A Career in Science Will Cost You Your Firstborn

http://www.johnskylar.com/post/107416685924/a-career-in-science-will-cost-you-your-firstborn

by timr • 12 years ago

629 392 12 years ago

I have never heard of a professor "forgoing their own salary" to keep the lights on. I'd be surprised if this was allowed, actually.

Also, for what it's worth, I did a PhD and a post-doc and have a nice biotech job that pays well. It's not an easy road (what is?) but it's not as bleak as all-that, if you enjoy doing science.

timr3• 12 years ago

The whole piece is about how your earning potential rises when you leave academia, so pointing out that your income rose when you left academia isn't really a rebuttal. How much income did you forego during your PhD and post-doc, and how much would you have foregone if you'd stayed?

roadnottaken3• 12 years ago

I made approximately $30k as a grad student (5 yrs) and ~$50k as a post-doc (2.5 yrs). I probably could've made more in a different industry, but it was plenty to live on at the time. It would've been a different story if I'd had kids sooner... anyway, I didn't go into science for the money, I went into it because I like science. I don't disagree with many of the conclusions in the original post, I just wanted to add my anecdotal experience which has been relatively happy and sufficiently-compensated.

squidfood• 12 years ago

Sure it is allowed. You can apply for grants for your lab, and not include funds for yourself, and if your own salary is soft-funded, you might have to go "on leave" or the like while your lab gets the money.

That said, I've never seen anyone do it for more than a month's gap, and very rarely.

hga2• 12 years ago

I can't track down the source of the quote (thought it was Noland Bushnell), but "You aren't an entrepreneur until you've made a payroll out of your own pocket".

Interesting, but not surprising, to know that scientists are known to have done this.

adamdoupe• 12 years ago

Most professor salaries are on 9-month appointments, for the academic year. The three summer months usually come from grants, teaching summer sessions, or consulting.

However, a professor can choose to spend the grant money on student support rather than summer salary (thus forgoing their own salary), which is what I assume the author is referring to.

bduerst3• 12 years ago

I did a PhD and a post-doc and have a nice biotech job that pays well

Which works if your field of study is an applied science.

I think that for many in the pure fields there is this sort of romanticized "career in science" that can cloud expectations. As with Margaret in this story, though, they eventually figure it out.

regehr• 12 years ago

I routinely forego summer salary in order to make sure the students are fed. This works because I receive a perfectly adequate 9-month salary from the state (and also my household has two incomes).

mjt0229• 12 years ago

This is my family's situation as well. My wife has a 9-month salary for her tenure-track position at a state university. Her startup package hardly covered anything. The university has virtually no money to give out in small grants to help along until she gets an extramural grant from the NIH or the NSF, but the kind of research you can do at a small state university that's focused on teaching is not sexy enough to garner big money from most extramural granting agencies.

As a result, she's applying for grants at the moment to pay a few students a paltry sum to stay and work in her lab over the summer. She will work for free. Any students who can't cover their own room and board on their own probably couldn't afford to stay and work; they need to spend 30 or 40 hours a week in the lab, which pretty much excludes other sources of income. My wife makes the point that it's unfair that poor students can't afford the experience to work in a lab as an undergraduate, even if it will benefit their careers in the long term.

peterfirefly• 12 years ago

You shouldn't have to do that since your research is actually both beautiful and useful. Too much is neither.

therzathegza• 12 years ago

I believe the official term in grant funded kinds of places is "no cost extension" of the project.

Fomite8• 12 years ago

This can also be used for "We haven't spent out all the money yet but the funding period is coming to an end."

pvaldes2• 12 years ago

I have never heard of a professor "forgoing their own salary" to keep the lights on. I'd be surprised if this was allowed, actually.

This is because when you say Science you are of course thinking "USA Science". This is pretty common in other countries.

I spend 6 entire years "collaborating" with my University waiting for my opportunity. No salary, no social benefits, no contract and all day. It was take this or take the exit and bye bye!, we have a lot of other candidates, ha ha.

This was my election. I don't blame on it.

But the worst was when (after spending all day picking-up things from the inner guts of a deeply rooten 500 Kg carcass of a dolphin) someone tells me: "you should be happy, all your wishes granted, this is what you wanted!" Yeah, to bath myself in shit, rancid fat, guts and breath formaldehyde all day is the best thing in the universe...

DaveWalk21• 12 years ago

It's not an easy road (what is?)

I think we could work on the road, actually. For as long as a PhD is, there are ways to make it less of a slog, I believe. Early career development and more relevant classes come to mind from my institution.

Also, if a postdoc is truly required these days, maybe we can shorten PhD length to 3 or 4 years? Cutting down the opportunity cost of time has nothing (directly) to do with salary...but it would have profound changes on the culture, I believe.

AznHisoka• 12 years ago

Replace science with medicine, or law, and the same still applies.

toufka• 12 years ago

Yep. An entire generation of our society's most educated all in the same boat right now.

saschajustin4• 12 years ago

Most educated? Yes.

Most intelligent? No.

Smart people have been shunning science and academia since the 90s. The best and brightest work on Wall Street and they do tend to have kids--their genes for intelligence do pass on.

It is very encouraging to hear that people who make dumb life choices are being prevented from reproducing their foolish genes.

Maybe in a few generations no one will be stupid enough to work for a boss that doesn't reward them, and then we will have reform.

Downvote me all you want. You can't handle the truth.

kohanz3• 12 years ago

Where I am (Canada), at least, doctors and lawyers will end up at their final positions with much more certainty than someone seeking a faculty position and they'll pay their debt off a lot faster.

declan3• 12 years ago

Replace science with medicine, or law, and the same still applies.

I don't think that's true with law. The linked essay talks about "the 20 years of your adult life that a scientist typically spends proving they deserve a career."

You can be a newly minted, bar-passed, practicing lawyer after spending 7 years of your adult life, and 6 years if you diligently optimize your course selections (typically 4 years undergrad, 3 years law school, plus a few months studying for the bar exam). That's a heck of lot less than 20 years, and matters a lot in terms of female fertility, the topic of the essay.

And about 20% of new law school graduates will be making six figures in their new job. There's a sharp peak in the distribution of full-time salaries for new lawyers centered around $185K because of big law, with a larger, flatter peak centered around $60K thanks to small firms, nonprofits, and work that doesn't actually require a law degree. Those figures come from NALP data, and reflect the situation even during the lawyer/law school bubble the U.S. is in today.

Note I'm not saying law is a necessarily a wiser choice; I know one big law associate who slept overnight on a partner's couch so much I helped her with the transport of a small refrigerator so she could keep meals at work. That's even though she lived within about four blocks of the office. She eventually quit to write novels.

aetherson4• 12 years ago

Passing the bar does not "prove you deserve a career" in law to more or less the same degree that getting a PhD does not "prove you deserve a career" in academics. Plenty of lawyers who pass the bar (these days) ultimately are not successful as lawyers, and the low levels of attorneys at big law firms are a grind designed to weed people out in much the same way that tenure tracks are.

Ditto finance.

That's not to say that either law or finance take AS long as academics do to get to the point where you're secure in your position, but neither get it right out of their degrees.

rhino369• 12 years ago

The issue with law is that it while it requires a bit less time investment, it requires a substantially larger investment of money.

PhD programs pay you, not a lot, but at least 20-40k a year.

A top legal program (the only kind that will realistically get you a decent legal job) costs about 75k a year in non dischargable loans. There is some merit aid, but it requires you to trade down to a worse school. A good bet if you can get into the elite schools and trade down to a good school (like from Harvard down to Cornell or UMich). But if you can just barely get into Cornell or UMich, you don't really want to trade down to GWU or WUSTL.

I'd rather spend another 5-6 years in grad school / post docs than have huge student loans.

Worse, law keeps weeding people out well past the bar exam. A lot of lawyers spend 7 years in school and 3 years in practice and just leave the industry, often with well over 100k in debt.

Legal salary statistics are a bit skewed by sample bias. NALP relies on reported salaries.

Also legal jobs tend to be in high cost of living areas, while a lot of PhD employers are colleges in bumfuck.

meej2• 12 years ago

What's the source for your 20% figure and have you read any of Paul Campos' work on the state of legal education in this country? He's been saying for years that it's a scam. Only half of graduates get jobs as lawyers, applications are way down, and this year schools have been accepting more people with lower LSAT scores in an attempt to keep admissions up.

This interview has a summary of some of his claims at the end:

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_23733599/carroll-many-law-schoo...

He used to blog on the subject anonymously at:

http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/

He's also written a book on the subject.

ForHackernews2• 12 years ago

Not true of medicine in the US. The AMA functions as guild system, and medical doctors' salaries are kept extremely high. Yes, the training period is long and expensive, but at least there's a near-guaranteed payoff at the end.

Law does suffer the same glut of workers relative to jobs as academia.

ArkyBeagle3• 12 years ago

The salaries are not that high - let's say top 5% level.

rawdeegee• 12 years ago

Same thing in Canada, guild system, though of course the ceiling is kept somewhat lower by having to negotiate with a single-payer system.

krallja• 12 years ago

Training is not guaranteed, even with a medical degree. There are fewer residency positions available (and more graduating seniors) with every year.

carlmcqueen• 12 years ago

Maybe it's just me, but I've never really thought getting a PhD had to do with money, but instead the result of either extreme curiosity or a very strong passion about a more granular complex topic.

I never understood it to mean a path with a defined cost to equal a defined salary. This scientific equation of years of school to salary just feels foolish.

debacle3• 12 years ago

Regardless of who you are, it's very likely that at some point in your life you'll want love, rest time, a family, financial security.

Being a scientist offers nearly none of those things.

avz• 12 years ago

It's true that most people seek family and stability. However, there is more to human existence than that. There are people who lead very eccentric life styles that express passions for other pursuits. For some reason scientists do seem more prone to eccentricities than most. Examples abound in biographies of great scientists and engineers like Galois, Tesla, Whitehead, Heaviside, Erdős...

bduerst3• 12 years ago

This is why working in a lab as an undergraduate is absolutely key, as it sets expectations.

Through various internships and part time jobs, I worked both in industrial and academic labs as an undergrad, and while I enjoyed the work it helped me realize that it was more about dedication to the love of a subject than actually forging a balanced, lucrative career.

pm90• 12 years ago

I see where you're coming from, and yes, I do agree that having more education does not automatically qualify someone to a better salary or benefits, which seems to be the undercurrent in this article. However, its not about earning "lots" of money, but enough to at least sustain yourself and maybe a family. That is not possible if one has to be a postdoc for 6 years. The point is basically that the system is misleading bright young kids into thinking that they can have reasonable expectations of having a "regular" life when doing interesting work.

nilkn• 12 years ago

You're completely right, but the main problem is that there's no longer any sort of guaranteed end-game for academics. A relatively low income really isn't that much of an issue if you're guaranteed that income for life and don't have to worry about finances and you're doing something you love.

But today's young scientists and researchers aren't guaranteed anything -- they're lowly paid and most likely will not get any decent lifelong faculty position. And settling for being, say, an adjunct lecturer means you'll be paid less than a high school teacher in many cases (with no pension and very minimal benefits to boot).

scottious• 12 years ago

Part of it still feels exploitative to me. It vaguely reminds me of back in the early days of web sites where people thought they were doing a web developer a "favor" by letting them make their web site for them. "You can put your name on my site! What great press!"

Oh yeah, sure, while I'm young and learning maybe it's okay but at some point you realize you're just being scammed out of money

sosuke4• 12 years ago

I've now put science degrees in the same bucket as liberal arts. There is a crazy amount of knowledge available, but unless you're gifted or lucky it won't pay, and you do it because you love it.

DaveWalk21• 12 years ago

I don't know about that; I think perhaps it is the opposite. Psychologically, at least: if you got another degree, shouldn't you be worth more than you were previously? Aren't two degrees better than one? (I know that sounds stupid, but these are thoughts that can flicker through one's mind.)

An informal polling of the students in my PhD program showed a large fraction (~90%) that came directly out of undergrad. Without setting foot in the real world I believe one can see believe this distorted reality. And in the economic "long term" (salary per addition year of schooling) most PhDs are probably better off than their Bachelor's counterparts, but this belies the opportunity costs.

PaulHoule• 12 years ago

I think that's the right way to put it.

kohanz3• 12 years ago

I only did a Master's and avoided the academic route (wasn't interested). My lab peers at the time were 5 PhD students. Of that group at a good Canadian University, 3 are still post-docs (4-6 years after graduation), 1 has a decent-paying research position (non-teaching) and 1 is a faculty member... in the Middle East. Meanwhile, I work in an R&D field alongside many current faculty members, a surprising number of whom are 65+ and will die before they retire.

In general, my observation has been that the students that quit after a Masters tend to do better financially than those who continue on. That's not to say that Master's graduates are hitting the big time; they just tend to end up getting their market value.

refurb7• 12 years ago

I had a similar experience as you. I wrapped up my Masters in Canada because the job prospects were better than if I stayed and finished a PhD. Most of my lab mates went into industry and are doing well. Only one landed a prestigious faculty position.

entee2• 12 years ago

I think the downside of no PhD is that you're much more likely to hit a glass ceiling. There are obviously exceptions but you're more likely to be put in charge of a research project in industry if you have a PhD than not.

Clearly an MS or BS level science student can absolutely eventually do the same things as a PhD or postdoc. The latter just have scientific approaches that have usually been subject to repeated and rigorous challenge by their peers, which means they are typically (though by no means always) more rigorous out of the box. In my time in industry I've found that in many cases that kind of critical challenge doesn't happen as much as in academia.

In the end I think people in hiring positions use the PhD letters as a screening tool for how strong a scientist the person is, without necessarily really evaluating the individual.

kohanz3• 12 years ago

I think the downside of no PhD is that you're much more likely to hit a glass ceiling.

I would agree in the context of staying within the R&D field. However, I know more than a few people who used the extra years not spent doing PhD post-doc to develop their careers in a different direction (sales, biz-dev) that allowed them to stay in their field and shattered those glass ceilings. You can still do these things with a PhD, but it will be more difficult (people pigeon-hole you, and you're playing catch-up time-wise).

In the end I think people in hiring positions use the PhD letters as a screening tool for how strong a scientist the person is, without necessarily really evaluating the individual.

This is key. I've actually found that a PhD. is a relatively poor predictor of how well a person might function in an industry R&D role. Please note that I'm not saying it's a negative predictor. I've just found there's little to no correlation. I've worked with incredibly smart and capable people with PhD's and others who could not function outside of a low-consequence lab setting.

comrade1• 12 years ago

This is nothing new.

I planned on being scientist in genetics/cell bio starting around 10th grade. I worked in laboratories throughout my undergrad years and then got into a prestigious human genetics phd program around 1993.

I first started to see that something was wrong while still an undergrad while working with people smarter than myself that were on their second or third post-doc. I had no desire to be into my career 12 years (phd + 3 2-year post-docs) and still not have a real job.

In graduate school I saw this continued and I also began to see just how much of a crap-shoot having a successful science career in academia was. The young professors on tenure track all had some amazing research during their phd or post-doc(s) but most often it based on something unexpected or novel that they couldn't have predicted.

Finally, when the head of the NIH testified in front of congress that there is a glut of scientists and that he couldn't recommend to anyone to go into science I decided to drop out.

I've had a great career since then outside of science but there are times when I miss it. I especially miss being around people much smarter than myself and driven purely by curiosity and the desire for knowledge. And I miss doing original research solving a fundamental question about life that is completely unknown and that can't just be googled.

And there are times when I get tired of the software industry and its man-children and its lack of seriousness... I know that everything we do isn't pointless and I've worked on some interesting cutting edge government/military projects that had mixed academic/industry teams, but it saddens me that so many of the smartest people in the software industry are working on essentially marketing/advertising projects. Google has become the blackhole for researchers that Microsoft Research used to be in the late-90s.

I'm not as negative as my post probably comes across as. I do like what I do and I have made friends with people in the software industry that are closer to my mindset than the norm. But it would have been nice to have been able to stay in science and have a better chance at being able to support myself and a family.

DaveWalk21• 12 years ago

This is nothing new.

Thank you for bringing up this point (and speaking to it personally from 20+ years ago!). I have been beating this drum for years since I've read Paula Stephan's research[1] on "How Economics Shapes Science." The overproduction of PhDs, the delaying of retirement by professors, and the addition of institutions to grant funding have been known since the 1980s, and the trend has been linear since then.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Shapes-Science-Paula-Stephan...

debacle3• 12 years ago

If it weren't for our current economic system, having a glut of lawyers, doctors, scientists, engineers, etc, would be an incredibly good thing. For everyone.

protomyth• 12 years ago

what economic system values having a glut of people of the same profession?

debacle3• 12 years ago

One that recognizes the realities of a globalized, post-scarcity, automated economy. Not everyone can work.

yarou• 12 years ago

A planned economy loves having a high supply of labor in the same profession. It keeps the ball rolling ("bread for all"). A humorous example is Egypt under Nasser. You need one person to fetch the passport, one person to stamp it, another person to review it, and another person to fetch the coffee.

wtbob• 12 years ago

It is a good thing; because there are so many of them (supply is high), society gets plenty of cheap labour from them all.

ArkyBeagle3• 12 years ago

There's a pretty good chance our economic system reflects our revealed preferences better than others. "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." - Immanuel Kant.

aetherson4• 12 years ago

In addition to what everyone else said, why lawyers? (Also, why doctors?)

Like, I get why a naïve opinion might be "the more engineers, the better" on the simple but attractive theory that more engineers = more stuff = better for everyone.

But what's the even simplistic theory that leads to "the more lawyers the better"?

And surely even a simple theory says "once you have enough doctors to provide healthcare to everyone, you're kinda done with doctors."

psbp• 12 years ago

Yeah, that statement only applies to scientists IMO, and to a huge degree. You'd be surprised to see what kind of research simply can't get funding.

theorique2• 12 years ago

We have a glut of lawyers. A lot of new law school graduates are getting the shaft, especially if they aren't coming from top-tier schools.

mathattack3• 12 years ago

It seems strange to me that people assume that more education in any field they want will necessarily result in more money.

Schools are producing too many Biology Phds. Or Forensic Science undergrads. Such is life. There's no way to predict 100% what the market will be like, so we make do. There's no intrinsic right to a job in the field that one chooses to study, and most people work in fields outside of their major.

It's also true that your choice of first (or second or third) job is no guarantee. GM used to be a job for life. Now it isn't. As individuals we make our best choices, and then have a small safety net to fall back on if we're wrong.

The only thing we should push for schools to do is show transparency on where the alums wind up, because unfortunately their incentives in producing Phds (and JDs and Russian literature degrees) differ from ours in receiving them.

fat0wl• 12 years ago

yeah i guess it strikes me as odd that these silos are painted as such dire straits when describing a scenario that includes the backdoor of "unless you choose to go into industry and immediately make 100k+".

I and the other people in my graduate program don't have that option... I studied music technology, degree was pretty expensive. no stipends, literal you pay for degree, BA-style, but are not going into a six-figure business field.

These are the choices you make in life, and being presented with an opt-out like that is as they say "a good problem to have". It would be cool if every field could make intelligent people rich as they improved the world but, you know.... its life.

If I had chosen a different field maybe I would be making 6-figures instead of doing boring enterprise work (decent money but most of my research peers were less programming focused, didn't even have this type of out), but I also would be even further from my goals. I wouldn't have the foundation of knowledge that I'm hoping to return to / build from in the future.

I guess the point of this comment is that the author should be thankful that people in science are valued by industry (even many programmers are only considered "labor", basically). There are lots of fields people devote themselves to that have no industrial use & they are relegated to lower-paying dayjobs regardless of who they are willing to sign on with. As for whether or not academia should be more lucrative, well.... should people be paid to learn? is academia the most efficient way of learning? is it an antiquated social construct? many open-ended questions.... got my masters but didn't go back for PhD, waiting to see whether or not there is a better way to make it happen out on the pavement.

mathattack3• 12 years ago

Many scientists struggle with the Plan B. If it's very math heavy (physics or engineering) then Wall Street is an option, but by the time many others opt out, they are too specialized to use their knowledge for a 100K job.

DaveWalk21• 12 years ago

and then have a small safety net to fall back on if we're wrong

I think it's the years that really hurt. A student is delaying entering the workforce for a lousy paying job, for 5-8 additional years, and now a postdoc or two? Wouldn't you want for some more money at the end?

But I completely agree with your diagnosis: accountability is a great way to open some folks' eyes. It is my wish, in fact, to be able to reach biology/chemistry/genetics/biochemistry/etc. students early in their undergraduate career and convince them NOT to consider graduate school. I think the application process with GREs etc. makes it difficult to accurately weigh the opportunity cost of going for a Ph.D., and by the time I talk to applicants on interview day it's too late.

mathattack3• 12 years ago

Some of it is which graduate school. I would like to see a lot of folks with those majors studying policy, business, law, government, etc. Knowing the scientific method goes a long way above and beyond doing pure research and teaching.

fiatmoney• 12 years ago

Not brilliant to ensure a good fraction of your smartest citizens are effectively unable to reproduce.

saschajustin4• 12 years ago

Would your smartest citizens really make such dumb life choices?

My professors pushed me so hard to get on the grad school track.

I was too smart to do something so stupid.

Professors are no longer the smartest people in society because only idiots go into academia. Grad students are often not the best or brighest but people with some kind of mental illness that prevents them from making rational long-term decisions.

There is no way that an intelligent person would ever try to get into academia in this climate. The people who try are on par with the pothead guitar player starting a garage band to get rich--they're not smart.

rifung• 12 years ago

There are reasons to do things besides money

jerf• 12 years ago

"Would your smartest citizens really make such dumb life choices?"

Oh, my, yes. One of the biggest problems with being smart is that it makes one especially prone to listening to and trusting in words, because one is so used to doing so due to the fact that it was the rewarded and reinforced behavior throughout their entire life, which remember, has consisted of little but schooling for such people up to that point. It takes additional training or practice to break out of that. After a lifetime of words about how wonderful this career path is, how suited to it they are, and how it's their natural goal, it cuts down to their personal identity to realize that the words were not true, and that's a hard thing to go through. (I am not being even slightly sarcastic. That can literally drive people to suicidal levels of emotional pain.)

almost_usual• 12 years ago

Not all smart people care about money, stability, or following social norms. Do you know much about Galois? He layed the foundation of modern Algebra as a teenager.

Do you know what else Galois did in his free time? He became a political radical, served a nine month jail sentence, and had an affair with the prison medic's daughter ultimately resulting in his death at the age of 20.

chris_wot• 12 years ago

Or a career in science may save your firstborn, or someone else's. Just saying.

wwweston2• 12 years ago

"Why does anyone think science is a good job?

The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:

* age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college

* age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month

* age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year

* age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year

* age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s

This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a 'second rate has-been' label on his forehead."

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

eranation• 12 years ago

Wow, this is sad. I knew the situation wasn't great, but it makes Breaking Bad look much more realistic than I thought. I guess the people who do it, don't do it for the money, I hope that those 8% who make it to tenure, do it because they love what they do. I just hope they have enough energy to keep things up once they get there.

There has to be a better way. I liked the mention of DIY scientists, if people could have done hobby medicine research the same way they can 3D print, start a SaaS company, built a home automation solution using an Arduino and some stuff from ebay, if doing DIY lab research would be as easy as launching a mini delorean style quadrocopter (search on youtube), I'm sure a lot of the community here in HN would have been working on the next cure for cancer.

longlivegnu• 12 years ago

I think DIY scientists have it the hardest, especially the ones that cannot survive without a job.

scrumper• 12 years ago

I'm reminded of 18th and 19th century astronomers and naturalists, some of whom made very important advances. Of course these were usually wealthy individuals before they came to science.

Perhaps there's room for a 21st century form of patronage instead.

cryoshon2• 12 years ago

1800 a month is a high stipend, FYI.

Some of the schools around here (Boston) have stipends which work out to be about 18,000 per year.

danielweber• 12 years ago

15 years ago $1200-$1500 was what me and friends got at MIT. (And in many ways I was living like a king.)

DaveWalk21• 12 years ago

It's always low, with a strict limit set by the NIH, and schools have a tiny bit of wiggle room. For example, a stipend in NYC is the biggest nationwide[1], but that's mostly cost of living.

1500-1800 was common at the schools in the mid atlantic that I knew of recently.

[1] http://www.wendychao.com/science/stipends/

ttflee• 12 years ago

A Stanford Ph.D. turned taxi driver

http://kentridgecommon.com/?p=4962

Even if you had been successful for 16 years, it could still turn bad.

dnautics9• 12 years ago

Not to mention Douglas Prasher (shuttle bus driver for a toyota dealership)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher

I'm a chem phd driving for lyft while I'm running my nonprofit science outfit. Some of my passengers have told me there are others out there.

refurb7• 12 years ago

That's for a scientist staying in academics. I used to work as a scientist in a science-focused industry and the salary trajectory is much better. As a newly minted PhD, you can pulled $120K + bonus (20%) right out of your post-doc. You'll probably hit a ceiling of $200-250K/yr relatively quickly (10 years) if you don't move into management.

Of course, that doesn't take into account the fact that as R&D person you'll be viewed as a cost center and a target for cost cutting if the time comes.

kayhi• 12 years ago

What industry? I've never seen anything close to these averages for hard science research.

civilian• 12 years ago

I read this article a year ago and my google-fu wasn't good enough to find it again! Thanks for posting it, and thanks for posting it originally if this is something you post periodically. I will now bookmark it and send it to all of my relatives.

drzaiusapelord• 12 years ago

wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life.

Sounds like to me like this is the problem. Its a lot to ask for lifetime employment, pension, etc. The tenure system causes this. A more fluid employment system would provide more opportunity as recruitement wouldn't be this overly neurotic thing.

That said, I know people in this exact situation. They bounce from university to university. They eventually ended up somewhere, at least most of them, with a couple scragglers who always came off as hugely unlikeable trust fund kiddies, so I'm not surprise they can't convince anyone to keep them or that they feel motivated to work hard.

The people I mentioned above were mostly U of C grads. Salaries there:

The average salary for a full-time professor at the U of C during the 2007-08 academic year was $170,800—the fifth highest in the nation

170k 5 years ago is nice scratch. Even in "poor" public schools like the University of Illinois, you're looking at 110-120k for entry level professors. Oh, and usually that's without working any of the summer months.

I'm not sure why there's so much hang-wringing over these jobs, many of which pay a decent wage. Yet there's no hang-wringing over the millions who are just as smart and talented in the private sector who have no tenure protections, no publishing rights, no patent co-ownership rights, no royalty rights, and fear layoffs all the time.

tobinfricke• 12 years ago

Oh, and usually that's without working any of the summer months.

Hah! This must be one of the strangest and most pervasive myths about academia. Typically you only get the summer off ... from teaching. It's the prime time to do that research that motivated you to get into the business in the first place...

And conveniently, the University doesn't pay you a salary for this time. You can elect to pay yourself... out of your research budget. At the opportunity cost of students, postdocs, staff, equipment, travel, etc.

letitgo123453• 12 years ago

Dunno about other fields, but atleast if you're doing a PhD in CS/math/stats, the industrial options (tech, finance, data scientist, etc.) are great enough that this article posts too bleak a picture imo of doing a PhD and trying out a career in science.

If one wants to stay in science, then there are many other options than being a prof including but not limited too industrial or government labs, research scientist positions at universities, etc.

Also the majority of assistant professors actually do get tenure and I feel this article is implying that they don't. And salaries are definitely higher than 65K a year. Though again, a CS perspective.

cheriot• 12 years ago

I wish people would break this out by discipline for exactly the reason you mention.

Sadly the articles describing a lack of STEM graduates and the ones describing how shit being a scientist is both paint all science with one brush.

wwweston2• 12 years ago

Sure, and I'm not complaining too much as a guy who studied Math/CS in my undergrad days (and I'm even considering graduate work!). The author also gives a nod to the industrial paths.

On the other hand:

* I think if you consider "tech, finance, data scientist", some reflection reveals a discouraging fact: we're usually not talking about science or even engineering at all, but essentially support functions allowing new kinds of productivity or scale for mundane business functions. So there's careers out there for us educated in these quantitative/technological arts... but it's generally not a career in science.

* More concretely, my math/CS education is almost entirely superfluous to my six-figure job doing CSS and wrangling squirrelly JavaScript frameworks/apps (mostly as a support function to sell automobiles). Meanwhile there are tenured faculty making half what I do (and postdocs/grad students on poverty incomes) actually working to figure out how life works, cure cancer, and build space elevators.

I don't know much about research related to tenure achievement and salaries, but I found these:

http://chronicle.com/article/Average-Faculty-Salaries-by/126... http://www.opia.psu.edu/sites/default/files/AIR_Tenure_Flow_...

My takeaway from skimming is that (a) faculty salaries vary, those in areas with the industrial options we've talked about seem to be higher, but an average of $65-70k seems credible (b) data on tenure is hard to come by but everyone agrees it's very difficult to get at high status institutions.

DubiousPusher2• 12 years ago

The author here is differentiating between Science oriented careers (industry, government, consultation, practical research) and hard science jobs (research at the edge of science with no immediate practical benefit.)

The point is that with almost any Science or Engineering degree you can get a great job in industry but that in the world of hard science research, a place people go because of their ideas, not because of the profits, you will struggle for little chance of serious reward.

Perhaps this is good for an economy. Most people will be flushed into practical things and those who are driven to be artists, teachers, scientists and performers will be carried there by their passions despite the hardship.

The biggest problem with this is that we are probably herding our most talented young people straight into the open maw of industry and away from things that lay the foundation for human advancement.

0xgrr2• 12 years ago

About the fact that the majority of professors get tenure. Lets put some numbers to this statement.

64% get tenure according to http://www.sciencemag.org.libproxy.mit.edu/content/335/6070/... at least. Median time to exit the tenure track? 7 to 10 years depending on the area.

So now imagine this. You work as a PhD student for 6 years, as a postdoc for 2-3, as a faculty member for 7 years. And at the end (you're just about 40) someone flips a coin. Either you get tenure, or you beat it and get nothing. Along the way your industry peers have outearned you by hundreds of thousands of dollars by this point.

So yes. The situation is that bleak and the article is not overstating its point.

Along the way you have to keep in mind that things are only getting worse. Grant funding is much harder to get today than it was 10 years ago. Tenure rates are much lower than they were 10 years ago. So if you're planning on a career in science you have to factor in the fact that the situation you will face when you come up for tenure will likely be far worse than the already-poor statistics above indicate.

hchenji• 12 years ago

a CS perspective

S is different from TEM in STEM...and CS leans more towards TEM than S.

zeidrich• 12 years ago

I don't think that anyone really thinks science is a good job.

You rarely talk to anyone who says "I want to make a lot of money so I'm going to be a researcher!"

Normally people (want to) become scientists because they are passionate about science.

The problem is that science is not highly valued, especially academically. We live in a society that values trading commodities, and science isn't easily commoditized. The closest thing we can come to a commodity in science is papers, and maybe patents in the commercial world.

The shame is that science is a public benefit. In our whole history, nearly everything is ephemeral, but the things we have learned and understood and documented have persisted. Technology can be good or bad, but (well founded) science is knowledge, and it's only ever good as it lets us better understand.

We live inefficiently as long as we focus on letting people live comfortable lives only when they have something they can restrict access to and barter in exchange for that opportunity.

There are people out there that would like to do science, who would like to further our understanding of the world and universe we live in, who don't do so only because they need to help produce something that people will pay for.

In my opinion, we should pay for education and a fair income for any person who wants to practice academics. Sure, you can save luxurious salaries and budgets for the superstars, but make it such that everyone who has the capability and desire to do so can work in science, or possibly other academic pursuits, that they will have a wage that will let them have a home, healthy food on the table, support a family and live a comfortable, if modest life. The condition being that all of your results are made available to the public for free and you might get called to teach.

I think of it kind of like being in the military. Enough money gets spent on the military, TONS of money gets spent on the military, and for much of it, the public sees minor benefit. But you know that when you join, that at least while you're serving, you are going to be guaranteed to have a place to stay, food to eat, health care, education options. Nearly anyone who is fit can join.

If you could do the same for science, I think that would be great. Our governance would need to change first though, and our culture. I don't trust that government employed scientists give good results over lies to promote an agenda. At least in our current private economy you have conflicting interests that can act as oversight.

But as automation and technology supply more of our needs with less labour, we're losing more and more jobs. This leads to people without jobs. If there are people in that group that are smart enough to be scientists, there's always room for more science.

chongli2• 12 years ago

We live in a society that values trading commodities

It has nothing to do with our society per se. All capitalist societies work this way. Externalities distort pricing in very predictable ways. The fact that science is undervalued and commodities trading overvalued comes right down to how externalities are produced and/or captured by these activities.

IndianAstronaut6• 12 years ago

I think of it kind of like being in the military. Enough money gets spent on the military, TONS of money gets spent on the military, and for much of it, the public sees minor benefit. But you know that when you join, that at least while you're serving, you are going to be guaranteed to have a place to stay, food to eat, health care, education options. Nearly anyone who is fit can join.

When I was doing my PhD, that is all I was really asking for. Honestly, I would have been okay with making the $40k salary per year for the rest of my life if I got to do the work I loved. But even that was not even remotely guaranteed.

Fortunately I had some good software skills from my bio phd so I could land a job.

michaelochurch3• 12 years ago

You rarely talk to anyone who says "I want to make a lot of money so I'm going to be a researcher!"

I'm not a fan of generational hate, but for the generations that were the architects of this corporatized society, an academic job meant that you wouldn't be rich, but that money wouldn't really be a problem for you. You'd have a lifestyle comparable to about $120k in the Midwest, adjusted for cost-of-living (but coastal property also wasn't as skewed). The humiliating day-to-day struggles of the poor are hostile to the life of the mind, and the earlier generations knew it.

Hence, you have Boomer professors, even with the best intentions, championing the academic career because it has been good to them. If college advisors weren't picked from the most successful 1-2% of those who attempt PhDs, you wouldn't see the smartest of every generation shoehorned into these programs. (And yes, my experience was that almost all of the top students took an academic path at first, though some, like me, left as early as one year into a PhD program. Sure, there are a few who start Facebooks or are hand-picked to be proteges of hedge fund managers, but the other 95% of top talent veers academic-- until their illusions pop.)

So... while it's true that no one went into academia expecting to be rich, they also expected lives where money wasn't really a problem: they'd be able to buy a house, raise kids, travel abroad now and then, and because college profs respected reciprocity in admissions, beat college admissions without a fancy prep school (those being at a price which most professors would still find out of reach, even in the better times). And they got totally fucked, relative to that promise.

Fede_V• 12 years ago

"Why does anyone think science is a good job?"

- Because you get paid to investigate some of the most interesting things in the world, in the company of mostly great people.

Science is awesome. Scientific careers right now are shitty, but that's because the current system is broken, not because of anything intrinsic to science. We should try to fix it.

untilHellbanned4• 12 years ago

Solutions?

I've tried quite HARD with Onarbor, https://onarbor.com, a crowdfunding for Science site, but its not exactly setting the world on fire. Would love if you have any specific suggestions.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

but what is broken? Perhaps there are far more smart people than there is need for? Its hard to break into a field where other people are actually that much better, its even harder to acknowledge it.

Osmium3• 12 years ago

It's certainly a bit grim. To offer a personal perspective...

* age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year

You can earn more than that (and younger) if you're prepared to travel outside the US, though it's still not great. I'm hesitant to share personal details, but I'm personally in my mid-twenties and just starting a "postdoc" (in a sense; still waiting to defend my thesis), and I'm earning quite a bit more than that, albeit in an expensive city and with a large tax/student loan burden.

I'd like to do a postdoc in the US next year, but I'd have to take a large pay cut to do it, which is something I'm on the fence about–I figure you're only young once, and money isn't everything, but I can't help but feel I'd be being taken advantage of just because I happen to enjoy doing science, and the additional opportunity cost would be high too. Is it worth it? I'm not sure.

Beyond that... I wrote a much longer comment but deleted it. The fact is, academia is in an unhealthy place right now, and there's quite so much wrong with it that it's very difficult to articulate. Where do you begin? Whether to even stay in academia or leave is a question that seems to be discussed a lot lately, certainly among my colleagues, and I expect to see a lot more threads like this in the future.

Edit: Actually, I should add, that despite being in a decent place now, I had to unexpectedly work without pay for a time last year due a (ahem) 'funding hiccup.' This experience was so very terrible at the time that I'm surprised I didn't just give up on the PhD right then. To explain: in the UK, STEM funding is typically 3 years, and when that runs out you're in trouble: you can't go and get another job because you need to finish your thesis to get your PhD. Most people can't finish a PhD in 3 years (unsurprisingly). Some people manage to get extra funding from somewhere or start postdocs while still technically writing-up, but most people don't. Some people are told there will be extra funding which never materialises, or doesn't arrive on time. Several of my friends ended up going back home to live with their parents to write-up (and are still there); this is not uncommon. I know someone else who ended up living in a hostel. Once you've started the PhD you're invested, and the longer you do it the harder it is to walk away. The real kicker to me is that a lot of people accept this and think it's okay.

cozzyd• 12 years ago

The situation in bio seems dire, but in physics our postdocs are typically $50k+ (obviously depends on where).

DaveWalk21• 12 years ago

Where do you begin? Whether to even stay in academia or leave is a question that seems to be discussed a lot

The best thing you can do for your career is decide, right this minute, what you want to do. Do it as soon as humanly psosible.

The reason, I suspect, that this issue is cropping up is that graduate schools are incredibly bad at career development, and it will take at least an entire generation before the culture changes completely. Administrators in general are doing their absolute best and that's a great step. But it's the lab leaders/PIs that are culturally stuck in the past.

Source: recent PhD in biological sciences, spent years improving career development at school, have Real Job now

jacquesm• 12 years ago

You forgot to mention that the likes of Elsevier then make more money off their research than they do.

noelwelsh• 12 years ago

These figures might be correct for the US, but the UK is much better about things. As a PhD student (a teaching assistance) I received a tax-free income that was equivalent to earning about £20K a year, which is about USD30K. I think post-docs are in the range £25-35K. We also don't have the brutal tenure system.

Iepai2eg• 12 years ago

I wish. Most EPSRC-funded PhD student are paid the minimum EPSRC rate [1], currently £13,863 (or USD 20,965).

[1] http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/skills/students/help/minimumpay/

nether• 12 years ago

age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year

Podunk U in the midwest gets filled with MIT/Harvard degreed profs, who couldn't wait for existing profs to die off at their alma maters. It also captures the Harvard rejects with 4.0 GPA's, 2300 SAT's, 12 AP courses. Extreme selectivity at the elite institutions improves the quality of the non-elite schools. Better profs, better students. Does Podunk U have the potential to churn out some great students then? Even if its prestige isn't as good as an elite.

Chronic304• 12 years ago

Since your brought up the prestige issue. Prestige is a very important component when applying to jobs, meeting people, or going to graduate school. So no, Podunk U will not churn out great students.

speeder• 12 years ago

I am currently unemployed.

My mother is nagging me to join a masters degree so I can get a job as professor in a public university.

She does not think it is a good job, she thinks it is a easy job, her words were: "I think you are smart enough to pass the tests to get the position."

That is because in a public university, after some time tenured you can't be ever fired unless you commit a serious crime, so it is a "good job" in the sense you will never be unemployed again...

At least this is the situation in Brazil.

IndianAstronaut6• 12 years ago

When I was doing my PhD I. The US, I seriously considered the Brazil option. Took Portuguese courses and everything. I bailed though in the middle of my degree.

However, eu falo um poucu de Portugues.

xaa3• 12 years ago

I'm 27, skipped postdoc, and make $60K in a staff scientist position. I am able to get away with this because bioinformatics is in huge demand. At my institution this also does not preclude a later tenure-track position.

Basically, you have to play it smart, find a niche, and you can beat the averages.

cli• 12 years ago

Hello, could you please describe what being a staff scientist is about? It seems that you are someone who does research at a university but is not a professor. Do you work under a professor?

DaveWalk21• 12 years ago

Do you see yourself in that later tenure-track position? As a bioninformaticist I'm sure your skills will be in demand. I have seen such offers on the lab research side of things but I've been told it's deceptive: very few "research associates" (what you call someone who can't be a postdoc anymore) actually transition. But I do wonder if this is because it's a relatively new concept.

analog313• 12 years ago

I read Greenspun's article. It's certainly sobering, and that's coming from a PhD with a decent industry job. Still, one concept struck me:

>> Consider taking the same high IQ and work ethic, going into business, and being put on the fast track at a company such as General Electric.

My concern is that "work ethic" is not an independent, immutable trait, but is instead situational. If so, then a high work ethic, transplanted to General Electric, could become a low work ethic. Some folks may need their motivation to come from what they are doing, more than others. Those folks aren't helped much by a simple list of what jobs pay the most.

rtpg• 12 years ago

There seems to be a strong myth with my friends in graduate school that somehow everything you're forced to do in "industry" is terrible boring busywork and could not possibly be interesting, and that a career in research, while tiring, means you can work on what you want.

Truth is that so long as somebody is above you, it's very possible to have to work on things imposed on you, and in research that can mean working on topics you disagree with, along with all the office politics that come with it.

I think someone who has done both industry and research can comment, but my impression has always been that they're mostly the same thing if you're between 20 and 40.

lotsofmangos2• 12 years ago

Science isn't a good job.

It is a calling.

Which is why the insincere find it so easy to take them for a ride.

dougabug• 12 years ago

I've had friends whose careers have followed more or less that trajectory. It seems to me that there's an arbitrage possibility here, tremendously undervalued intellectual capital.

sebastianavina• 12 years ago

that only happens in the US, in Mexico, you get scholarships from the State, If you're studying a Master Degree, first of all, most of the PNPC degrees are free (the best degrees indexed by conacyt), the mexican state gives you a scholarship for about $8000 pesos monthly, (most people fresh out of the bs earns about that so it's ok), for a Phd, they pay you about 12k which is ok too, and for a postdoc pays about 18k. All good science programs are free, on top research centers like Cinvestav, Cimat, UNAM, you name it. you have mobility (that means that the mexican state pays you for making and internship on a university abroad), and well, maybe in the industry is hard to get a good with such credentials, and if you are a very good prospect you could top about 100k pesos in a top white collar job, but, lets be fair, is very hard to get one of those jobs. So getting a PhD is basically a very easy and good route to have financial stability. Also, there are a lot of opportunities on the state universities around the country for people with PhDs.

Sad fact, there is no will in the general population for this programs. I'm studying right now a master degree on applied statistics and we are a generation of 6 persons.

yodsanklai• 12 years ago

Maybe that's the average trajectory in the US (and not for a successful scientist since she fails in the end!). But let's not forget that the US is not the only place where a scientists can find a job. There are many research institutes or universities in the world where someone with a PhD from Stanford and a postdoc from MIT (and less than that) could find a stable position.

Besides, one has to consider the other options available. Would the person in your example be happier had she taken a different path? who knows.

I wouldn't discourage people to try and work in that field if that's what they want to do.

hudibras2• 12 years ago

Greenspun loses a lot of credibility by ranting on child support, though.

selimthegrim2• 12 years ago

Did somebody take him to the cleaners once? He's had all his recent children by surrogate and there is rarely any mention of his wife (I believe he has one) - it seems to be a neurosis with him.

cryoshon2• 12 years ago

I don't have a PhD, and won't be getting one. While it's something I'd love to do for the sake of knowledge, it simply isn't workable money wise, family wise, or time wise. The postdocs and graduate students work 6 days a week for 10 hours each day for a pittance.

I'd like to think that all these gripes about science are reaching some sort of boiling point, and that some solution is right around the corner-- except that I'm here in the trenches, so I know there is no such thing happening. People suffer through it, grumbling once in a while, but refusing to attempt to better their own circumstances in any way other than more work.

Many of them lead outwardly lonely or empty lives spent slaving away at their lab benches or tissue culture rooms. They cannot afford to replace their old clothes, phones, or bicycles. They live in houses with 4-6 other people, even into their 30s. When they publish their paper, it is their supervisor's name that is noticed. The bitterness and beatdown demeanor they express suffuses many of their non-work conversations.

Science is a pretty bad life in academia. Industry scientists still need to muddle around in academia for at least some period of time, but on the whole they seem much better off... except that most people from the academic side don't consider them to be scientists at all.

Retra3• 12 years ago

except that most people from the academic side don't consider them to be scientists at all.

Are they publishing their work in a way that other people can use? Or are they grinding out the meat of patents and trade secrecy?

veryluckyxyz• 12 years ago

If that is all a career in science will cost you, you are one of the lucky few. For many others, it costs a lot more. If your significant other is also in science, bonus costs for you! If you came to US on a student visa and want to continue living in US and you spent your OPT working as a post-doc, more bonus costs for you! If after many years of postdoc, you have not been able to get a tenure-track position, even more bonus costs for you!

One has to try though.

greymeatball• 12 years ago

I know it's N of 1 but I did grad school with a wife and kid both at home, all of us supported on my typical student stipend. Then lived in one of the most expensive locales in the country as a postdoc, again, wife was at home with the kid(s). Started making $45k, 2.5 years later was at $55k (you do know that postdocs can ask for raises, right?). Now in a tenure-track faculty position, have federal funding, and making $125k/year. It's not impossible to make it work, and I'd do it all again.

theorique2• 12 years ago

You're one of the fortunate ones - and undoubtedly you worked extremely hard to get into that position. But many people also work hard but do not wind up with the same reward at the end of the road.

paulmd• 12 years ago

Yup - "STEM jobs pay well" is just wrong at this point. Neither Science nor Mathematics pays worth a damn, what people actually mean when they say this is "go work in technology or engineering".

brianwawok2• 12 years ago

Can you draw that conclusion from this article?

I think Academia is not paying that well. I think a lot of these post-docs could make a lot more in industry, no? I think if you are willing to sell your soul to the devil, most STEM pays pretty dang well...

IndianAstronaut6• 12 years ago

I think a lot of these post-docs could make a lot more in industry, no?

If you are in a programming heavy field, yes, else no. If you did biochemistry, developmental biology, etc, you are SOL.

ryanSrich3• 12 years ago

Yeah I never understood the "get a job in STEM" anecdote. As a designer/developer I don't really place myself in the STEM category. A more accurate anecdote would be "learn how to program a bit, figure out how to solve some problems, take a bunch of different classes, work for a few years learning how to do real world things and you can easily pull in $80k + in any city in the US". If money is your main goal then I don't see a better path in any other profession.

boyaka2• 12 years ago

Take the technology and engineering out of STEM and what are you left with? :)

cafard• 12 years ago

In the cultural historian Burkhardt's letters, I saw one to a young friend saying, in essence, What do you want to be a university professor for? Become a high school teacher, and you'll earn enough to marry and start a family. This was 19th-Century Switzerland (or possibly Germany, I forget).

mason240• 12 years ago

So what can actually be done? Simply adding more funding won't change the grad student -> post doc -> tenured professor system.

brianwawok2• 12 years ago

You could create more tenured prof positions with more funding, which would obviously help right?

dnautics9• 12 years ago

so waste taxpayer money on more positions which create more postdocs and grad students? Just kicks the problem down the road.

What if there's a limited social capacity to do science? As in, at any given time there's it's only worth it to allow some percentage of people to do science (and not all of them will be doing science). Throwing more money at the problem will only muddy the waters by drowning out the good voices with junk, and what you will see is thousands of journals, and more fraud and bad science percolating through the upper journals. Hmm...

adrianN• 12 years ago

Each tenured professor produces PhDs way above replacement rate. A tenure spot only opens when the Professor leaves academia, but during his career he produces dozens of PhDs. The system can't work out like that.

pcrh4• 12 years ago

You have to stop graduating useless PhDs. Graduate students, and often postdocs (though more justifiably), are recruited primarily in the expectation that they will provide work for their advisors/Profs.

If Profs could no longer benefit directly from the labor of grad students, in the manner that teachers don't directly benefit from the work of students, then academia would be less inclined to churn them out. Supply would go down and both average quality and salaries would go up.

DaveWalk21• 12 years ago

I liked to think about taking in half the number of PhDs but increasing their salary, focusing only on applicants that can realistically produce. Or even better, shortening the PhD to 3-4 years, forget the salary altogether, and turning it into more of an apprenticeship, with the postdoc being the workhorse of academia.

eykanal• 12 years ago

Excellent post. Even more depressing, the author didn't discuss the fact that when this young researcher—who just finished a PhD and postdoc training in a specific research area—applies for her first grant, she is effectively required to submit a grant for whatever topics are "hot" at that moment. These topics may not be directly related to her field of interest, and may be something she has very little expertise in. However, by writing a proposal in simply whatever area she finds interesting, she is taking her already dismal chances of obtaining funding and decreasing them further.

Even MORE depressing, once our young female scientist has done a good job, built her lab, and is now in her mid-forties, if she really wants to improve her pay at that point she will have such attractive options as "department chair", which adds a lot of non-research administrative work to an already overworked person. What fun!

rthomas6• 12 years ago

What is the economics of this? I never understood why this is the case now in academia but it apparently didn't used to be. What changed?

haihaibye• 12 years ago

https://biomickwatson.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/nbt-2706-f...

ergzay• 12 years ago

This all comes back to profitable work generation. MUCH of science just isn't profitable, you're usually doing something that simply shows that something ISN'T possible. This, to the economy, was a worthless result. The only value was to stop other's from also spending money on that same worthless result. That's fundamentally why science doesn't pay well.

pcrh4• 12 years ago

Perhaps it isn't that science is unprofitable, it just isn't immediately profitable.

Pretty much the entire modern economy, i.e. those parts that don't depend primarily on manual labor, politicking or usury, is founded on the work of scientists and engineers.

djoshea2• 12 years ago

Certainly a depressing perspective, but as a Stanford PhD student (neuro), my thoughts have always been that pursuing science was a decision to work on the problems that interested me at the _expense_ of not receiving good financial compensation. The particular things I'm interested in studying happen to exist primarily within academia (and non-university academic institutions like Allen Brain and Janelia), because the neuroscience work being done in industry (today) is far more primitive (e.g. EEG). This may change in the near future, and I'll reconsider my options then, but for now, I'm under no delusion that my salary (~30k) is anywhere near what it could be for an EE/CS in industry. That being said, if the amount of bullshit and politics becomes so burdensome that it kills the attractiveness of the science, then I'd leave.

koof• 12 years ago

I think you might find this article relevant. I think that liking your work shouldn't be in exchange for fair compensation and work conditions.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/...

djoshea2• 12 years ago

Read the article, but I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with it. Of course I don't think that scientists "should" make less money as they're doing something they love, but since when are salaries determined by how much someone "deserves" to make? My working conditions are excellent; I'm at Stanford in a well-funded lab. And I decided and continue to believe that this is research that I'd like to do despite the financial opportunity cost.

If I'm reading it correctly, this article seems to suggest that the advice that pursuing work that you find fulfilling is itself responsible for lowering wages, which may be true in as much as people are willing to accept lower wages if they enjoy the work despite having better options. But what would you propose as an alternative? Pursuing work that you find less fulfilling in exchange for more money? That's not a sacrifice I'm willing to make, and I've been privileged with enough opportunity and financial security to have a choice. Of course everyone has different objective functions they're seeking to optimize, so I see why others would make different choices, which is all good by me.

DaveWalk21• 12 years ago

If you truly have your expectations properly set, then my hat is off to you. The difficulty, I believe, comes as time goes on and problems such as a family, prompt student debt repayment and savings come into play. (That's why I love the metaphor from the article: grad school costs you your firstborn.)

To put it another way: do you think you are paid enough for the quality of work you do? And at what salary would you rather work on something less interesting? I always thought part of the problem was that salaries are mostly set--or that's what researchers think--and therefore they accept whatever the system assigns to them.

Balgair• 12 years ago

Ask HN: Ok, well, im in my first year of a neuro PhD. I returned to school to beat the credential creep and partly to change careers. I have burning questions, but the funding is just not there at my uni. Also, as it is a career change, my grades aren't the best, as I lack the foundation in neuro (was EE before). What now?

epicureanideal• 12 years ago

Start a startup and go on academic leave permanently to pursue your dream? "I left to found a company and never went back, I've been too busy." sounds pretty good to me. But you should obviously get more opinions than my 2 minute consideration of your situation.

pcrh4• 12 years ago

Where are you located? If you're in one of the "hubs", i.e. Bay Area, San Diego, Boston, Cambridge (UK), etc, identify the local networking organizations and get exposure to what others are doing, both in industry and academia.

If you're not in a hub, get to one....

dnautics9• 12 years ago

"beating the credential creep" is just about the worst reason to get a PhD, so I'm going to be a jerk and start by saying "you're part of the problem". But thank you for considering changing careers. What you have identified is exactly correct. If your institution is unable to raise funds in neuro that is a BAD SIGN since Obama promised a heap of money for neuro, and it is one of the few areas that is modestly well-funded (of course a lot of 'other players' jumped in to try to capture that money too so there's now, surprise surprise, more competition for that grant pool).

If you were an EE, even with bad grades, you should be able to find a startup that will want you, that is, if you're young and want to play the startup lottery. Another thing to consider is to get a master's in EE or a related engineering discipline if you want a 'second chance' to bring your grades up. Sure, it costs money, but it's only one or two years and masters are very highly valued in the Engineering disciplines.

DaveWalk21• 12 years ago

The funding is just not there at my uni

Does that mean you won't be able to continue? As other posters suggested, if your "burning questions" are about leaving, perhaps you should set yourself up with an Exit Master's and use that to start your new career in neuro, depending on your situation and university.

Feel free to pop over to the ScienceCareers forum for more specific advice: http://scforum.sciencecareers.org/viewforum.php?f=1

throwaway-43212• 12 years ago

This hits just way too close to home to keep a straight face :-(

If anyone on HN has any questions/doubts/need details, AMA. I'm a Life Sciences Post-Doc at a major US university. I'll try my best to answer (no personal details please).

sosuke4• 12 years ago

I loved science as a child, genetics was my hobby. The more I read, the more I learned, and the more I learned that to make a difference would require a monumental effort. To learn about the world, the understand the world, these are fun things. To unlock the secrets of the world puts you in a completely different category, and you need a certain drive and focus that not many have.

My view of STEM and liberal arts have begun to merge. To excel academically in either requires devotion, and you have to learn 10 years to have the base knowledge enough to even start making headway into new territory. The idea of a 10,000 hour expert doesn't work through college education.

Going to college used to be an affair for the intellectual elite, something that you did when you had family that could already cover living expenses for their children. The pursuit of knowledge was because you wanted to, and there wasn't often jobs connected to degrees. That is different now, thanks to available credit and a golden carrot people from all corners can sit in university, and get an education. The costs are deferred, hidden, for their future selves to contend with.

Knowing what you know now, would you again go into Life Sciences with the thought of making a living in it? Would you go again perhaps because you love Life Sciences, that is your hobby, your passion, but do it on the side and get a 'regular job'. Maybe you could finish getting your PhD, decide that the joy of discovery was worth the time and cost, but then go into a more lucrative but perhaps unrelated field.

Whatever happens, the price, the time of learning everything I assume you have learned has value. I took a different path, but I loved my 2 years of community college that I did as a hobby, learning about history, art, geology has all brought richness to my life.

You're on HN, you have a hacker mind I assume, you see the startups. You have a valuable asset in your knowledge that most (top 20% easy) don't have. Look at the world, find a problem, solve it, do it on the side like programmers bootstrap. You can make the future what you want, but an education is very valuable, and a really cool thing to have done.

throwaway-43212• 12 years ago

TL;DR Well, there isn't one, except an apology for the somewhat ranty writing.

---

You can make the future what you want, but an education is very valuable, and a really cool thing to have done.

Yes, as is having composed a symphony, painted a masterpiece or written a magnum opus. But none of those require an investment of youth(time) along with an opportunity cost that is near-impossible to recoup, in more ways than one.

I understand the essence of what you are conveying in terms of value and I was motivated by primarily the same ideals and thoughts before I decided to dedicate my life to science and research, discarding a tried-and-true (by social standards) career as a medical doctor (and before anyone asks, no I can't go back, it's too late for that).

The romance of science is one thing, paying the bills is another. And watching your fellow college-mates make (undeserved, imo) high salaries with far less education than you, makes you question many things, including that pesky thing called your career choice.

I have been a long term (~6 years) HN user (lurker). Here, in front of my own eyes, I have seen Web 1.0 implode, HN explode and the birth of Web 2.0 as well as it being raised, milked and put to pasture. I have seen HN legends, both companies and people, come and go.

Somewhere, within me, lies a dreamer, the same dude who lured me into the romance of science, whispering the possibilities that may lie in life-sciences+software entrepreneurship. But that implies taking huge risks, not easily possible with a wife in the same science-boat and a very young kid. No real savings, coz life science doesn't really pay much in research. Can't go the ramen route, am almost (back) on it as a Post-Doc!

So, what are my possibilities? Anything that can open the doors to entrepreneurship, draw upon my polymath training (biology + software) and a deeply diverse skill-set (molecules-of-life + mostly python coding + systems administration). Hello HN! Any takers?

DaveWalk21• 12 years ago

I would also welcome anyone with concerns to join us at ScienceCareers, where we tackle this problem head on. There is a wealth of information in the articles, and many hidden gems at the forum: http://scforum.sciencecareers.org/viewforum.php?f=1

dnautics9• 12 years ago

I think it's important to consider that maybe scientists aren't worth paying that much. The average scientist is probably moving society forward, but I'm not so sure the median scientist is. Having been to a 'top 10' PhD program in a 'hard science' (chemistry), I am not sure 75% of the professors there were worth a dime. I am not sure 50% of the thesis defenses were, either (mine included).

This is in contrast to the doorman example, or in my case, being a Lyft driver (which pays more than being a postdoc). Every night, I help society out by providing a service that someone wants, and if you want to be more abstract, by keeping drunk people off the road.

I was able to raise $56,000 for an experiment in anticancer research. That doesn't seem like much (it isn't) but in retrospect it's about right. I asked for money for one experiment, and that's what I got. It doesn't pay my salary, but I probably don't deserve it (yet) until I've proven myself at least at one stage. Drug development is risky, why should society pay much more than the bare minimum to get it done?

acgourley• 12 years ago

I too have had interactions with academics I don't think society is benefiting from. I think it's important to say out loud - maybe we need less research scientists and when we do that we might work on more important areas with slightly better funding.

emodendroket2• 12 years ago

Is this any less true for the median lawyer or doctor or office worker or any other profession you care to name which involves more than the most basic skills?

dnautics9• 12 years ago

increasingly doctors and lawyers are coming up against this professionalism/credentialism creep.

noobiemcfoob2• 12 years ago

Your Lyft example is exactly the point of this article, and many other comments here.

Science, specifically academic pursuits, is not something that can be quantized in the now. The scientific work that enables us to live our lives, that enables that very Lyft app to function, wasn't made last month or even last year. These technologies are based on fundamental theories developed 30 or more years ago (centuries if you want to count the basic electronic theory that's enabled circuits).

Scientific research has practically $0 value in the now, but it is nigh impossible to say what value any specific scientist's work will have in 50 years. It is for that reason that science and its practitioners need to be seen as public service/benefit, not a business commodity. They aren't even playing the same game as CEOs

dsp1234• 12 years ago

This reminds me of a Quora answer[0] about what Mathematics graduate students do all day.

"And, indeed, you are lucky! After a hundred years or so, your idea (along with a bunch of other ideas) leads to the development of aquarium air pumps, an essential tool in the rapidly growing field of research on artificial goldfish habitats. Yay!"

[0] https://www.quora.com/What-do-grad-students-in-math-do-all-d...

dnautics9• 12 years ago

and because there's effectively no accountability, it's ripe to be gamed with fraud and cronyism. Although it is not a business commodity. The knee-jerk reaction of the 20th century is to fund public benefit causes using the government, but that's especially irresponsible when there is no accountability. It's a problem compounded by diminishing returns on science (low hanging fruit has been picked) creating a greater demand on money, a top-down funding structure, and nationalistic measuring contests. None of these are conducive to good science being done.

There is a demand for science. People like contributing to something bigger than themselves. Just, the demand may not be as big as we 'hope for it to be'. But 'get it done now' might not be the best approach to some parts of science... Often times discoveries that were a total schlep to get through become nearly trivialized, shortly after discovery, by an orthogonal set of technical enablements.

snowwrestler• 12 years ago

The best results of science develop into the fundamental theories that underpin every aspect of our way of life.

But the vast majority of science is not the best. And most scientists will spend their whole careers trying to make a big dent in the unknown--but fail. Most make a very small dent, or none at all.

From a long-term social perspective, we need the best and brightest to rise to the top of science and push it higher. But that's not the same thing as providing a working wage and middle class+ lifestyle for everyone who wishes to work as a scientist.

api6• 12 years ago

That's like saying you can dispense with all the members of a football team except the star players.

Science is an exploratory discipline. You don't know what's most valuable until you've got the benefit of often 20-50 years of hindsight.

person_19872• 12 years ago

No, it isn't like saying that.

It is saying that you can't expect all the players on the football team to collect the same salary as the star players, which incidentally is exactly what happens.

letitgo123453• 12 years ago

Science is a very stochastic process though. Yes, not a lot of research is eventually useful but that's because chance can play a huge role. If the success rate is 1%, then investing less will not necessarily increase the success rate. It will decrease the absolute rate of discovery.

eli_gottlieb7• 12 years ago

Why is the median utility a better point estimate of scientific effectiveness than the expected value?

tezzer• 12 years ago

I've contracted for several government agencies and research firms, and I've noticed only PhD's get to run laboratories. Without one, you hit a glass ceiling rather quickly (by which I mean you don't make the leap from 100Kish to 200Kish salaries)

kevinalexbrown• 12 years ago

"Why do we do this to ourselves?" She asked me. "We train forever and ever, live in near poverty, work insane hours—all of it to get jobs that don’t exist, as tenure track faculty. Why do we suffer this way?"

Because it's fun and fulfilling. My lab has had people who left banking and consulting gigs, at extraordinary financial cost, measured in dollars. Neither seemed to regret the switch much, but many who go the other way feel the same.

Planning on a tenure track job isn't very reasonable, it's like planning for a successful startup, I suppose. But right now I get to do exactly what I want to be doing. The 'premium' economists would say I pay is worth it to me, for now.

Retra3• 12 years ago

It's not that fun though. It's a fun _dream_, and a dream that is worth chasing in theory, but most of us never come close to living it. Instead you just say "well, I'm sure things will work out after the hard part is over."

There is no reliable point where the hardship ends. It's just sacrifice or career change for most.

DaveWalk21• 12 years ago

I respectfully disagree, and think "because it's fun" is a dangerous precedent to set.

When I was in grad school there was an informational poster in the lobby that said something to this effect: "Why are you in lab at 12am on a Friday night? Because science is your passion, and you are awesome. Good job."

I should have graffiti-ed "THIS IS PROMOTING AN UNHEALTHY LIFESTYLE" next to it. Why should we encourage this behavior -- especially in graduate students, lowest on the totem pole? How many PIs burn the midnight oil, versus living their life with their families? It felt so degrading.

One of the most valuable things I learned from career development in grad school was that, in the real world, you can demand to be paid what you're worth. (And, ironically, you are respected more for it.) I think it is this, more than the actual salary, that is responsible for the depression seen in the article.

varelse3• 12 years ago

Grad school cost me close to ~$100M... My bad...

No I am not exaggerating. I would have been #3 at a very successful tech company had I chosen it over grad school and that's about half what #1 and #2 are worth these days.

That said, over a decade after I tripled my salary in a day by fleeting my post-doc for the dotcom boom, everything I learned in academia suddenly became relevant and continues to increase in relevance every year.

puredemo• 12 years ago

What became more relevant that you learned?

varelse3• 12 years ago

bioinformatics and machine learning

sosuke4• 12 years ago

I remember watching Prince of Darkness, the students were in science.

  [Walter is studying quantum physics]
  Walter: Why do I want a Ph.D. in this?
  Catherine: Particle beam weapons, research grants...
  Walter: A millionaire when I'm forty! Now I remember!

That is what I thought as well, I guess science doesn't pay.

fergie• 12 years ago

As a well paid software consultant, I totally envy my friends and family who get to work in academia. I would love to do a PhD no matter how poor it made me.

vph• 12 years ago

All this person is focusing on is $, $, $, and more $. If you want money, get a MS degree. PhD's don't get you high-salary jobs.

api6• 12 years ago

It's simple: we have de-funded science just like we've de-funded other liberal pursuits.

People like Peter Thiel are right about the drought of fundamental innovation since the early 70s, but they are wrong in other ways that ultimately render their arguments void and hypocritical. Thiel backs the same right-libertarian economic policies that caused this problem in the first place. The reason we stopped going to the Moon and inventing new paradigms in computing is because we stopped funding it.

The simple fact is that only three kinds of entities can fund basic research in most fields:

(1) Governments.

(2) Gigantic corporations with entrenched monopolies so profitable that they can afford to spend like governments (e.g. the old Bell Labs). Usually deep lasting monopolies of that sort are government-granted... again Bell Labs is a good example. So this goes back to governments or alternately government can be seen as the ultimate super-monopoly.

(3) Individuals with absolutely stratospheric net worth (over one billion at a minimum). The problem is that there are few of these and fewer who really get science and care about it that much.

You can't -- and shouldn't be able to -- patent a law of nature. Discovering a fundamental principle that led eventually to practical fusion power, interstellar travel, or radical life extension (to give examples) would be among the most valuable acts in human history, but its economic value would be pretty darn close to $0. There is no way to directly monetize it. As a result, markets cannot efficiently fund basic research. There is no way to securitize it -- no marketable financial vehicle for valuing it, capitalizing it, or delivering returns on it.

Monetize-ability doesn't come in until later -- until engineers have assimilated the new scientific discovery or principle and designed practical and workable technologies based around it. Usually these are different people than the original discoverers. Sometimes this process takes generations.

Science won't come back from its present abyss until and unless we get over market fundamentalism and realize that there are some classes of human endeavor that markets just aren't very good at funding.

It's a fact that's been true throughout history too. All the wonders of the ancient world (pyramids, Roman roads and aqueducts, etc.) were built by governments. None were built by commerce. All the wonders of the modern world -- the Moon landings, the Internet, the ISS, the Human Genome Project, the harnessing of the atom -- are either wholly government funded or were set into motion by a substantial initial investment of government money. The only big set of counterexamples I can think of are mostly out of Bell Labs, which was funded by a government-backed telephone monopoly.

If you think Xerox Parc is a counterexample, go find the Engelbart demo. Parc was doing stuff that was trail-blazed by a DOD-funded SRI project a decade earlier. If you think Elon Musk's ventures are counterexamples, understand that both Tesla and especially SpaceX are built directly on massive amounts of government R&D over the past 50 years. SpaceX is basically commercializing a lot of NASA (and Soviet, and German) technology. Elon himself says this, to his credit.

Most libertarians are simultaneously pro-tech and anti-state-investment. This requires an act of willful blindness and ideologically driven self-delusion on the same level as believing that the Earth is 6000 years old and mankind coexisted with dinosaurs. There is simply zero historical evidence that you can have that cake and eat it too. This is a special case of the more general "public good denialism" of right-libertarian and conservative ideology. Market fundamentalism is, quite ironically, America's own version of Soviet dogma.

The deeper underlying reality is that to make a huge step forward like this requires enough capital to effectively insulate a group of smart motivated people from the market (and other forces and demands) long enough to enable them to try something fundamentally new. Nothing like that is ever profitable from the get-go. You can't bootstrap it. It must be a "pure act," almost Nietzschean, undertaken for the goal itself and nothing more. "We will go to the moon" or "we will build a pyramid" because... we decided to. Period. Only once the trail has been blazed can commerce come in and line the street with shops and houses. At that point you've de-risked the path enough that bootstrapping and venture funding and similar things become thinkable.

I'm not anti-market. I reject that fundamentalism too, and generally reject fundamentalism as a way of thinking. Governments can fund basic research because they can, but they stink at taking it beyond the discovery or prototype phase. I'm just saying that markets are good at some things, but not others. Market should be free to act where they are effective, but they should be part of a larger political landscape that encompasses multiple mechanisms that are (hopefully) given jurisdiction where they work best.

Everything I wrote here will remain true until someone figures out a way to profitably fund such things within a market framework. Given the monstrous challenges involved I'm not holding my breath. Patents would be a poor mechanism, since they would have the perverse effect of shutting down research in a whole area for a long time.

gphil• 12 years ago

Wow, I wish I could upvote this comment even more. It's a much more well-thought out version of what I wanted to say on this topic. Thank you.

I'll just add that it seems to me (in the US at least) that one's compensation is more proportional to ones's proximity to financial transactions and the size of those transactions, rather than it is to your overall value creation for society (contrary to what most libertarians, especially those in Silicon Valley, like to argue.) This is why financiers and executives make by far the most money while teachers and scientists make peanuts despite producing great value for society.

api6• 12 years ago

is more proportional to ones's proximity to financial transactions

Wow! I had precisely the same realization years ago -- compensation is based in part on proximity to the transaction and the relationship seems exponential. That's why salespeople quite often make more than inventors, engineers, etc. and why the final commercializers of tech make orders of magnitude more than those that develop it (e.g. Zuckerberg vs. Tim Berners-Lee).

The other factor is equity ownership and other forms of leverage.

There's an old atheist joke: that we should teach the Bible in school so we'd have more atheists. A similar effect caused me to lose my faith in at least naive and right-leaning forms of libertarianism. I worked for a while in business consulting. The only thing that kept me from becoming a full-on socialist was then working for a while as a government contractor. Both business and government are sausage factories. You just don't want to know.

In the end I ended up cured of most forms of political fundamentalism. If there were quick easy sound-bite answers to these things, we would not be struggling with these same problems over and over again. They would be solved and we'd be walking around in some kind of sci-fi white toga world.

sirmarksalot• 12 years ago

This is known as the "public good" problem. Hard-line libertarians and conservatives deny that such a thing exists, while moderate conservatives acknowledge the possibility, but define it so narrowly as to be meaningless. Other right-leaning individuals acknowledge both the existence and value of public goods, but have such distrust of government that they'd rather go without, or failing that, allow a single company to impose its own form of taxation.

TimPC• 12 years ago

Interestingly, funding fundamental research is one of the key areas where Peter Thiel's views diverge from the majority of libertarians. He's said a fair amount on the necessity of funding fundamental research. He has significant complaints about the volume of researchers, but that's quite different from what you've suggested. My view of his positions would be that he favours earlier aggressive weeding leading to smaller graduate programs, fewer postdocs, fewer tenure track positions and potentially fewer tenure positions, but the positions that exist getting higher per capita funding to do quality work on important problems. He's likely close to assuming deterministic-optimism if you believe the best research is far closer to random we're probably currently funding in a fairly effective way. However, if you believe there are 10x scientists in the way there are 10X programmers, and also believe that 10X scientist strongly correlates with being successful in other fields, then we're probably funding in a system that strongly encourages those 10x scientists to work outside academia and potentially outside of science entirely.

We probably agree a lot on political philosophy: I believe markets are the best mechanism for solving many problems, but there are many problems they suck at and the purpose of government is to intervene in those problems. Fundamental research falls into one of the major categories of problems markets are poor at solving: high value creation with zero-to-little value capture results in markets being unable to create the high value. Other interesting categories include severe negative externalities, and prisoners-dilemma type issues where we often need incentives to break getting stuck near individual 'optima' that lead to societal suboptimal solutions.

api6• 12 years ago

I sounded rough on Peter, but I loved Zero to One. It's one of the best non-fiction books I've read in years. I think he's right on most things.

I still sympathize with the end goal of libertarianism: a society in which force and fraud are relegated to history. The problem is that we are nowhere even close to that. Our world is still absolutely ruled by force and deception. Governments are basically large gangs of people with big guns and their authority and power comes from their willingness to use them.

When you pluck isolated ideas out of some future moral utopia and try to apply them here and now, you run into problems around unintended consequences. Getting from here to there requires deeper thinking that takes context into account. We have to chart a course from our current state of affairs to one that is more civilized.

In more concrete terms: when you take a world that's ultimately run by violent gangsters and then take away compensatory "hacks" like wealth redistribution and regulation and public goods expenditures, what you end up with is actually a step back from the kind of future humanistic libertarianism actually envisions. It's basically unilateral disarmament. The gangsters are now free to get more powerful, and they will not return the favor.

varelse3• 12 years ago

IMO if the US were willing to throw money at science like it's willing to throw it at the military and entitlements, it would generate a pile of junk science and enough occasional gems to more than pay for it in the long-term, something I can't say of the things I initially listed. Our national priorities down to the individual just flat out suck across the board and that's everyone's fault.

pnathan2• 12 years ago

Basically this. In order to do heavy duty blue water research, you have to consider values in the 20-200 year range, which only gigantically long-lived institutions or the rare individual can do.

You have to burn incredible amounts of money, with illdefined returns that are highly risky, and then keep doing it, constantly, for a long period of time.

so it goes.

api6• 12 years ago

Another way of thinking about it is this:

Governments can make these kinds of investments because (as you say) they might still be around in 200 years, and because they can recoup ROI on them via overall GDP growth captured through taxation. They can capture the upside by doing so at the scale of the entire national economy instead of worrying about monetizing minutia.

So it is a form of venture capital, in a sense, just at the national scale.

rwallace• 12 years ago

As someone who identifies as a pragmatic libertarian generally in favor of smaller government, I've upvoted your comment. Markets are great for a lot of things, but they undersupply public goods, and scientific progress is a critical public good on which everything else depends. Underfunding science is a grave - perhaps fatal - error.

jqm2• 12 years ago

I agree. The problem is I believe, a society does some great things and then the bureaucrats step in. Game over. People lived in Egypt long after the pyramids were built, and they didn't build any more.

Giving money to Washington or Brussels isn't likely to fuel innovation right now. Until governance (in the West anyway) is streamlined and focused again, I don't think they are going to be capable of any major research that society can afford. They can barely roll out a major website, and even that costs way too much.

leoc• 12 years ago

De-funded science? Not to any dramatic extent in the US, at least. AFAICS US science funding has roughly plateaued or declined only shallowly since about 2003, after decades of post-war increases. The main problem with salaries, career opportunities and so on is apparently that the number of people pursuing careers in science has risen to meet, then exceed, the increased funding. (Plus probably that an increasing share of the money is being funnelled off into university administration salaries, Elsevier and Bertelsmann and so on.)

eli_gottlieb7• 12 years ago

The main problem with salaries, career opportunities and so on is apparently that the number of people pursuing careers in science has risen to meet, then exceed, the increased funding. (Plus probably that an increasing share of the money is being funnelled off into university administration salaries, Elsevier and Bertelsmann and so on.)

The reason is much more fundamental: the Profzi Scheme, http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1144. As long as scientific labor is pyramidal, foisting most of the actual research work on "trainees" while professors mainly write grants, there will always be a structural necessity of far more trainee workers than there can ever be permanent positions. Thus, most trained scientists will always be employed outside their field or not at all, simply because a finite world cannot accommodate an indefinite exponential (recursively reproducing) increase in the number of scientists.

(That said, science funding as a percentage of GDP has dropped, and actually dropped in inflation-adjusted dollars with the Great Recession.)

niche• 12 years ago

The issue here is that you are focused on: something vague (a PhD) and a quantitative psuedo paycheck. Money is bound by numbers, a primal abstraction of the mind. Focus on what is most meaningful to you, get it, chew it, digest it, vomit it out, study your vomit and repeat. Everything else will fall into place. You are limitless.

pvaldes2• 12 years ago

This is totally true.

harmonicon2• 12 years ago

My first college major was biology. I was determined to become a "scientist", inspired by all the giants I learned about in high school. I immediately found a job working in a lab after getting to college.

However, I quickly become disillusioned about the career prospect. In the textbook, it seems like Mendel had a great idea one day after observation of pea traits. He cultivated some pea plants to test his idea and thus came the genetic theory of inheritance. Boom, home run. Modern biology research takes a lot more effort and churning just to get to a intermediate finding. Obviously I was at the bottom rung with the most menial work but it just did not appeal to me much.

In addition to that, it is very apparent that everyone in the lab is stressed out. The professor is always working on a new grant application; post-docs worried about their future; grad students trying to get their experiment finished and paper out. People come into the lab on weekends all the time. It feels like a grind and very few people seem to have the time to slow down and take delight in their work. I didn't have an idea of how much their respective salary back then but its obviously they are not rich.

I worked on the job for all four years but am very glad I switched my major to CS in my sophomore year.

hudibras2• 12 years ago

I don't really want to start a "us vs. them" flamewar, but biology is almost universally recognized as the most stressful lifestyle for grad students and post-docs, followed closely by chemistry. The lab lifestyles in those disciplines are insane.

Retra3• 12 years ago

It is easy to hate working in a lab...

harmonicon2• 12 years ago

Also I feel like this article just reflect a familiar trend across all US labor market: Winner takes all. The people at the top always take a disproportionate amount of the overall resources. In manufacturing it's the CEO vs the assembly line worker; in healthcare it's the hospital administrator vs the nurse aid; in academics its the university administrator vs the grad student.

crpatino• 12 years ago

I do not think "winner takes all" reflects what you described. Rather, I'd say it means: best basketball player plays in NBA and makes millions per year. Median basketball player trains a pee-wee team on the side while holding a sales day job.

DaveWalk21• 12 years ago

I diagree, and think the OP's point is actually quite prescient: "winner take all" is exactly how science is rewarded.

The first to a discovery can claim the credit, and will get the merit added to their score on grant applications, tenure, etc. The second discoverer, or one who affirms the finding, is considered at best to lack creativity.

CurtMonash• 12 years ago

I got my PhD in Math from Harvard in 1979. Based on http://abel.harvard.edu/dissertations/index.html, it seems that 5-10 folks per year did that in those days. Perhaps 20% went on to research careers big enough to have Wikipedia articles now -- mainly in academia, although there's one in industrial cryptography (Don Coppersmith) and another in finance. Most of the rest have had decent careers in academia or business.

However, I don't recall grants -- beyond grad school fellowships or whatever -- playing a major role in pure math at that time.

facepalm• 12 years ago

On the other hand, getting tenure is like winning the lottery, so maybe 8% is not that bad a probability.

othmanaba• 12 years ago

The argument that PhDs should earn more because their education costed more is faulty. Salary is a price, you see. It is governed by laws of economics, supply and demand. Scientists should not earn more, because their value is unknown. Why would anyone pay $200,000 to someone who "might" create an amazing paper? Whereas those in investment banking earn much more than that because they provide much greater value to the employer. One should be pragmatic about life and not feel entitled just because they incurred high costs.

MereInterest• 12 years ago

I think that the point is the other way around. Why should anybody go into science, given how little compensation there is for it? And that is the problem.

It is easier to pay people for things with short payback periods. That's why the car salesman gets a bonus for each car sold, but the engineer who designed the car does not. The engineer was more essential yo the product, but the connection between the salesman and the money is more obvious.

The scientist is more useful to society, but the investment banker has a more obvious connection to money, so the banker gets paid more. We should add more incentive to the scientists, because otherwise the rational choice is to leave science.

jschwartzi3• 12 years ago

And more importantly, we should ask ourselves what kind of society we would prefer to live in. Would we like to live a life as a used car salesman, surrounded by other used car salesmen, talking about our weekly sales numbers with our used car salesmen wives?

eli_gottlieb7• 12 years ago

A scientist generates knowledge. An investment banker generates debt. Debt is just promises, promises that someone else has to pay. Ultimately, those promises can only be paid using matter, energy, and knowledge.

drdrey• 12 years ago

"It didn’t really occur to me that most employed twenty-somethings weren’t scavenging free food from lecture halls."

I used to do the same thing as a postdoc at UC Berkeley, while trying to provide for a wife and kid. Actually finding leftover sandwiches was a big deal.

geebee• 12 years ago

My guess is that none of this is surprising to people on HN, we're well aware of it.

But the message is important. Our government still operates on an almost unquestioned assumption that there is a critical shortage of people going into science and engineering.

A discussion from the chronicle of higher education is here - along with a link to the very specific legislation that is voted on.

http://chronicle.com/article/Immigration-Overhaul-Hailed/140...

"The real game changer in the bill for universities is in the green-card section, where advanced-degree graduates for STEM fields have green cards stapled to their diplomas," said Craig Lindwarm, assistant director for international issues and Congressional and governmental affairs at the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities."

Notice that this is specifically STEM. Many legislators in government truly believe that there is a shortage of STEM workers, especially at the grad degree level (they are almost never holders of these degrees).

Meanwhile, a report from the RAND institute finds the aversion to STEM graduate degrees among US citizens (ie., people who already have the freedom to work and live in the US regardless of what degree they hold) is rational considering the better prospects in other fields.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html

Keep in mind that a dental hygienist in San Francisco makes a median salary of 109k a year, a registered nurse in San Jose 122k a year (see us news best jobs for sources).

The whole system is due for a correction, and truth is, the market would bring about this reckoning on its own if it weren't for the interference of government. To get people into STEM graduate programs, especially at the elite level, you'd need to make those graduate programs as attractive as MBA, dentistry, medicine, elite law, and so forth. What would happen? Perhaps universities would do something about the 50%+ PhD attrition rates, realizing that elite law and med schools typically have attrition rates of below .5% (yes, half of one percent). Perhaps they'd make completion times shorter and more predictable. Perhaps salaries and work conditions would improve.

Or, alternatively, universities wanting students and tech companies wanting workers can lobby for special consideration in the immigration system, where immigrants are allowed into the US only on the condition that they either have immediate family or spend a huge chunk of their lives studying science and engineering, getting PhD degrees that only make sense if you don't have the same choices as full and free citizens, and working in this field under limiting visa conditions for an extended period of time, after which your life options may be more limited.

So far, the second choice appears to be the path the US has chosen, but by delaying the market correction, the US may truly harm itself in the long run. I don't think it's wise to allow the career path for science to deteriorate to the point where the only people who would pursue it are ones who don't have the freedom to chose their profession in the US.

ska• 12 years ago

It can even be hard when your career trajectory isn't stuck. I went to grad school because it was well funded and I could do fun research; I did the same thing in a post-doc with my own funding (much more than this article suggests, so I wasn't giving up too much salary compared to industry).

But I got a good look at what the next 10+ years were going to look like if I wanted to be successful at it. Although I had tenure track offers I decided the life of a research academic, even at an R1, wasn't for me. The practicalities of maintaining funding derail a lot of good research ideas and make people very conservative. Time pressure from the admin and teaching on top of this leaves little left for actual research. This was topped off with the difficulty I was having trying to get outside collaborations really working and transition my research into practice. Maybe if I'd been better at it I would have had opportunities that changed my mind, I don't know.

So I left, although many of my colleagues thought I was crazy to do so having "made it" past the post-doc trap.

I can't complain at all, I made a decent salary for several years to just do research and learn things, which was great. But I couldn't see staying.

michaelochurch3• 12 years ago

Academia and VC-funded startups in this "M&A has replaced R&D" era seem radically different but are actually similar in structure.

You have a massive wealth of mostly passive capital with vague desires behind it. For the VCs, it's "invest in small businesses and get me a high return", the passive capitalists being administrators of teachers' pension funds in Ohio who delegate the small-business investment decisions to a bunch of well-connected "experts" and kingmakers in California. From the government, it's "invest in research that benefits the national interest". You have talent that wants to do the research and exploration. And you have politically-adept middlemen who manage to leverage the principal-agent problem native to passive capital for personal gain.

In technology, those are the venture capitalists, the well-connected people who can be founders whenever they want by placing phone calls, and the buy-side executives at Hooli-type companies who have the authority to acq-hire mediocre "talent" at $10 million per head.

In academia, they're the bureaucrats who administer grants and the most successful academics who transfer out of an IC role into a professorship that is mostly a management role with a high degree of credit. (That's what the OP's discussing when he talks about the people doing the work getting the least credit, having it taken by advisors and full-timers.) Power goes not necessarily to the best scientists, but to those who are most able to direct the flow of passive investment capital (from the government) in a direction they find favorable.

It's upsetting and perverse, but it also shouldn't be surprising. People sell their votes for pennies and wonder why they don't have power. Ohio pension funds invest their wealth in Silicon Valley VCs and wonder why none of the jobs being created are within 500 miles of them. Academics and startup engineers who work based on "idealism" or "changing the world" are likewise selling their votes by taking jobs that underdeliver in compensation and career support. And, of course, people pay taxes into the federal grants that keep universities afloat (let's be honest: even "private" universities breathe on taxpayer oxygen) and tuition to get their kids stamped as "approved for admission into the middle class" and that's the biggest bit of cut-price vote-selling in all of this.

Part of me says "fuck this noise" and the other part of me doesn't know what the solution is, for startups or for academia. I think the end goal of all societies should be (just as political vote-selling is illegal) to make passive capital a bit less passive, so that the salesmen who make careers of buying and selling cheap votes at a profit are (what is the word?) disintermediated.

superdude264• 12 years ago

So the university get a portion of each grant someone brings in? This may be naive, but I thought grant money was given to a person/project and that tuition paid for university stuff.

dekhn6• 12 years ago

Yes, universities get an extra amount over the requested amount; it's negotiated between the U and the funding agency and is called "overhead". It goes into Dean's funds and stuff, part of which supports departmental-level services, as well as many other places.

throwaway1979• 12 years ago

I have a PhD in CS from a highly ranked school (systems) and work for an industrial lab (6 years out of school). I make the same as a fresh graduate from Waterloo from recent empirical evidence. It is just dressed up differently ... the fresh grad in question has a salary at the 100K mark salary with 25K-ish in guaranteed bonus for a few years (plus some stock options). I make that in guaranteed salary with no bonus or options. My work week just ended (easily 10 hours a day doing very cool stuff but not science). I'm juggling reading some papers out of true interest (deep belief nets), reviewing some crappy papers for some journal that were due two weeks ago, and spending time with my wife. Clearly I made some very bad career decisions.

billsossoon• 12 years ago

Then get out of your comfort zone. If you want to shake up your career, now's the time to do it. And nobody is going hand it to you.

saalweachter2• 12 years ago

This is trickle up economics at its finest.

The share of income going to labor has been declining for decades. 2000 hours a year at minimum wage is $15k before taxes. Why should universities pay their grad students any better when $15-20k is the realistic best alternative? If you want to increase grad student stipends, a $15/hr minimum wage is the way to do it.

tdaltonc2• 12 years ago

I would expect that most grad students have plan-B options that can beat minimum wage.

saalweachter2• 12 years ago

The problem is that there's also a very large pool of people who could be grad students who are currently unemployed or underemployed. If some grad students get tired of the conditions and decide to seek higher wages in private industry, the universities can easily recruit more grad students in short order for the exact same wages as they were paying before. Therefore, there is no incentive to improve the conditions to retain their existing grad students (or post-docs, or assistant professors...).

dluan• 12 years ago

It's posts like these that show just how ripe for innovation academia has become.

It's no surprise that there are now so many science tech startups popping up. Founded primarily by scientists.

https://hackpad.com/Science-Tech-Startups-zSZ0KdT6Zk1

lambdafunc• 12 years ago

go do an mba instead of a phd if you really want to spend more time in university.

rrtwo• 12 years ago

ok, so I have done the 'mistake'* and now an epsilon away from getting my PhD in CS.

What would be the best came coming out of it financial?

* I did enjoy the process very much, and learned a lot, but like the gist of the article - you can't feed on science.

abvdasker• 12 years ago

relevant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovEghdXC4tE

tsotha• 12 years ago

Frankly, everything about the career, the business of science, is constructed to impoverish and disenfranchise young scientists, delaying the maturation of their careers beyond practicality.

That's because way, way too many people want to be scientists. Lots of people want to be actors, too, and most of them end up working as waiters for the same reason.

I've never run across such a smart group of people who are so dumb. Even if you win the lottery and get that coveted tenured position you're not going to be doing much in the way of research - you're going to spend all your time filling out grant applications and managing grad students.

You may as well get an MBA instead.

stalcottsmith• 12 years ago

Passed on a career in science when I was 17 and noticed after interviewing professors that it was mostly full of politics and money stress and precious little science. Fact is there are a lot of fields that are "desirable" and enjoy and endless supply of willing young and talented recruits. These fields always pay terribly for all but the elite and offer tremendous competition. Publishing seemed to be another one. It was common knowledge or at least patently obvious to me that you should not attempt a career in publishing (editing and evaluating manuscripts for major publishing houses) in NYC without a trust fund and or a magic credit card paid by daddy. Science is like that. I hope my children can do science.

MichaelCrawford• 12 years ago

Why do scientists regard academia as necessary?

Out of my own education, the science class that I regard as the very-most valuable with Caltech's "Physics X", taught by Richard Feynman. There were no grades, no homework, no tests. One did not register for the class ahead of time, one could come and go as one pleased.

One could ask any question one wanted, provided Dr. Feynman was not required to work out any math. It's not like he didn't know how to, rather that he felt conceptual understanding was far more important than the understanding that comes from following derivations.

Pierre Fermat totally stymied more than three hundred years of the world's very finest mathematicians with his famous Last Theorem - while serving as a magistrate of the French Court.

We've had universities since medieval times, however it is only recently that universities have served science.

It is also only recently that one attended a university to prepare for a career. Consider that I have a degree in Physics, despite that I work as a coder. In my actual experience I am often able to do work that those with Computer Science degrees are unable to.

(I expect that some CS graduates could perform Physics research that I myself would be unable to, were they only to try.)

Would you like to do research? To publish? Win the Nobel Prize? Score with graduate students?

Just carry around a notebook.

If you see something that you don't fully understand, write it down. You might forget, or if you remember the phenomenon, you might not remember it accurately.

If you find a phenomenon that you can't explain, try to find some way to explain it. perhaps it's in wikipedia. Or if not, perhaps it's in scientific american magazine. or if not, perhaps it's in the astrophysical journal.

Maybe you've discovered something totally new, or if not, you are the very first to take interest in any otherwise unnoticed phenomenon, or perhaps the first to explain it.

If you can explain it, publish your explanation.

Don't gripe about the peer-reviewed journals - publish it on your website. If you have a Sitemaps Protocol file - http://www.sitemaps.org/ - then The Wayback Machine will eventually pick it up.

"Peer Review", for me, consists of mentioning something I'm working on at Kuro5hin, then getting flamed mercilessly for it. The way I see my colleagues at Kuro5hin, is much like the reason Inspector Clouseau requested that Kato attack him with sophisticated martial arts whenever he entered his apartment.

"Citation" is getting linked.

"What about research grants?" you may reasonably ask.

When I was at the Institute, there was an Astronomy Professor who had never been awarded a grant in her entire career - no doubt due to sexism, as the grants are awarded by anonymous committee members.

She was real pissed off about this, but didn't let her lack of funding get her down; she paid for her research by operating a recycling center on the side.

I'm good enough at Physics that I figure I could get tenure were I to complete my doctorate.

But I don't want to be part of the system. It was pointed out to me in 1993 that there were too many postdocs, and not enough professorial seats.

I'd like to publish, but really, I don't see the point of completing my PhD or even applying for a postdoc fellowship.

However, I do carry a laboratory notebook around with me.

And I do publish - on my own website.

(BTW - I didn't decide to be a scientist when I was sixteen; I decided to be a Chemist at first, when I was but eight years old.)

selimthegrim2• 12 years ago

These days she probably wouldn't make tenure. Certainly you're not talking about Olga Taussky-Todd?

Did you start a PhD?

hueving2• 12 years ago

Don’t we, as a society, want them to have bright little babies who will make the future a better place? If we do, we’re really working against ourselves.

This is a common flaw in thinking I see all of the time when it comes to teachers, scientists, and everyone else that someone says is underpaid. The fact that they are underpaid represents exactly how the sum of our society values people in these positions. So the blunt answer is, "no, humans are more focused on short term goals and reward people that provide something with an immediate return."

Lots of smart people train to become lawyers as well, and now the market is saturated with new lawyers resulting in a situation similar to PhD students. Think about how much interest you have in shelling out extra money to fund these new lawyers salaries with bring them to parity with the law graduates of 10 years ago. That is how much interest most of society has in ensuring that someone with a PhD in biology is making six figures.

known• 12 years ago

Why you should not go to medical school?

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/abinazir/2005/05/23/why-you-sho...

kirk21• 12 years ago

Guess it depends on your location. In Belgium they pay quite a lot to compete with the private sector. In Germany not so much...

padobson• 12 years ago

If you're smart enough to copy DNA with a polymerase chain reaction, then you're probably smart enough to figure out the logistics of building a highly efficient janitorial services company that undercuts the local competition.

On that career path, you'll be making six figures before your scientist doppleganger gets their graduate degree.

The point is, most career paths don't put money as the top priority. Count up the costs before you start down it.

xanmas• 12 years ago

Assuming 7% returns, and 6% employee match of a graduate student's salary in my programme (32k), graduate school costs ~288k in lost retirement savings, as well.

mudetroit• 12 years ago

I wonder if this doesn't point to a market inefficiency that someone could take advantage of. A company that focused on research specifically, patenting and marketing relevant discoveries or spinning of subsidiary companies to exploit research they are doing.

I know it isn't the tenure track positions that are mentioned in the articles. But a company like this could potentially pay substantially more than the academic institutions,and give them a more immediate opportunity to publish as a primary investigator.

Those additional publishing opportunities may allow them to even return to the academic field if they chose to later on.

Just something I was mulling over while reading the article.

Chronic304• 12 years ago

Go make that mobile app then.

nosferatus• 12 years ago

low cost high reward, from my view

papul1993• 12 years ago

This makes me so sad. I am currently studying Chemistry in a joint undergraduate+postgraduate program. And reading all of this makes me so sad. Here in India, the situation is even worse.

mikhailfranco• 12 years ago

If a situation doesn't make any logical sense, you are not seeing it from the right perspective. If you look around and can't see the sucker, it's probably you.

Higher education is not designed to produce happy productive affluent scientists, it's designed to make money for the education industry (administrators) and churn out debt slaves for the finance industry.

A Career in Science Will Cost You Your Firstborn

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