How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang

http://alexandreafonso.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/how-academia-resembles-a-drug-gang/

by kens • 13 years ago

101 88 13 years ago

alexandreafonso.wordpress.com

jbellis• 13 years ago

Linkjacked from http://alexandreafonso.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/how-academia...

af3• 13 years ago

nice catch!

unabridged• 13 years ago

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.

impendia2• 13 years ago

Unlimited money? In academia?

Umm... no. Even for the very best people, at the very best places, salaries tend to top off below $150K. In places with high costs of living, this isn't a cushy life.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

Famous academics make a lot of money besides their salaries. And there was a Hacker News thread recently that said that Terence Tao's salary (which I guess is public information, because his salary comes from a public university) was above $400,000 a year. (I imagine he has the flexibility to travel to conferences that he desires, as well, among other nonsalary benefits.) Medical doctors who are professors of medicine also have total compensation packages well north of $150K.

AFTER EDIT: Of course, I was specifically disagreeing with the specific dollar figure ("$150K") in the comment immediately above mine. The grandparent comment, referring to "unlimited money," is of course using the literary device of hyperbole, which academics in the disciplines I studied in my higher education know better than to take literally. An academic who writes a widely adopted textbook can make serious money in quite a few different disciplines, and academic employment in general offers more opportunity than most forms of employment to take on side jobs.

jrs99• 13 years ago

after you're a professor, you can reach the top, the president of a university. look at john hennessy.

peter_l_downs• 13 years ago

Drug lord was chosen so they could plaster Breaking Bad pictures and get links

Where do you see a Breaking Bad picture on this page? The comparison they make to drug gangs is fair and the gangs themselves are _not_ the root of the article. It's an article with statistics and cited sources, it seems reasonable for them to make an interesting introduction.

pallandt• 13 years ago

I think the URL was changed, it used to be this one if I remember correctly: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/inside_higher_ed/2013/11/... I saw this post on the /newest page earlier today.

lsc11• 13 years ago

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'

001sky• 13 years ago

the "wealth" you accumulate at the top isn't money; it's prestige

Exactly. The culture is 'presitige maximization', and it's ruthlessly pursued. TLDR: Man is a political animal

ItendToDisagree2• 13 years ago

Very much so. 'Prestige job' pretty much sums it up. Only a fool gets a PhD so they can 'make the big bucks'. If they were into it just for the money they'd go into finance rather than fiddling around with teaching or research.

seanmcdirmid• 13 years ago

I did not get my PhD to get a teaching gig and I'm exactly where I want to be: a foot soldier in an industrial research lab (just please don't call Ballmer a druglord).

Who the heck wants to be a University President? I'm frankly surprised John Hennessy finds being Stanford president an interesting use of his time, but maybe I'm just naive.

graycat10• 13 years ago

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.

jccalhoun3• 13 years ago

"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."

That might be true for some fields but not all. I am looking for a teaching gig with my phd and coming up with nothing. At this point I would love to find one of these other jobs that would love to hire me.

tensor• 13 years ago

Speaking personally, I went into academia to do research above all else. I didn't want to teach. Money and prestige* were not major goals. And I certainly didn't want to be a president of a university. Nobody cares about that.

* Most researchers do dream of making great discoveries, or proving world changing theorems. In this sense I guess I too want prestige. But it has to be because of actual achievement, not just perceived achieved. E.g. fame for the sake of fame.

aheilbut• 13 years ago

Teaching is important, but in science, very few people do a PhD with the primary intention to teach. It's about the research, yo, and prestige that is mostly somewhere between your head and the literature.

gaius2• 13 years ago

I don't know how it is in the US but in the UK the chancellor of London Met, a third tier at best university, pocketed millions, before he was forced out in disgrace. I suppose there was little prestige to be had there tho'.

nnq3• 13 years ago

...the mysterious thing to me is why people choose these "tournament-like professions" in the first place. I think the whole "tournament profession" thing is an illusion build for the purpose of unfair exploitation by the few at the top. The natural reactions imho to encountering a "tournament situation" should be to either: (a) just run as far away as you can from such a discipline/industry/trade or (b) rebel and burn the system to the ground from the inside, be the joker that just wants to "see the world burn" because you'll just make it a better place for others by burning it clean.

It's as stupid as playing the lottery. In academia people should just rebel and ask for one of two things:

1. higher salaries (like significantly higher than the average income that someone with a similar qualification would get in industry!), OR

2. tenured positions with lots of "free" time to do research and the security that even if they pursue unpopular lines of research and get negative research they'd still get to keep their tenure.

People should not accept working for the "hope of much better status/income" in the future, they should aggressively and unreasonably demand IMMEDIATE compensation for their struggles, not work for expectation of a "better future". There are enough money and resources in the system for almost everybody to "have their cake and eat it too" and you shouldn't settle for anything less!

Now if people would start thinking this way, worldwide academic institutions would collapse, but I think this would be a good outcome as, imho, despite their contributions to mankind's progress, educational systems and academic institutions are mostly unreformable and can only be rebuild from scratch for the better.

gaius2• 13 years ago

The weird thing is that we (society) are fine with this model in sports, movies, music, academia, publishing etc but not in business.

nnq3• 13 years ago

...because the model is just wrong and broken and it's only useful for exploiting people in the benefit of those in the "inner circle". Business is more like evolution and has less tolerance for plainly broken models: even if you want to get to "the top", you still need to make profit for most of the way up there, just like in evolution every variation must provide some kind of clear immediate fitness benefit (not just "hope of great great benefit , but after n generations in the future").

Now, in business you can get close to "the top" by riding on investors' money, but someone still has to make profit on every step of the way, only that "every step of the way" may be more like "the aggregated profit of all companies fueled by one investment fund in a period of time" or something like that.

michaelochurch• 13 years ago

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.

DaveWalk3• 13 years ago

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."

nickthemagicman• 13 years ago

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

i.e. see every third world country.

raverbashing• 13 years ago

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.

graycat10• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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!

niggasbalting2• 13 years ago

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...

niggasbalting2• 13 years ago

Obvious typo is obvious.

chasing• 13 years ago

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.

ooku• 13 years ago

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

auggierose• 13 years ago

It's not just you.

VintageCool• 13 years ago

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.

DaveWalk3• 13 years ago

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).

p4bl05• 13 years ago

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

Ma8ee• 13 years ago

And what do you do when you have finished your PhD? Only a very small fraction of the people with PhD have a chance to get a permanent position in academia, and end up looking for jobs in the industry and realizes that they are both missing some skills and are overqualified for most jobs.

p4bl05• 13 years ago

I intend to continue in academia, but in my lab for instance most of the PhD students want to go to the industry after their PhD. Our field, implementation security, is very practical and clearly skew the answer to this question. But it's to say that not all people starting a PhD do so with the intent of working in academia after that.

GuiA• 13 years ago

I agree with most of your post, but also keep in mind that PhDs are a bit different in Europe than they are in the US. Competition is much higher in the US, and the points raised in the article apply to the US definitely more than they do to Europe.

tfgg• 13 years ago

I think this is worth noting - especially in the UK, where PhDs are 3-4 years on top of a 3-4 year undergraduate. I think this shorter PhD length means that there's less opportunity to be exploited as cheap labour, and more opportunity to finish up and leave while you're still young if you ultimately decide that academia isn't for you, as a lot of people I know are. I might not stay in academia, but I won't regret doing it -- I enjoyed the challenge, the people, and doing my little bit for science. I can imagine being a bit more bitter if I was still doing my PhD a few more years down the line.

dekhn• 13 years ago

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%.

p4bl05• 13 years ago

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.

return0• 13 years ago

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.

analog312• 13 years ago

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.

plg3• 13 years ago

"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• 13 years ago

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.

plg3• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

plg3• 13 years ago

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

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