure that since it's MIT,
the PhD degrees lean toward the technical, but I'd really need to see PhD in
CS to make the comparison. If this data were available, I'd guess that some
PhDs from elite universities are actually very well paid on the level of elite
JD or MBA programs. Even then, PhDs have vastly higher attrition rates and
longer and less certain completion times[3]

[1] "Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go"
[http://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-
the/4484...](http://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846)

[2] "If you get a PhD, make it an economics PhD"
[http://theweek.com/articles/452770/phd-make-economics-
phd](http://theweek.com/articles/452770/phd-make-economics-phd)

[3] Attrition rates often shock people who don't know. The attrition rate at
an elite law, medical, or business school is typically well below one percent.
At elite PhD programs, they can reach or exceed 50%. It's not an exaggeration
to say that attrition rates at elite PhD programs can be 100 times higher than
a 2 year MBA or 3 year JD program at the same university.

------
pks016
I am currently pursuing MS in Biological Sciences on animal behavior. I want
to do Phd then Post-doc and then continue in the science field. But I am not
very talented. Most probably I may get stuck after Phd or Post doc.

I don't want job. But looking into these kinds of articles now and then, make
me think "what are the alternatives ?" What about the people who do basic
science like in theoretical physics or pure maths?

~~~
thicknavyrain
I’m doing a PhD in Theoretical Physics, I hedge the uncertainty of academia by
finding small opportunities in other fields to do work in. Internships in
science communication, teaching at the university, part time work for a tech
start up. On their own, none of them are a safety net for jumping out of
academia if you have to, but if you accumulate enough experience over the
years, the hope is that transitioning to industry goes a bit smoother. There’s
also a few fellowship/transitional schemes opening up for PhDs in esoteric
fields to go into things like Data Science/Software Development. I think you
just have to keep a level head and pursue things while it seems reasonable and
always keep in mind the dream can pop at any moment and you may have to move
around and go into something else.

~~~
pks016
Yeah. That's a good piece of advice. I usually spend time on data analysis,
learning computer security, web designing or any tech related stuff but as
hobby only. I know basic of these things but not a "pro" in one field. I guess
better to keep learning new things, any time opportunities might pop up as you
have said.

------
maruhan2
I feel there could exist "academic industries." There should surely be a way
to do similar research for industries. With proper infrastructure I feel like
companies can own and sell research materials, allowing them to hire academic
researchers to do academic research related to the companies field. In fact,
with even better infrastructure, an individual could own and sell research
materials

------
kensai
The hard truth. I wonder if a new scheme of collaborative research (to share
costs) out of academia can possibly pop out. But this is hardly possible given
the high costs of equipment and consumables, especially in the natural and
technical sciences.

Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant
scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the
"garage" of the day).

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant
> scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the
> "garage" of the day)_

Source? (Genuinely curious.)

~~~
Aperson4321
It is assumed due to the higher knowlege and specialisation level that the
world has these days, but such moments of change does not come along very
often, and people have always been confident about how there is no way their
understanding of the world might be severly lacking in some way. So it might
just be that all is as it always has been you just have to look at it using a
large enough time frame.

------
justinzollars
This is true, I earned my MS in Biology in 2009 (a rough year to graduate). I
was able to land a position as a laboratory manager but ended up teaching
myself Ruby to solve a few problems on the job.

I've ended up in Silicon Valley in software engineering and I'm quite happy
but wish I would have considered job prospects in my field of study a little
harder before committing so much time and effort. I might have ended up in a
CS program and would have been better suited to succeed earlier.

Biology is definitely interesting and I learned how to think scientifically,
and "how to think" about problems. So that component was rewarding.

------
eighthnate
This is an academic industry wide problem, not just for junior scientists.
When tenured professors stay on their job for 40 or 50 years and new
universities/positions aren't created each year for newly minded PhDs, it's
going to create a pyramid like structure in academia with the comfortable
professors at the top and legions of phds on the bottom struggling to get to
the top.

Ask philosophy, history and even economics PhDs. The research/academic/etc
opportunities simply aren't there because it is structurally impossible. And
as time goes on, it's only going to get worse and worse.

------
CodeSheikh
What about creating more private research centers? Where the benefits are not
tied to individual company profits or have them hoping for patents stash.
OpenAI is an example of one of such initiatives. Similar centers can be spun
off more often. Does CERN have satellite labs across the world? Sure
committing to funding can be a problem for private entities
(companies/families/individual billionaires). Perhaps govt should these
entities tax breaks for funding such centers.

------
neebz
They can always move to Pakistan.

Phds from abroad is one of the most well-paid positions here thanks to the
recent influx of numerous private business-minded universities opening up in
every city.

~~~
rohit2412
Interesting. Its different in India, where it's not the salary but the
prestige that drives people to become professors. Even the research
opportunities are limited, and industry pays much more.

------
analog31
I've shared this anecdote before: When I was a grad student in the late 80s,
we learned about the oversupply of PhD's compared to the number of available
faculty jobs. In fact I remember it as a topic on discussion boards in my
earliest experiences with the Internet.

I told my dad about it. He got his PhD in the 50s. His reply was: "Oh yeah,
that was common knowledge when we got our degrees too."

He enjoyed a long career in industry, as have I, so far.

------
ak_yo
This problem has been a structural feature of the academic profession for a
long time -- Max Weber famously wrote about it almost 100 years ago:
[http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-
content/uploads/2011/12/Weber...](http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-
content/uploads/2011/12/Weber-Science-as-a-Vocation.pdf)

------
burnerOh2125
Yea, i went into a phd program in biomedical sciences, spent 2 1/2 years doing
computational biology, studying math, computer science and machine learning,
not to mention working on project, then left. It was at the point where the
prospect of out competing 7/8 of my fellow phd students was not work it, when
all of my skills, where transferable to industry, even without staying for the
phd. Part of me wishes I did stay, and I'll probably go back for a masters at
some point. who knows. Anyway, the system really is designed to get phd
students to do the heavy lifting, at 30k a year, for 6 year stretches. Why
would I do that, when I have dropped out, and tripled my salary?

------
yread
Interestingly, I've heard recently from two different sources (both in
biomedical sciences) that there is a shortage of professors in Germany. As in
foundations or national initiatives having funding for them but there aren't
enough candidates

------
diogenescynic
I know someone who has a PhD in a specific field. They lost their job three
years ago and have not been hired since. I can’t even imagine what going to
school for that long then being underpaid and discarded must feel like.

------
znoop333
Adding insult to injury, you might have to take the PhD off your resume to get
a job in industry! I found that outside the biggest companies, HR departments
routinely throw out any overqualified resumes.

------
j7ake
How are these odds compared to other similar ventures full of uncertainty,
such as start ups ? And if the odds are comparable then why is our culture
viewing start ups positively but PhD negatively ?

~~~
tome
Because when you "win" at a PhD you (eventually) get tenure, which these days
mean lifetime position of high stress and low salary.

------
l5870uoo9y
Doing a PhD thesis these days doesn't necessarily makes you cut out to be a
scientist. One can speculate if job prospects differs across disciplines.

~~~
dnautics
Just because one is a good scientist doesn't necessarily mean one is cut out
to be a professional scientist.

~~~
l5870uoo9y
I would argue the opposite is more plausible; if one is a good plumber, one is
likely also a good professional plumber. I would like to see if this trend is
cross disciplinary or say it is mainly within say social sciences or
humanities. Personally, I have meet many university students and PhDs whose
intellect at best was ordinary.

~~~
dnautics
What I meant was that the skill set to become a successful professor
(grantsmanship, political wheeling and dealing) is antithetical to being a
good scientist.

------
lbeltrame
A question: how it is for people doing research but not in traditional
academic settings (e.g. no profit foundations)? As far as I understand, you're
tied to grants anyway to get money, but there's no clear concept of "tenure":
I work in such a place, but it's outside the US, so I was wondering about what
happens there.

------
chiefalchemist
Science like everything else is driven by money and "success." Mind you, the
Scientific Method is a wonderful ideal. However, it is implemented by humans.
Humans that more often than not have been struggling. Humans under stress do
irrational things.

------
projectramo
Are there junior scientists who don't know how dim the prospects are for an
academic position are?

I've been hearing this for two decades. Seems like the sort of thing that any
mildly educated person would be aware of, let alone smart people in the field.

~~~
s0rce
As others have mentioned this obviously isn't a secret but the environment at
top schools is very cult-like especially in certain labs and pursuing non-
academic tracks is looked down upon. The problem arises when you are
objectively more accomplished scientifically than your peers and you think you
might have a chance and realize that it will take 2 postdocs, 10-15 years and
more politics than science to get a tenure track job these days.

------
nmca
I'd be interested to see how the institution at which you studied effects the
probability of a successful career. If you're a masters student at a top uni,
do the numbers change significantly?

------
akyu
As someone in the process of applying to PhD programs right now, these
comments are quite disheartening... scary even.

------
somethingabout
I thought there weren't enough people with STEM degrees?

------
DrNuke
In 2017 the research path in computer-heavy subjects is not academy-bound
anymore. There may be early problems in getting credit within the learned
circles, but a couple of good papers and one good presentation at a good
conference under your own ltd umbrella solve this for good.

~~~
hyperpallium
Do you mean just publish on your own account, not under the auspices of an
institution (aka "academy")?

Is "ltd umbrella" your own "pty ltd" company - instead of an institution? Or
you mean, just within your own specialised field?

