
How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang - kens
http://alexandreafonso.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/how-academia-resembles-a-drug-gang/
======
chasing
Sweet inflammatory title, dude!

People really want those tenure spots at prestigious universities. Or those
starting slots on NBA teams. Or CEO roles at exploding tech companies. Or the
starring role in the summer blockbuster. Or that #1 slot on the NYTimes best-
seller list. And such.

There will always be plum jobs out there that people are willing to compete
and even suffer to get. And in situations where there's a ton of demand and
not much supply. Well. Things get really unbalanced in favor of the supplier.
I'm not sure what targeting academia in particular proves except that, yes, it
also happens there. It's yet another situation in life where if you really,
really want one of these jobs then you need to learn to realistically assess
yourself, the market, and what paths you have to get where you want to go. If
there's no clear path to the position you want, you either need to switch
gears or prepare for some serious struggle that might never bear fruit.
Thoughtfulness and being realistic with oneself are key to staying out of
exploitative situations. That's the thing to avoid.

The average person with a college degree has options the drug dealer in
Levitt's example probably doesn't have. As do your average Hacker News
readers, I'm sure.

Also: I'm an adjunct professor at two universities. But it's a great side-gig
and not at all a core part of my income, which makes it _great_ , to be
honest. There's a lot of university-related stuff I don't have any interest
in. But being an adjunct means I've got real-world experiences that are
completely fresh that I can use in the classroom. It's the kind of information
that a full-time professor would have a difficult time keeping on top of, I
would think.

------
unabridged
Drug lord was chosen so they could plaster Breaking Bad pictures and get
links, but it resembles any other tournament-like profession. Its like being a
musician or actor, unlimited money at the very top for the few who make it and
extremely large number of people at the bottom trying to make it just scraping
by.

~~~
lsc
the interesting bit about academia, though, is that the "wealth" you
accumulate at the top isn't money; it's prestige. To the best of my knowledge,
if you are president of a good uni, you are looking at like half a mil a year.
Undoubtedly good money, but hardly "rockstar level"

In fact, I'd argue that business management is closer to a "tournament-like
profession" \- guys on the bottom of the management scale make nothing
compared to even a mediocre Engineer, and get no respect. Folks a the top of
that scale laugh at your puny half a million a year.

(Note, I wouldn't call business management a tournament-like profession...
just that the difference between the bottom and the top is larger, I think,
than it is in academia.)

The other problem here is that okay, you get your PhD in hope of getting a
teaching gig. sure, okay, let's accept that. If you join a gang as a foot-
solder, you do it to get to the top. Let's accept that, too, for this
discussion.

The problem is that if you are a failed gangster, your /best case/ is to end
up nearly unemployable and living with your mom.

If you are a "failed" PhD? which is to say, you get your PhD and you fail to
get a teaching gig? There are all sorts of other jobs who would love to have
you. Yeah, you might not get paid all that much more than others who stopped
with a bachelor degree, but more than half the time, that's more money (even
if it's not more stability) than a professor can expect to make.

Really, I think teaching higher education is a 'prestige job' more than a
'tournament job'

~~~
graycat
> you get your PhD and you fail to get a teaching gig? There are all sorts of
> other jobs who would love to have you.

You've actually tried that? Even in a STEM field? So you are speaking from
first hand knowledge?

There is some evidence that outside academics or industrial 'research' really
aimed at just publicity or 'luster', a Ph.D. will do somewhat less for a
resume than a good felony conviction. Why? Because people without a Ph.D.,
that is, nearly everyone else, just does not want a Ph.D. around. The people
without a Ph.D. commonly make lots of excuses, e.g., a Ph.D. is too bright to
be successful in business, cares only about far out pure theory, hates
anything practical, is no good at anything practical, always wants to go for
big risk, low payoff blue sky stuff, just want to publish papers and make it
back into academics, won't work on our practical problems, won't be happy
here, etc. There is also the "failed" term; who wants to hire a 'failure'?

In an organization, a lone Ph.D. is in a very poor position, basically feared
and/or hated by everyone else. Not good.

~~~
elteto
I speak from a STEM background, Mech/Aero specifically. 90% of the PhDs in my
department (at a large research university) _do not_ go into academia and do
not want to, but find very high paying jobs in industry, doing the kind of
things that only people with their training can do. It sounds like your PhD or
post-PhD experience wasn't that good, but is pretty much anecdote and you
really can't extrapolate to everything because you didn't get a PhD in every
degree. And btw, most of the research done in my field is not theoretical at
all, but very advanced novel applications, I have never seen anyone shying
away from any real work because they "hate anything practical".

~~~
graycat
> I have never seen anyone shying away from any real work because they "hate
> anything practical".

I've never shied away from things that are practical. My Ph.D. is essentially
in some applied math, that is, for me, the practical and money making kind.

But what you mention is a common remark on Ph.D. degree holders and sometimes
true.

~~~
elteto
That is the essence of the contrasting experiences: we study in very different
fields with job markets that are nothing alike. It is definitely much harder
to get a job as an applied math PhD.

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jbellis
Linkjacked from [http://alexandreafonso.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/how-
academia...](http://alexandreafonso.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/how-academia-
resembles-a-drug-gang/)

~~~
af3
nice catch!

------
plg
PS several of my former students who didn't end up in academia are making way
more money than I am. Academics don't compete for professorships to get rich.
If I wanted to make money I would be in the private sector. I chose academia
because I value other things above money: the ability to work on problems that
interest me, the ability to mentor smart and interesting and curious students,
the ability to control my own destiny, and perhaps above all else, to spend my
time interacting with smart, interesting people who are also not driven by the
pursuit of wealth.

To be sure, a tenured professor's salary is comfortable (unless you are in
NYC, SFO, Tokyo, London, Paris, etc), but it is also has a definitive ceiling.
It's not like you can work double the hours and get double the salary. Even if
you generate a great discovery, the salary increment, if any, is comparably
modest --- orders of magnitude smaller than for example the bonuses one gets
on Wall Street for a successful quarter of sales of shady investments to
unsuspecting investors.

As an illustration: A colleague of mine who's at the top of his field just
negotiated a raise, (using a competing offer from an Ivy League school), and
do you know what his raise was? ... He got an additional $15,000 per year to
his salary of around $140k. After taxes he'll get around $600 or $700 per
month extra. Now tell me again about the riches of being a tenured prof? If he
was working in the private sector (Wall Street, or consulting, or medicine,
which he could easily do given his skill set) he would be making integer
multiples of this salary.

~~~
masterofmasters
It's not a ton, but he could also get a summer salary if he has grants for it
(netting 33% more salary) and do some consulting on the side.

Also on the whole we should take into account that professors didn't have to
pay for grad school unlike medicine / business and instead got paid for it.

~~~
plg
true. As a grad student I did get a salary. You know what it was? $11,000 per
year...

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VintageCool
I do not think that this article is correct about the motivation of the gang
members low in the hierarchy.

The Robert Taylor Homes were poor, isolated, and cut off from the rest of
Chicago by a highway. The young men who joined the gang didn't have many other
options. Most of the men who lived there worked ad hoc jobs. Sudhir Venkatesh
coached young drug dealers for interviews (ex: to become a janitor).

I suspect that low-level drug dealers start dealing because it's easy for them
to get into and they don't have better options. The gangs probably hold more
appeal as a social organization than they do as a way to make money.

~~~
DaveWalk
I see a parallel that I don't believe was mentioned in the article: that the
"young men" can be compared to "undergraduate degree holders." It's a crude
comparison, and I feel guilty making it, but if you have a BS in Biology, your
options can _feel_ limited, and it may be mentally easier to apply to graduate
school than to figure out what you'd like to do with your life. And once you
join graduate school, you've got at least 5 more years to make a decision (in
the US, in the biomedical sciences).

------
ooku
Is it just me, or are the graphs/plots in this article really confusing and
poorly presented?

~~~
auggierose
It's not just you.

------
p4bl0
I don't know the world of drug dealing. But I can say that this article's
point of view on academia is mostly wrong. I am myself doing a PhD right now,
and I know a _lot_ of people who have done PhDs, who are currently PhD
students, or who are going to be in the coming years (before starting my PhD I
was in a school/uni, the École normale supérieure, in which almost 90% of the
students do a PhD since the school's goal is to train future researchers). The
reasons to go for this career paths are not money or wealth at all. Not at
all. People chose this path because they love physics / philosophy / computer
science / literature / math / history… And because they value freedom above
many other things, among which money clearly is.

Doing a PhD is fun and interesting, and that's the main reason to go with it.

The pay during the PhD is indeed not good compared to what we could make by
working in the industry, but it's not that bad: we certainly make more than we
would by working at MacDonald's (I don't think it is a relevant comparison but
that's the example at the beginning of the article).

We do a PhD because we enjoy our life with it right now, and because we want
to do research (and possibly teaching at uni level) as our job later, without
thinking about the salary (some PhD students don't even really know what are
the salaries in academia, only that it's not as much as in the industry).

The position of a PhD student have nothing that is comparable to the drug
dealing field as described in the article. It's sometimes hard, but it's not
risky/dangerous and you're not exploited by your hierarchy, or have to fear it
in any way.

[EDIT to clarify my point] There's is no trade-off such as "I'll take risks
and live poorly for now in the hope of becoming rich and famous later" when
you choose to do a PhD. If you get to do a PhD, you _already have what you
want_ , which is freedom to work on the subject that interests you, _very_
flexible work-hours, the possibility of teaching if you want to (and have some
more money for that, which is a nice plus but I guess most PhD students who
teach would do it anyway). [/EDIT]

I recently wrote a blogpost which did not get any traction here [1], in which
I present a quick overview of my PhD work until now in the hope of showing how
much I'm enjoying myself as a PhD student :-), and this in order to try to
balance a bit the tendency that HN has to present PhD as a waste of time or
generally with negative connotations.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6755727](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6755727)

~~~
dekhn
I'm glad you're happy about your education, but to be clear: you don't
actually speak representatively for all PhD students.

Although I enjoyed many parts of my PhD experience, and the subsequent
Postdoc, I rarely harboured (after my first year of grad school when I saw how
competitive faculty positions are) the belief that my PhD (from a competitive
school in a hot area) would allow me to work on anything I wanted for a
reasonable salary.

I will say this: PhDs go a long way to maximizing freedom, but they are not a
panacea. Positions for research are typically quite limited, and it's more
likely, you'll end up a terminal "Research Associate" (little pay or autonomy)
or working in an Industrial Lab (which has its own plusses and minuses).

Real freedom comes from being the top 1%.

~~~
p4bl0
Maybe it's very different where you live than in France, but what you say
clearly isn't true here. For more than the top 1% gets real freedom. Getting
into CNRS or Inria or other public research institutes is hard because it's
very competitive, but it's not impossible. And then there are positions at
universities which are reputed to be less hard to get (depending on the uni,
of course) since there are more of them.

Concerning the pay, I question what you call "little". Salaries in public
research institutes in France may be little compared to what you could make at
a good position in the industry and given your diplomas, but it's certainly
not a bad salary in the sense that you can live off of it with reasonable
comfort.

~~~
DaveWalk
Dekhn is calling you out on your _qualitative_ statements: where you live, in
your field, in your own mind and to the people you know ("I know a _lot_ of
people who have done PhDs") these facts may indeed be true. But I would argue
that it's not true elsewhere, such as in the US across scientific disciplines.

The research of Paula Stephan covers the economic decisions made by US science
research institutions[1]. Her hypothesis is that academia maximizes PhD
student numbers while the number of tenure-track faculty positions decline.
This presents an untenable situation in the long term, where a flood of
researchers with PhDs will be unable to find permanent employment, and yet the
demand for cheap labor filled by PhD students intensifies.

As you can imagine, this type of trend can be terrifying to some PhD students,
despite the "freedom" that their research allows. A lack of job security makes
one question their salary as an extension of their worth.

[1] Her latest book is an exhaustive look at the subject:
[http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Shapes-Science-Paula-
Stephan...](http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Shapes-Science-Paula-
Stephan/dp/0674049713)

~~~
p4bl0
Okay I see. I totally agree with that.

------
graycat
> the corresponding age cohort

 _What_ "corresponding age cohort?

E.g., in, say, the OECD countries, the Ph.D. degree holders who got their
Ph.D. in year 2000 make up about 1% of the population, and the Ph.D. degree
holders who got their Ph.D. in year 2011 make up about 2% of the population?

It's a bit tough to read the vertical axis labels on the right. If save the
graph as a file to disk, unfortunately a JPG, good for landscapes, instead of
a lossless file type such as GIF or PNG, and magnify the image, then can read
the labels on the right axis. Alas, find that the labels are 0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3,
3, 4, 4. I have team of researchers working on what those axis labels mean and
will post here again when they submit their solution!

~~~
blahedo
I think (i.e. infer from context) that they mean that in 2000, the people who
were of an age to be getting PhDs[0] made up that percent of their age
"group"[1]. On the axes, I'm assuming due to poor choice of sig figs that "0,
1, 1, 2, 2" represents "0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, ...", because that seems plausible.

But yes, that figure (all the figures in the article, really) could have used
a bit of editorial guidance.

[0] vague!

[1] other people "of an age to be getting PhDs"? also vague!

------
nickthemagicman
Lol this is the way the entire world is headed as JOBS IN GENERAL become
scarce.

i.e. see every third world country.

~~~
raverbashing
See: Europe See: the US

And while in some fields there's the need to "import people" (IT basically),
there's a chronic lack of jobs in some other fields. Source: spent 2 years
working in Europe.

------
analog31
I live in a neighborhood nearby a major public university, populated by a lot
of academics. Most of the people I know who are pursuing academic careers just
want to do good work in return for decent working conditions and a decent
middle class living. Few aspire, or expect, to become superstars.

Academia has those positions, maybe not enough to go around, but they're
there. I'm not sure that drug dealing does.

------
return0
Since when are academics becoming hugely rich? They feed on a regulated supply
of taxpayer money, if they make money it will be usually from non-academic
activities. There is also very low risk and only predictable returns, not like
drug business at all.

------
plg
"So what you have is an increasing number of brilliant PhD graduates arriving
every year into the market..."

An increasing number of PhD graduates,sure... But not an increasing number of
brilliant PhD graduates.

There are market forces (e.g. Government incentives) for universities to admit
more students to PhD programs and my experience is not that the additional
students are brilliant. They tend to be people who complete the PhD (or just a
terminal masters) and exit academia quite definitively

~~~
sentenza
It is not my experience that there is a strong connection between whether or
not a PhD student is "brilliant" and his staying in or leaving academia.

The most important factors for your future academic career are intelligence,
mentoring, good project choice, good self-management and always some luck with
outcome. Fail in two of these and you don't have much of a chance to get your
academic carrer back on track.

IMO failing at least two of these factors are usually the reasons for people
to leave academia that are subsumed under "lack of success". There are also
many students that are successfull and leave for the money or because they are
female and want to have childern before 35.

Then again, I've never been at a "top tier" university, so maybe things work
different in Stanford.

------
niggasbalting
I can't take anyone seriously who believes the main reason for gage
involvement is that the prospect of future wealth. It simply does not compute
with:

[http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/487/h...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/487/harper-high-school-part-one)

~~~
niggasbalting
Obvious typo is obvious.

------
michaelochurch
VC-istan is the same thing. VCs force rapid growth, act as a herd that injects
huge amounts of cash or none, and have thus created an economy powered by
clueless men in their early-mid 20s who think they'll be founders in their
next gig (when, in fact, they will be founders never).

The truth is that the world's full of suckers who can be paid in promises
rather than actual rewards. So many people will believe anything they are
told.

Academics and startup engineers have less of an excuse than drug pawns,
though. The soldiers have felony convictions (often) and generational poverty
issues against them, putting regular employment out of the question. Academics
and startup engineers are privileged people who refuse to fight for
themselves; most of them exhibit the very process by which wealth declines-- a
refusal to look out for one's own interests.

~~~
DaveWalk
I like your comparison -- nobody hats yet drawn the parallels between the
topic and the startup culture, which makes a lot of sense. It reminds me of a
quote I once heard attributed to Bruce Sterling: "Start ups are full of people
working hard to make other people rich -- baby boomer financiers, mainly."

