Even if this was true (which I doubt), that just reinforces the article's contention that postdocs aren't paid enough: the jobs are only attractive to foreigners, while Americans have other options.
More than 95% of people in the world are not American, and good American universities have access to the top talent. If the US is doing a competent job of hiring the best people then the majority of these researchers will not be American-born.
1. American colleges are still overwhelmingly the best in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Univ...
2. 96% of students at American colleges are American. http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2014/...
Did some digging and found this article from 2012 which says that 38% of researchers in the U.S. are foreigners.
http://www.nature.com/news/global-mobility-science-on-the-mo...
Why on earth would you group dual citizens in the same category as foreigners?
Even if 100% of the faculty are dual citizens (Americans + something else), it would still be 100% American.
Sure, but everyone including a freshman undergrad is an adult and the odds of ever becoming a tenured professor are public knowledge. No-one can realistically complain that they just didn't know.
By most metrics, a system in which most of the actual work is done by low-paid laborers with long hours - who are then thrown out as soon as they've got experience and tribal knowledge! - is not only an abusive system but a stupid and counterproductive system.
I've always known that the academic market is saturated. I still don't know what it actually takes, in practice, to penetrate.
I contend that this guidance failure stems from a policy that aims to inflate certain non-informative statistics.
More to your point, however, I think you over-estimate the quality of the information going around. Every college professor will tell you it's difficult, but they'll also guide you based on their experience from 30 years ago.
Nobody knows. That's the long and short of it. If you find any set of traits in common among tenured prof's, and look for those traits in the grad student body, you'll find a roughly 10x surplus of people who are good enough to be in the pipeline.
Disclaimer: I was not one of those people. I got my PhD in 1993, and knew that I was clearly not professor material. So I steered myself into industry.
As for experience 30 years ago, the oversupply of PhDs was already widely known at that time. We called it the "birth control problem," and it was discussed over the then-nascent Internet. I mentioned it to my dad, a chemistry PhD, and he said: "Oh yeah, we knew about that in the 1950s."
A perpetual optimism about career advancement is possibly just a social convention. At my workplace, the HR message is that anybody can move up. But we can't all move up, and none of us are ever told our realistic prospects.
By the way I'm not trying to play "internet tough guy" here, but am just trying to be realistic. I'm actually quite sympathetic about the problem.
I do. You need to either be outstandingly, obviously better than almost everyone else, or you need to be good enough and lucky. You can probably think of examples of both of these cases.
I'd add a couple of other factors: The people I know who got into tenured jobs, had binders full of shovel ready research ideas (backed up by literature and/or preliminary results), and a comprehensive knowledge of the literature in their specialties.
We do know exactly how change this, though. Since it's probably not affordable or sensible to triple the number of profs (you can't do this without making profs much worse), the only way to increase the chances of the average PhD is to graduate fewer PhDs.
Back in the mid-20th century only 10-15% of people even got undergrad degrees and we did not have this problem so much.
Disclaimer: I'm a PhD, and have spent my career in industry. My dad did likewise, and my grandfather had a consulting business. I was no threat to anybody's professorial aspirations, and I was in grad school because I just wanted to have the education.
Should I have been kicked out, to make way for more worthy students?
Also, limiting the degree could backfire, because it could end up driving away the best students along with the worst, while attracting mediocre students who figure out how to play the game.
I would certainly welcome some reforms to graduate education, but I don't think that the PhD degree can be turned into a guaranteed career path.
Maybe. Does the astronaut program drive away the best and attract mediocre people?
I'm being extreme to make a point. I don't think high standards drives away the best people.
> Should I have been kicked out, to make way for more worthy students?
I don't understand the point. You competed with others for your spot, right? If that was working properly, the more worthy would have taken your spot. Sounds like you made the cut.
I think we'd agree that the problem is in expectations of students going in. I agree with others in this thread that profs have a duty to help people make realistic decisions. And as long as some subjects are set up to rely on a badly-paid middle class of postdocs, they are missing the incentive to do so.
In AI and robotics right now, it's very hard indeed to get a good postdoc since their opportunities are so good. I'm a prof and I'd love to exploit some but they all make more money than me. Good institutions are routinely hiring AI people straight out of PhDs. The problems we are talking about vary enormously by field because the supply and demand are wildly out of whack in some fields.
I made the cut, but to reduce the number of PhDs by (say) a factor of three, I might have been cut at some point. That could have been at the entrance to grad school, or somewhere else down the line, up to being told not to bother submitting my dissertation.
One idea is for funding agencies to set a minimum salary for post-docs, say $100k/y. Doing so would automatically change the number of post-docs and the standards for hiring them, while letting those of us with no academic career aspirations do our own thing.
I suppose that supports your point. ;-)
In AI and robotics right now, it's very hard indeed to get a good postdoc since their opportunities are so good.
Maybe that's the solution. It means that the people you're training actually have realistic career options, and you don't have to create an artificial job market for them.
Quite the opposite - both countries and departments/professors actively advertise the odds as much higher.
I considered myself maybe a 60th percentile researcher, which I knew wouldn't be good enough. It's a good thing I opted out when I did. I know people who were as good or better than me who are keeping it together with a string of visiting positions, still hoping for that tenure track line to open up. I expect most of them will be giving up on academia in the next 2 or 3 years.
The point is that everyone who goes into any STEM subject at any level ought to know upfront that there are far more graduates than there are jobs in those fields of any sort including "researcher". It's no secret.
What a snarky and strangely dismissive comment!
Clearly there's a lot of overlap in the subject matter (it's science, after all), but employment prospects are most assuredly not the same for engineers and academics. You can get a job as an engineer; I cannot. As such, I don't see the relevance of your experience as an engineering student, hence my question.
So again, I'm not sure what your point is. I'm open to being wrong, but in order to see my error, I need to first understand your point.
It would be nice if you could explain it to me without being disrespectful.
I think a large part of the issue has to do with government policy as it relates to science. I notice that many politicians reason in terms of "producing more science" as if it were a commodity good that should be produced and exported en masse.
The problem, then, is that the current academic system actively encourages people to pursue academic careers without disclosing the reality of the situation. They push masses of people through undergrad, then grad school, then post-docs, until the end of the line whereupon most people hit a huge brick wall.
I'm all for promoting research in STEM fields, but simply upping the quota of Ph.Ds won't cut it. As far as the U.S. is concerned, I think this has more to do with turning a blind eye to the dismal state of public education than anything else. It enables politicians to say "we trained 200% more scientists", while conveniently omitting the following truths:
1. Virtually none of them will be employed in the sciences at a level that warrants a doctorate.
2. For all the chest-puffing we do, we still get humiliated by the rest of the civilized world in terms of education.
3. Those people actually employed in research positions in American universities are majority foreign.