More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

That's mostly reasonable. But for some people at least, the PhD doesn't give them all the skills they are looking for, so they might do another post-doc (2-3 years at slightly better than PhD lifestyle), before jumping ship.

generally you are somewhat right, but it's complicated by country. for example it would be less surprising that a UK-style 3 year PhD might want a couple more years training after.

  >  But a postdoc at a university is an underpaid training position for the most part.

You're also talking about someone who is probably in their early to mid 30's. Eventually people want to start having a life. And you're expecting them to make pennies? I'm not joking. Here's a list of CS Post Doc stipends[0]. Go to Berkeley or Stanford and make $66k-$80k? I've gotten more money as a PhD Intern! You're going to get more than double that in industry before we talk about RSUs.

I think this is something we need to take quite seriously here. There aren't really good reasons for people to choose this path, especially considering how disruptive it is to your life (have fun moving again in a few years :). Maybe we can hope that those who go are just really dedicated to research and following their passions. So dedicated that they are willing to put off normal human things like starting a family, maintaining relationships[1], or even just building one's net worth (or paying off student debt). Some people want to become a professor[2] so will do that.

But the big thing I see is that there's nothing to attract the best people. (We can extend this to even just professorships[3]). So who are becoming the postdocs and professors? Who are becoming the people that educate the next wave of people? If you are at the top, you likely aren't going the professor route, you're likely going to industry where you'll likely get 2x-3x the pay AND more freedom in your research. Even if you're pretty mid you can get 2x-3x the pay in industry with an honestly less stressful life (but you may not be doing research or likely have more restriction of what research you can pursue). This, seems pretty disastrous. At best, unstable. There's not a lot of professor spots but I think we need to have some incentive system such that people at the top are encouraged to carry on their research for the public as well as educate future researchers. As a business you want to be greedy and capture top talent, but that's also because you should be thinking much shorter term. At social levels, we have to think generations.

TLDR:

So are we confident we are getting "cream of the crop" (even if shared with industry) in academic positions? Are we sure that's even true at highly prestigious institutions?

I think the answer is "no", we should not be confident in that outcome.

[0] https://vspa.berkeley.edu/faculty-staff/compensation/postdoc...

[1] Good chance you met your partner while doing a PhD and yay now you both need to find post docs but they are competitive and so good luck finding one in the same place? Hope you like long distance relationships or are willing to let one partner make a bigger sacrifice.

[2] Which weird thing that we train someone to become an expert researcher and then as a professor we give them such high and diverse workloads that they will often have little time for research and instead will more be managers. The research skill degrades with time and only keeping up at a high level is not sufficient.

[3] In CS a post doc is also often a way to elevate your status. Like you got your PhD from a lower tier university and so doing a Post Doc at a much higher tier can make you employable at a more prestigious university. Because prestige still matters a lot, especially since it is tightly coupled with things like equipment access.

[side note]: I think with the competitiveness that it is a bit odd we still have these strong notions of prestige. Just to put things in perspective, if every graduating PhD at the number 1 school, they likely graduate enough people that you could fill all available faculty positions available. Given how prestige matters, it should be clear how high prestige graduates permeate into lower prestige positions. More clear when you start to consider things like how many top universities are in not the greatest living locations. https://drafty.cs.brown.edu/csopenrankings/placement-rank.ht... https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/

It's not as if there is a surplus of academic job slots that are going unfilled. The pyramid where one professor trains multiple grad students quickly becomes unsustainable.

But how can we know that we picked the right person for the job if we aren't at the very least absolutely sure the alternatives were worse?

The human mind resists accepting decisions made without a proportional amount of effort put into those decisions. If we only get one candidate for the job, we will either hire them and deal with constant nagging doubt, or we will lower our standards to get more options we can reject to feel good, but at which point we've now created false hope in the remaining candidates and an illusion of more opportunities existing than actually do.

Humans are messy, and so everything is always fucked. Even when it's not, we find a way to make it so.

A large percentage of phds do a postdoc because it's easy and familiar, not because it's part of strategic planning of their career...

Depends on the industry. If planning to shift from biomedical research to pharmaceutical R&D a postdoc can be a major win.

life isn't all about the endgame? sometimes you just want to do research for a few more years

* discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.*

It’s not the research or teaching that drive people out of academia. It’s the endless and humiliating scrambling for money. Everyone who’s not a psychopath hates that part of the job, and the people who are any good at it have options outside of academia.

>2 out of 5 people getting all the way to the end and discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.

Research and teaching can take place outside of academia.

>A lot of people convince themselves that what they aren't feeling now will finally come to them after one more milestone, and as long as there enough milestones ahead of them they can play for time until it happens. Or they hit Sunk Cost and feel like they can't tap out now because they'll look like idiots, ignoring how much bigger an idiot you look like for wasting X more years of your youth and saddling yourself with even more debt. Or existential crisis with much the same outcomes. "Who am I even if I'm not..."

Learning can exist for the sake of learning and doesn't necessarily need to be reflected in career choice or identity.

For many it’s not easy to accept that "who you are" doesn't have to depend on the prestige of a title or a position, and that's often where people get stuck.

You can do research during your postdoc with chill timelines and pretty much 100% autonomy on your topic and then bootstrap a company with the ideas you've developed during said postdoc? In many countries the postdoc owns the IP of the research they're doing

Postdoc can be very advantageous on a resume. Where I am, if it's remotely related, you start at a higher engineering level than a PhD.

It's significantly easier to get a Visa from academia than work

Sunk cost? Selection bias? I don't think you can get a PhD by accident, you have to really want to work in academia (or a specific industry). And I doubt getting a second post doc position is all that hard (as long as you're willing to travel), given they're capable of getting the first one. My understanding is that universities quite like being able to hire cheap, hard working, disposable researchers.

People who go into academia are probably willing to live the life of an underpaid researcher. The fact that they have the post-doc title instead of the professor title probably is that big a deal, nor is the salary going to change their decision. The lack of autonomy is probably annoying, as is the lack of stability. Having to worry that they might change labs and maybe cities every 3 years, and not knowing for sure if they'll get a job is probably the only thing actually making them quit.

> Almost by definition, if you're doing a Postdoc in a STEM field, you're probably qualified for a relatively well-paying job in industry

Be careful: many people who are great postdocs are rather overqualified (and thus rather not suitable) for many jobs in industry.

Getting well-payed in industry requires in my opinion skills that are opposite to those that make you a great postdoc:

In industry you must not be a truth-seeker who can deeply absorb himself in problems. Being a truth-seeker makes you an insanely fit in the brutal office politics.

Also, while I do insist that in graduate school you actually learn a lot about leadership (in the sense of being able to push people to do great things), the abrasive and highly demanding leadership style in graduate school and academia is commonly very undesired in industry (but in my opinion not bad: a very particular kind of people (who will love graduate school) flourishes in such an environment).

At least in computer science, postdocs have other benefits:

1) they can be well paid, like high five to very low six figures;

2) they can be an extra year or two to figure out your own research direction with some help but not much oversight;

3) they can be much easier to get than industry positions -- sometimes requiring little more than a solid publication record and advisor recommendation;

4) if you've been in a university environment for ~a decades and liked it, it might strike you as an easy path to keep doing that (this is probably the worst reason, though).

This is skewed by computer science postdocs at highly ranked schools, though. Yes, people taking these positions face opportunity costs, but the actual experience can be pretty nice.

Stanford School of Medicine has a FOOD BANK for Postdocs because they literally can't afford groceries lol

> With the exception of poor pay, I experienced all of those things while working as a software dev for a major company.

Same here. I've worked at grindy startups that made me want to leave the profession altogether—everything from gaslighting by small shop CEOs to firing threats, and even firing a colleague just to show "who's in charge."

But switching companies is always an option, as is switching domains. I did that multiple times without much trouble.

> The instability of the postdoc life sucks if and when you want to have a family.

I thought stability was one of the reasons people choose academia. By stability, I mean a supervisor or program that guarantees a steady influx of cash for a certain period of time.

Yeah, but it comes down to what gives you fulfillment. For me, I need challenging work with a reward in pay that matches the effort and academia doesn't seem to fit that curve.

That’s exactly how much I was making in 2010 when I graduated. It’s even much worse than that because the benefits sucked and the school took back about about 1/3rd in the form of outrageous parking fees and outrageous student fees that required us to pay for tickets to every sports game we couldn’t even attend. Add overpriced books to that too.

It took a PhD to figure out how not to accumulate any new debt for those 6 years. I would have been first in line for food stamps, if they were available to us. I literally couldn’t afford to stay in student housing.

That's awful! I was a postdoc then and the NIH standard was $40k.

are you in the US? that's surprisingly low as by the mid/late 2010's PhD students in stem fields were averaging 30k. for the many postdocs on nih-supported grants i seem to remember ~60k being standard at that time. eg https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/salary-cap-stipen... .

> interviewing and carefully selecting the lab / professor

Worth pointing out supply can be slim in narrower fields of research or for location requirements, like being close to a significant other.

But careful. Many professors lie. And many of them are nasty.

Talk to the grad students of other professors

>> - Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.

> I've read about this on the internet to the point where I believe it's real.

My experience as a PhD student in France circa 2016: a professor comes into our office one morning, tells me "your work is completely stupid, irrelevant and useless anyways, you should just stop" and then leaves

> Not true in my experience, the pay in academia has always been more than acceptable. But again, I was in CS/LangSci, and I know that for instance in the humanities, pay is lower for similar jobs.

This could also depend on location, but from what I’ve seen, postdoc CS pay in most places is less than what you can earn as an entry-level frontend engineer at a medium-sized scale-up.

I thought the 40% number seemed lower than my experiences suggest. But this is a solid point that suggests that even 84% is too low. I guess it could be as high as 90%.

> A 60% stay rate evokes scenarios of academic inbreeding and a total disconnect between the real world and the small bubble where research groups operate

Why?

Ah yes, the real world of corporations and all their made-up bullshit. Much more real than a university.

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I couldn't read the whole article due to the paywall. I wonder (now that my knee has stopped jerking) whether they consider non-tenure-ladder professorial positions at universities as 'academia'. e.g. adjuncts, lecturers, staff or contract researchers, lab administrators, ...

Teaching is not really relevant in the hiring process of professors.

I saw several committees for prof position and teaching is treated like a checkmark. You should done it and provide a small sample lecture (which you prepare much more than your average lecture) and don't have to suck at it. After this checkbox, the differentiating factors are about citations and how much grant money you can/could/do have... (Western Europe, maybe somewhere else it's different).

I think it doesn't really enter the equation. The single worst lecturer I've had at university is now a professor. I don't enough about tenure tracks and we also call them differently (not adjunct, associate, etc) - but he's still there, 20y later, teaching (I think he just had gotten his PhD back then). I can only hope he has improved from "open script, read one page at a time, close script, dismiss".

> spend more time on teaching and less on research, which may reduce their research output

It's ironic that universities are primarily judged by their research output rather than their teaching, even though their original purpose was to share and preserve knowledge.

But the academic paper printer goes brrrr!

Hmmm... and with video games as with academia, the glut of willing low-pay labor hasn't actually made the end product much better at all.

Kindly, given your credentials, it does sound like your situation is a bit biased. That said, of course let me know where you are so I too can enjoy your luck.

Academia works on nearly everything, so it's no surprise that successes come out of it. Especially if you are willing to squint your eyes a little and describe something which has a few elements of the final useful innovation (but noticeably not the secret sauce) a precursor then anything can be traced back.

That does not mean academia, nonetheless academia in its current form, is the optimal system for producing innovations. How much effort is being wasted on things that will never pan out? How many great potential innovations are not being researched right now because the system does not prioritize them? How many needed to start in academia vs how many just happened to?

It depends on incentives. From what I can see in CS, a lot of young researchers are focused on short-term projects, disconnected from actual problems, and spend lots of effort to package the result to increase the chance of getting a paper in top conferences/journals, because they need this for their career. They will be forced to leave academia if they don't have enough results in time, from what I know. And even for established researchers, they have to do something similar, so their students can have enough results. And they need to try really hard to get funding, because institutions want researchers that can get lots of funding, so institutions can get money from that.

This is probably not the complete story, and probably a bit too pessimistic, but I think this is true...

Up to certain point. Beyond that there is lot of waste.

Say you have 20 competing products that want to get noticed or know to sell. Obvious solution for them is to pour more and more resources in advertising. Eventually this advertising takes away from actual product as more time and money is spend on it instead on the product.

Advertising in academia is publications but also applications for funding.

No, only if you have a narrow definition of innovation. Producing something actually new and actionable isn't always aligned with doing something that gets citations.

Too much competition is bad for innovation since it leaves no room for exploration.

The peacock is a product of competition. Of course the competition was for passing on genes, not survival, so the peacock developed a massive tail which is a huge waste of resources and attracts predators. But surviving with such a handicap is super sexy to other peacocks.

Competition is great at meeting the criteria of the competition. If the competition values anything other than innovation, like say grant money awarded or social standing, it is suboptimal for promoting innovation.

As a former postdoc in the physical sciences (who is now out of academia mostly for family reasons), I don't like the constant argument I hear about whether competition is good or bad in research and especially academic research. I think it is the wrong question. Competition is inherently good in that whatever researchers are competing over will be optimized in the long run.

We wish that we were optimizing for new/great ideas, but we aren't. In our current academic system, we are optimizing for number of papers and number of quick citations on papers (where quick = within 2-5 years). The reason these incentives are present is because they are largely deterministic in the outcomes of academic hiring, tenure decisions, and funding proposals. It seems to me that everyone discusses academic hiring and tenure ad infinitum, but less so for the details of the academic research funding system.

For most academic research, when a professor submits a proposal for funding, it is tied very closely to work on one particular idea or group of ideas. The funding cannot be used for research outside of the proposal area. Furthermore one must achieve results within the confines and time period (a few years) of that grant if one hopes to receive more funding in the future. So when a new idea comes along during the process of working on a grant, you either a) do your best to spin the new idea as related to the current grant in some unnatural way and proceed or b) wait until you can get funding for the new idea explicitly. This is the system within which the professors must work. They are laser-focused on achieving results within the constraints of their existing grant proposals. And some of these are great research ideas. But after a while, most people tend to stick with the same old ideas and pursue smaller and smaller ideas within the same area. This is why old professors are still pursuing the same overdone research they did when they were younger. You need new, young people to give an influx of new/bold/crazy ideas to pursue.

Now, the graduate student or postdoc must also work within this system, except that they have no say over the research directions. They must work on the professor's research ideas, not their own. There's fundamentally nothing wrong with that because it is the classic master/apprentice relationship which is generally a good thing. (After all, you can't have well-formed ideas until you know what you're doing, and that takes time. Without this type of system, you get outlandish crackpot ideas that are worse than wrong - they are useless.) But over the years of training, the grad student/post doc probably has a few good ideas. But what do they do with those ideas? Generally...statistically...the answer is nothing. These good ideas die with the grad student/post doc's unrealized academic career, since by far most have to leave academia before they can work on their own ideas (and there's simply no place outside of academia to work on your own ideas).

You would hope that there would be an outlet for good new ideas from grad students and post docs, but there isn't. People learn from mistakes quickly that graduate school and postdoc is no time to be putting your ideas out there. You won't get to work on them yourself and they will be taken from you, period. Let's say you, as a grad student, propose something new and great to your professor, and ask if you can work on it. Chances are that the prof will say no because it isn't funded, or because you're already busy with their currently funded ideas that they must execute on quickly in order to get more funding, or the worst one (which I have seen many many times) is when the professor says "well that's more of this other postdoc's specialty - I'll let them work on it." Sometimes you could propose something and the prof says no, but then 5 years later they are now funded for it. And none if this is caused by malicious intentions: the professor probably forgot that idea even came from you - after all, how many conversations do you remember precisely from 5-10 years ago? - its just an idea that came from the ether somewhere. But other students and postdocs see these occurrences, even if not caused by maliciousness, and just choose to never share their best ideas because they know they won't get any attribution or recognition for them.

As a result, the system is not optimized for new and good ideas, which is the lifeblood of research. If anyone came along on this journey with me that I originally intended to be only a few sentences, I'm sorry I have no solutions. If anything, I feel lucky because 15 years later, at least someone else did one of my big ideas and it made an impact, so at least I get to know that "back in my day," I had some good impactful ideas in my research field.

It all depends on the metric you are optimizing for. In academia, the metric would be grant money, directly influenced by number of published articles and citations.

From that perspective, the system works. We are making more articles, in more journals, there is also plenty of money thrown around. Unfortunately, there is no incentive for correctness, novelty or usefulness in this system.

Falsification of results, especially in the soft sciences, is relatively easy. Verification of results, doesn't give you any credit. So you can have people producing articles with blatantly misleading or false results for decades, all without any repercussion.

And it's not much better in the hard sciences either. Because verification of results there, is even more difficult and costly. And again, we are not incentivizing verification.

It has to be a combination of competition and opportunity. If you take away the opportunity then it's just a middle school field day all day, nobody making it to play college ball let alone the pros.