Academia: Exponential Growth & Post Docs Till 40?

[nickyrtr]

[...] The phd system isn't designed to give scientists stable careers, its designed to push wages down to get as much science done as cheaply as possible. [...]

Many other industries, if you could call science an industry, are or were similarly designed. Historically, when an economic relationship is unbalanced to the severe detriment of one group of people, that group eventually changes the relationship, one way or another.

What's probably going to happen in science is that the science PhD glut will become better and better publicized, and fewer students will pursue science PhDs in years to come. Fewer PhD graduates means a smaller supply of postdocs and therefore less science getting done, if postdoc labor really is essential to research. Ironically, it may also mean better wages and working conditions for the postdocs that remain, due to the laws of supply and demand.

 

[ParticleGrl]

What's probably going to happen in science is that the science PhD glut will become better and better publicized, and fewer students will pursue science PhDs in years to come.

This already happened decades ago- the number of US citizens getting phds in the sciences started dropping off as the job opportunities shrank. So what happens? We dramatically expanded foreign enrollment in phd programs. It will be a long time before we run out of people willing to pursue a phd entirely for the chance to immigrate. I doubt the situation in science will change in my lifetime. Which leads to the question- why do we encourage careers in science as if they are good jobs?

 

[czelaya]

I wonder whether there has been a push to make PhD's in science a professional degree program with a license. I would assume, if done right, whatever institutions grant the license could artificially decrease the poll of graduating students and cause an increase in salary. Much like the AMA limits the poll of doctors.

 

[czelaya]

So, this thread is making me very worried. How hard are chemistry jobs to come by compared to physics? I feel like chemistry has a lot of industrial application, or are all those jobs populated by chemical engineers?

It's just as bad from my point of view and according to what the ACS is stating in the latest journals-job prospects are not well. I should be graduating with my PhD soon in chemical physics and already have masters in theoretical chemistry, and I'm worried. I choose to pursue the PhD, primarily, because I couldn't find a job. Choosing to continue my education was a no brainier. My stipend with a local grant was paying 30K-plus the free tuition.

As far as job prospects... well, let's say I'm glad that part of my research included some exposure to both analytical and organic chemistry. I picked up skills in HPLC analysis, gas chromatography, exposure to synthesis chemistry(which I hated with a passion), and some exposure to chemical engineering that are more marketable in the local job market. From my short exposure to job hunting-these seem to be the only jobs that are available locally. What's even worse is a good portion of these jobs could be picked up by engineers, Ms. Science majors (including biologist), and anyone with exposure to these fields. I'm pretty limited to moving because I have young daughter, and don't wish to leave her anytime soon, so I'm really stuck in a rut.

What's interesting is when I look at my research committee. It consist of a PhD in chemical engineering who is doing organic and analytical chemistry research for the FDA. He basically tells me it's no what he wants to do but, hey, it's what pays the bills. However he gets to control his research to a large degree. Two of the professors in my committee graduated in theoretical physics and have slowly migrated to biophysics and computational chemistry. I also have a computational physicist in the committee that only recently got into academics (he was doing work in financial econometrics before his tenure into our department). Only my major professor began and still is in solid state physics research.

 

[Pyrrhus]

What's interesting is when I look at my research committee. It consist of a PhD in chemical engineering who is doing organic and analytical chemistry research for the FDA. He basically tells me it's no what he wants to do but, hey, it's what pays the bills. However he gets to control his research to a large degree. Two of the professors in my committee graduated in theoretical physics and have slowly migrated to biophysics and computational chemistry. I also have a computational physicist in the committee that only recently got into academics (he was doing work in financial econometrics before his tenure into our department). Only my major professor began and still is in solid state physics research.

This is true. I know some professors that have Ph.D. in Physics but are faculty in Econ programs. I guess they decided to migrate.

Also for some perspective, a good portion of my classmates while I was taking courses at the PhD level in Econ had a Bachelor in Physics/Math/Engineering (I have a Bachelor in Engineering). Some even had a Master's in some cases (I have a Master's in Engineering).

 

[ParticleGrl]

This is true. I know some professors that have Ph.D. in Physics but are faculty in Econ programs. I guess they decided to migrate.

"Decided" is probably not strong enough. The better phrase is "lack of opportunity forced them to"

 

[chill_factor]

It's just as bad from my point of view and according to what the ACS is stating in the latest journals-job prospects are not well. I should be graduating with my PhD soon in chemical physics and already have masters in theoretical chemistry, and I'm worried. I choose to pursue the PhD, primarily, because I couldn't find a job. Choosing to continue my education was a no brainier. My stipend with a local grant was paying 30K-plus the free tuition.

As far as job prospects... well, let's say I'm glad that part of my research included some exposure to both analytical and organic chemistry. I picked up skills in HPLC analysis, gas chromatography, exposure to synthesis chemistry(which I hated with a passion), and some exposure to chemical engineering that are more marketable in the local job market. From my short exposure to job hunting-these seem to be the only jobs that are available locally. What's even worse is a good portion of these jobs could be picked up by engineers, Ms. Science majors (including biologist), and anyone with exposure to these fields. I'm pretty limited to moving because I have young daughter, and don't wish to leave her anytime soon, so I'm really stuck in a rut.

What's interesting is when I look at my research committee. It consist of a PhD in chemical engineering who is doing organic and analytical chemistry research for the FDA. He basically tells me it's no what he wants to do but, hey, it's what pays the bills. However he gets to control his research to a large degree. Two of the professors in my committee graduated in theoretical physics and have slowly migrated to biophysics and computational chemistry. I also have a computational physicist in the committee that only recently got into academics (he was doing work in financial econometrics before his tenure into our department). Only my major professor began and still is in solid state physics research.

you sound like you have experience in the physical biosciences. how is the employment in experimental physical biosciences? you seem like have the same background as i so i am very interested. i am in the process of selecting a research project and the decision between inorganic crystalline materials (superconductors) and bio is very hard since they're in different schools and i will not be able to change until graduation.

 

[czelaya]

you sound like you have experience in the physical biosciences. how is the employment in experimental physical biosciences? you seem like have the same background as i so i am very interested. i am in the process of selecting a research project and the decision between inorganic crystalline materials (superconductors) and bio is very hard since they're in different schools and i will not be able to change until graduation.

My graduate program is a concerted effort between the physics and chemistry department. I have a molecular biology/biochemistry BS(this is where I got my exposure to organic, biochemistry, and laboratory training) and a physics BS. So that's the extent of my course work/laboratory exposure to biology.

As far as physical biochemistry, it overlaps heavily with biophysics, physical chemistry, chemical physics, and theoretical modeling. The majority of all students in these concentrations take overlapping course work (thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, quantum chemistry, atomic physics, mathematical methods, and so forth). My only exposure to these fields were course work, and working on small projects consisting of molecular dynamics of water in protein cavities and statistical mechanical applications to large proteins (the protein folding problem).

My only insight to these fields is that out of academia, physical bio-sciences are becoming less frequent in industry. We already had two guest speakers from large pharmaceutical companies and other related industries, and they all basically said the same thing. Companies are downsizing, and jobs are being shipped outside the US. So job prospects, overall, are not well in these fields.

As far as inorganic chemistry, solid state physics, and materials sciences, the job market is flourishing (meaning you should get a job in about a year). There are a lot of grants being given, and money is being pumped into these field at both the public and private sector.

The only piece of advice I would give myself, when I started my program, extrapolate how marketable your degree specialty is. However that piece of advice, at times, is worth a grain of salt. Why? Because changes are always coming, and you don't know where industries are steering next. When I got into graduate school fields like x-ray crystallography, molecular physics, chemical physics, quantum chemistry, and so forth were hot (well that's what I was told and most students graduating in these fields were finding employment in academics, industry, USDA, and the FDA) but then the downturn in the economy changed everything. My second piece of advice is learn as much as you can. Try to pick up skills that may work to your benefit across the board like programming language, laboratory instrumentation, and anything that has applications to industry. I'm glad I learned industrial chemical analysis. I'm not very good at chemistry but I've done enough to get some job interviews. I'm sure there are far more knowledgeable and well seasoned people on this website that would give you better advice. Good luck.

 

[twofish-quant]

Here is an economics project then- why is the labor market for economists so much better than the labor market for scientists?

Part of it is the "second Einstein effect". Once you have one Einstein that works out general relativity, then there isn't a job left for a second Einstein. One other thing is that in physics, once you figure out some fundamental law, you are done. Once you've worked out string theory or quantum gravity, you let everyone know, and you are finished.

In economics, the rules change so often, that knowing how derivative markets worked in 1980 is only of marginal benefit to knowing the rules in 2012. So you have to rederive all your models every few months.

Does this say anything about where our economy is headed?

Has headed. The bus left decades ago.

The US became a post-industrial service economy decades ago. Citigroup has roughly the same head count as GM, and Morgan-Stanley has roughly the same head count as Chrysler. One thing that changes public perceptions of finance is the fact that finance is not unionized. When you talk about an auto company, the fact that you have a union makes people aware that not every in an auto company is a auto executive.

Because financial companies are tight lipped and non-unionized, the only people that people on the outside see are the top executives, which makes people assume that everyone that works in a bank is a managing director.

 

[twofish-quant]

Back to the original point -- research is a project-based enterprise, but that does not preclude longer-term employment for researchers, as demonstrated by the existence of research faculty appointments with lifetime tenure. Offering postdocs longer-term, more geographically stable employment is possible, if academic institutions so choose, or are induced to choose by legislation, collective bargaining, etc.

The problem here is that if you do that, then you've just destroyed the tenure system. Once you have postdocs having long term contracts, and getting into positions of authority, then pretty soon, that's going to be the standard practice. One thing about legislation is that when it comes to politicians, both post-docs and tenured faculty are on the same side. No one wants politicians to start mandating terms of employment.

I'm reminded of the conversation between Bryant and Deckard in Bladerunner in which it's mentioned that androids why have a programmed four year life span.

One other thing to note is that tenure was not unusual in most unionized industries in the 1950's. It's only because of changes in the labor market that made professors have different hiring practices.

 

[twofish-quant]

Companies are downsizing, and jobs are being shipped outside the US. So job prospects, overall, are not well in these fields.

One thing that's good about a Ph.D. is that it will get you at the head of a queue if you want to switch countries. This works if you want to get into the US, but it also works if you want to get out.

Something else that is happening is the decline of relative US power. If you have a committee full of Americans, you can appeal to patriotism to keep jobs in the US. If it turns out that the people who are running the company aren't American, then appeals to American patriotism aren't going to work, and increasingly the people that make decisions about where the jobs are, aren't American.

I've seen this dynamic in multi-national companies. If you want to make a decision as to whether to move a plant from the US to India, then it's going to *have* to be based on economic decisions rather than on nationalism, because appeals to "keep jobs in America" won't appeal to the Indians involved in making the decision.

 

[twofish-quant]

What's probably going to happen in science is that the science PhD glut will become better and better publicized, and fewer students will pursue science PhDs in years to come.

At which point you may have a boom-bust cycle which just wrecks the system.

Or you end up with an economic death spiral. Fewer Ph.D.'s -> less economic growth -> fewer Ph.D.'s -> less economic growth

Ironically, it may also mean better wages and working conditions for the postdocs that remain, due to the laws of supply and demand.

Supply and demand aren't "iron laws" rather like everything else in economics, they can be modeled. The rules of supply and demand that work in perfect markets don't work with science hiring, but it's not hard to come up with other models.

 

[twofish-quant]

I wonder whether there has been a push to make PhD's in science a professional degree program with a license. I would assume, if done right, whatever institutions grant the license could artificially decrease the poll of graduating students and cause an increase in salary. Much like the AMA limits the poll of doctors.

1) Personally, I think that would be a horrible thing to do. One thing about physics Ph.D.'s is that out of necessity, they often are employed in industries with weak or non-existent professional licensing which gives people a strong dislike for professional licensing.

2) It's not going to work because graduate students are cheap labor for the tenured faculty. If you reduce the number of people coming in, then a lot of research just isn't going to get done. Also why would tenured faculty *want* to increase graduate student salaries?

3) And also, I think it would be bad for research. Once you start limiting the number of people coming in then things are going to get even more political than they are. This has been really horrible for economics academic research.

4) And then you have to get to "core values." Something that I've always been taught is that education is good for society, and if the economic system doesn't reflect this thing something is massively messed up with the system and it's got to get changed.

 

[twofish-quant]

After all, universities pour a lot of money into graduate students (paying tuition + for TA duties), and they offer tenured faculty significant benefits, so I can't help but wonder why there's less in between, since I've heard time and again that the in between phase produces a lot of the best research (in between when you're too old and too young to do anything impressive).

Karl Marx answered this quite nicely. People with power make up the rules so they'll make them up to maximize their power at the expense of people with no power. So what ends up happening is that either you have power or you don't, and that kills any sort of "middle class." I studied a lot of Marxism, and much of what he had to say makes sense. The big problem is that the obvious solution that he gave for how to fix the problem i.e. "have a revolution and shoot the old guard" doesn't work, so it's not clear what to do from a social point of view.

From a personal point of view, if we are in a situation in which the rich get richer and the poor are getting poorer, then first priority is self-preservation and do what I can to get in the door, and then once I get in, figure out what to do next.

 

[chill_factor]

Part of it is the "second Einstein effect". Once you have one Einstein that works out general relativity, then there isn't a job left for a second Einstein. One other thing is that in physics, once you figure out some fundamental law, you are done. Once you've worked out string theory or quantum gravity, you let everyone know, and you are finished.

In economics, the rules change so often, that knowing how derivative markets worked in 1980 is only of marginal benefit to knowing the rules in 2012. So you have to rederive all your models every few months.



Has headed. The bus left decades ago.

The US became a post-industrial service economy decades ago. Citigroup has roughly the same head count as GM, and Morgan-Stanley has roughly the same head count as Chrysler. One thing that changes public perceptions of finance is the fact that finance is not unionized. When you talk about an auto company, the fact that you have a union makes people aware that not every in an auto company is a auto executive.

Because financial companies are tight lipped and non-unionized, the only people that people on the outside see are the top executives, which makes people assume that everyone that works in a bank is a managing director.

the 2nd einstein effect is for mostly theoretical and basic sciences, i assume?

what about for experimental applied sciences?

 

[JakeBrodskyPE]

Has headed. The bus left decades ago.

"An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today." --Laurence J. Peter

 

[Locrian]

the 2nd einstein effect is for mostly theoretical and basic sciences, i assume?

what about for experimental applied sciences?

It's not even really true for theoretical science. Most of physics (materials, condensed matter, etc.) doesn't function by producing a few huge discoveries that leave everyone else with nothing to do. Most of physics discovery is incremental in nature.

Negative index metamaterials, giant magnetoresistance, high temperature superconductivity. . . these things created tremendous numbers of jobs in their areas, many including permanent positions.

Even Einstein doesn't really demonstrate this stuff about the second Einstein effect. In many cases - special relativity, brownian motion, Bose-Einstein condensates, possibly even general relativity - Einstein was the "second Einstein".

It's complete nonsense that has no basis in fact.

 

[Locrian]

Organic electronics is another awesome example. Twofish wants you to believe that the field died when Heeger created it, but it's the exact opposite. The discovery of the way those materials function has been the basis of tremendous amounts of research.

Saying that "once you figure out a fundamental law, you are done" reflects this absurd reductionist philosophy that our universe can be pared down to a few simple rules from which all else forms, and if we could discover those rules we'd be finished. The past 60 years of physics has been a triumph largely because that philosophy has been such a failure.

 

[czelaya]

1) Personally, I think that would be a horrible thing to do. One thing about physics Ph.D.'s is that out of necessity, they often are employed in industries with weak or non-existent professional licensing which gives people a strong dislike for professional licensing.

2) It's not going to work because graduate students are cheap labor for the tenured faculty. If you reduce the number of people coming in, then a lot of research just isn't going to get done. Also why would tenured faculty *want* to increase graduate student salaries?

3) And also, I think it would be bad for research. Once you start limiting the number of people coming in then things are going to get even more political than they are. This has been really horrible for economics academic research.

4) And then you have to get to "core values." Something that I've always been taught is that education is good for society, and if the economic system doesn't reflect this thing something is massively messed up with the system and it's got to get changed.

I'm not asserting that licensing would be a good thing. Personally, I think the strict licensing of many professions does exactly what you're stating. It protects a few at the cost of others. However, I'm in no way saying that certain benchmarks should not be achieved by practitioners of a particular field, but to large a degree, I feel that current licensing laws don't add outstanding benefits to society.

1.) Could you elaborate on your 1st comment?

2.) Couldn't post docs fulfill those obligations in the form of an accreditation program once you receive a doctoral degree? Much like a residency.

3.) Really? But economic programs aren't professional licensed programs... are they? Please elaborate? What about medical physics programs? Don't they pay generous salaries and it seems that research in that particular field is advancing.

4.) Well it seems that the market is over saturated with PhD's and is primarily due to the to easy access students have to fund their education (well-from my point of view anyway). However it does seem that society is not kind to researchers. Is it society or the researchers themselves that need to change?

I've always been more drawn to free market oriented views and not been fond of Keynesian or socialist economic schools, respectfully. In all honesty, my adherence to libertarian views is driven from my personal experience and the morals I've cultivated from those experiences. The price mechanism is far too powerful of an efficient system to allocating scarce sources.

 

[chill_factor]

Organic electronics is another awesome example. Twofish wants you to believe that the field died when Heeger created it, but it's the exact opposite. The discovery of the way those materials function has been the basis of tremendous amounts of research.

Saying that "once you figure out a fundamental law, you are done" reflects this absurd reductionist philosophy that our universe can be pared down to a few simple rules from which all else forms, and if we could discover those rules we'd be finished. The past 60 years of physics has been a triumph largely because that philosophy has been such a failure.

Would you recommend condensed matter physics as a good field to go into if the final goal is employment in this specific technical field in industry?

 

[Choppy]

2.) Couldn't post docs fulfill those obligations in the form of an accreditation program once you receive a doctoral degree? Much like a residency.

3.) Really? But economic programs aren't professional licensed programs... are they? Please elaborate? What about medical physics programs? Don't they pay generous salaries and it seems that research in that particular field is advancing.

I think one of the key differences is that medicine and medical physics provide very specific services that require those rendering them to assume a lot of responsibility. Ultimately that is one major factor that puts them/us in a favourable negotiating position when it comes time to work out salaries.

In medical physics the residency is where the physicist is supposed to be learning all the practical, clinical aspects of the profession. Thus you can take people who know all the theory they need and then place them in various practical scenarios where they are supervised by someone competant who is ultimately willing to assume responsibility for the services provided.

How would an analog of this work for academic research? I can tell you (or at least make a reasonably objective argument for) what makes someone competant as a clinical medical physicist. In academia, the traditional credential for "competant researcher" has always been the PhD. So what would a post-doc 'resident' be working towards? And what issue would a 'residency' solve?

 

[twofish-quant]

It's not even really true for theoretical science. Most of physics (materials, condensed matter, etc.) doesn't function by producing a few huge discoveries that leave everyone else with nothing to do. Most of physics discovery is incremental in nature.

A lot depends on the area of physics. There are some areas (string theory and mathematical physics) that are prone to the "second Einstein effect" than others. But even in areas that are more communal, the number of jobs produced is relatively small, and the jobs that are produced are often not directly related to research.

If you increase the number of string theorist from 5 to 100, then you can use the extra ones to research other approaches, but if you increase them from 100 to 10000, it's not clear what the other people will do.

Negative index metamaterials, giant magnetoresistance, high temperature superconductivity. . . these things created tremendous numbers of jobs in their areas, many including permanent positions.

But we are still talking about thousands of jobs in a nation with 30 million people.

Even Einstein doesn't really demonstrate this stuff about the second Einstein effect. In many cases - special relativity, brownian motion, Bose-Einstein condensates, possibly even general relativity - Einstein was the "second Einstein".

But we are still talking about 100 or so people that changed the world. The fact that a small number of physicists can change the world is paradoxically not a good thing when it comes to generating large number of things for physicists to do.

 

[twofish-quant]

Organic electronics is another awesome example. Twofish wants you to believe that the field died when Heeger created it, but it's the exact opposite. The discovery of the way those materials function has been the basis of tremendous amounts of research.

Yes, lots of research, but how many new spots for researchers? Hundreds? Thousands? The point is that physics is something that a small number of people can do lots of stuff.

Saying that "once you figure out a fundamental law, you are done"

Once you figure out a fundamental law, you are done figuring out the fundamental law, and you don't have to pay someone to rediscover it.

You can find people to figure out something else, but it's not like building a car in which you have to keep making new stuff to replace old stuff from breaking down.

 

[twofish-quant]

1.) Could you elaborate on your 1st comment?

With a physics Ph.D., I can't get hired as a doctor, lawyer, accountant, or civil engineer because of licensing (not to say that it's a bad thing for the world that I can't be hired). However, I can get hired as a software engineer, car salesman, and without too much trouble as a stockbroker, because those either have no licensing or minimal licensing requirements.

Couldn't post docs fulfill those obligations in the form of an accreditation program once you receive a doctoral degree? Much like a residency.

Trouble is that the "accreditation" is a Ph.d. Also there isn't a well defined set of skills, like being a doctor or lawyer.

Really? But economic programs aren't professional licensed programs... are they?

Effectively they are. You get a job based on what peer reviewed publications. The problem with economists (and to a lesser degree physicists) is that it's hard to come up with objective criteria for competence so when you have to make decisions, it can get very subjective, very quickly.

4.) Well it seems that the market is over saturated with PhD's and is primarily due to the to easy access students have to fund their education (well-from my point of view anyway).

And for physics Ph.D.'s people have easy access because it's necessary to have graduate students to do research. The other thing is that I *don't* think that there are too many Ph.D.'s. The problem is an issue of market structure and demand.

However it does seem that society is not kind to researchers. Is it society or the researchers themselves that need to change?

It depends. Personally, if the US isn't kind to researchers, then eventually people will move elsewhere, and that will be bad for the US.

I've always been more drawn to free market oriented views and not been fond of Keynesian or socialist economic schools, respectfully.

I'm a free market Marxist that looks as markets from a physics point of view. You can mathematically prove that assuming A, B, and C with definitions D and E that F must occur. However, reality is messy in that you never have exactly A, B, and C and you have to be careful about definitions D and E because the technical meaning of D might be different from the meaning that most people assign to it.

In all honesty, my adherence to libertarian views is driven from my personal experience and the morals I've cultivated from those experiences.

One trouble with extrapolating from personal views is that economics has a nasty habit of changing. Based on the experience of the Soviet Union in 1960, one could naturally assume (incorrectly) that central planning was the ideal economic system. Similarly the fall of the Soviet Union led people to assume that free market capitalism was the way to go, but that hasn't seem to work that well recently.

The price mechanism is far too powerful of an efficient system to allocating scarce sources.

Under some mathematical situations, and under some definitions of "efficient" then yes it works very well, but because it works in some situations, doesn't mean that it's some universal law that works universally well in all situations. You look at a a market, you figure out how it works, you write some equations, and if you look really closely, you can often figure out a way of making money from that understanding.

The other thing is that "efficiency" isn't a unalloyed good. If you are juggling chain saws then you really want your shoes to have a lot of friction, because it means that you won't slip. We are at the point that many financial transactions happen in milliseconds and that makes people wonder if too much efficiency is a bad thing.

The other thing is that markets don't come into being fully formed, and a *lot* depends on the specific market rules. I know of one situation in which the behavior of the market is obviously impacted by what time the brokers go to lunch, and that has to be taken into account when writing equations that describe that market.

The fact that markets are incredibly complicated is I suppose a good thing, because it means lots of pretty high paying jobs for physicists trying to model them.

 

[deRham]

Karl Marx answered this quite nicely. People with power make up the rules so they'll make them up to maximize their power at the expense of people with no power

I kind of suspected this too; in some theoretical fields, I don't think it's possible to "exploit labor" from the lower level guys, but I think it makes a lot of sense that once the middle batch grow larger, it's probably the top that will have to take the cut (not the bottom, because it has, and always will, remain the largest in population). I imagine once someone gets tenure, there is little chance he/she will support the idea of fewer tenured faculty, at least not vocally.

I imagine some tenured faculty make ~ 100-120K, and I see no reason why it's not economical to reduce the number of those drastically, and have more researchers making around 70-80K who have not strictly temporary but far from permanent jobs. I admit these numbers are not necessarily reliable (I've heard of one tenured faculty member at a pretty top notch school state his salary as ~ 130K), but they at least serve to illustrate.

 

[twofish-quant]

I kind of suspected this too; in some theoretical fields, I don't think it's possible to "exploit labor" from the lower level guys, but I think it makes a lot of sense that once the middle batch grow larger, it's probably the top that will have to take the cut (not the bottom, because it has, and always will, remain the largest in population).

This is where economic growth and science comes in. If you can make the pie bigger, then there going to be less argument over who gets what, and you can have extremely unequal societies in which the people with power get most of the stuff, and it doesn't matter because there is so much stuff that everyone else ends up with something.

I imagine once someone gets tenure, there is little chance he/she will support the idea of fewer tenured faculty, at least not vocally.

Ahhh... But the beauty of the system is that it's a system. If you had one person or a small group of people that made all of the decisions, you could protest and pressure them into changing their decisions. But the beauty of the system is that there isn't an easy choke point. Suppose people wanted to change the tenure system. It's not even clear where to start, even if people wanted it. In order to change something like that, you need a lot of people making coordinated decisions at the same time, and that's nothing that one or two people can do even if they wanted to, which they don't.

That makes it a clever system because you don't even have to feel guilty from benefiting from it. Someone that benefits from the system can say (and even say truthfully) that they can't do anything about it.

I imagine some tenured faculty make ~ 100-120K, and I see no reason why it's not economical to reduce the number of those drastically, and have more researchers making around 70-80K who have not strictly temporary but far from permanent jobs.

The problem with cutting is that once you start eliminating jobs, people stop spending, which eliminates more jobs which gets you in a vicious circle.

There are two political problems:

1) People who make 100-120K are going to fight the changes tooth and nail

2) People that don't make 100-120K also have an interest in fighting those changes. The problem is that the people that want to cut education and science spending aren't going to stop once they've reduced salaries. Once you've reduced salaries for tenured faculty to turn them into non-tenured, then the next step is going to eliminate those jobs so that no one makes anything.

This isn't an academic issue. Rick Perry in Texas has been very active at trying to cut spending to UT Austin, but his "war against tenure" hasn't been well received among adjuncts and graduate students, because he hasn't been able to convince anyone that he won't stop once he has gotten rid of tenured faculty. It doesn't help that the people that are in this camp tend to think that the world is 6000 years old.

I admit these numbers are not necessarily reliable (I've heard of one tenured faculty member at a pretty top notch school state his salary as ~ 130K), but they at least serve to illustrate.

A lot depends on the department. Business professors often make $200K/year and football coaches can make $1M/year.

 

[mal4mac]

With a physics Ph.D., I can't get hired as a doctor, lawyer, accountant, or civil engineer because of licensing (not to say that it's a bad thing for the world that I can't be hired). However, I can get hired as a software engineer, car salesman, and without too much trouble as a stockbroker

Is becoming a stockbroker that easy? In the UK, at least, daddy better have the contacts and money:

25% of UK merchant bankers and stockbrokers went to Eton.

96% of top stockbrokers went to public schools.
4% went to grammar schools
0% (The vast majority of kids!) went to comprehensive schools.

Figures from: "Money/space: geographies of monetary transformation" by Andrew Leyshon, N. J. Thrif"

... these are 1986 figures, but I don't think much has changed.

I went to comprehensive school and was seriously applying for jobs in technical industries & academia around 1986. I often wondered if I should have applied for a stockbroker job. Now I see that I would have had 0% chance! Makes me feel a bit better... I never had a chance of earning easy big bucks :)

I suppose it's obvious - those with big money and power are going to make sure that the jobs that easily provide big money and power are kept for their kids.

 

[Mute]

I imagine some tenured faculty make ~ 100-120K, and I see no reason why it's not economical to reduce the number of those drastically, and have more researchers making around 70-80K who have not strictly temporary but far from permanent jobs.

One of the major reasons people put up with the length of time required to land an academic job is because once you finally have it, you have it for as long as you want. If you eliminate the permanence of the position, it's harder to justify the years you spend going after this job. You have to make up for this somehow. You either have to retool the whole system so that people don't spend years of their lives trying to become professional researchers, or you have to increase salaries for the positions to remain worth going after. You might even have to do both.

 

[ParticleGrl]

One of the major reasons people put up with the length of time required to land an academic job is because once you finally have it, you have it for as long as you want. If you eliminate the permanence of the position, it's harder to justify the years you spend going after this job. You have to make up for this somehow. You either have to retool the whole system so that people don't spend years of their lives trying to become professional researchers, or you have to increase salaries for the positions to remain worth going after. You might even have to do both.

I strongly disagree. The current system is loaded with people who would pursue a career in physics regardless of how awful the outcome. If postdocs allowed for more a stable life, but tenured positions paid less, overall utility would improve. The worry is that if you cut tenured pay, you still won't do anything to improve the generally poor postdoc conditions, so nothing changes.

But even if tenured profs made half of what they do now, you'd still have people chasing the positions. CS and economics professors make substantially more than theoretical physics professors, even at liberal arts colleges, and yet the physics professorships are much more competitive.

 

[George Jones]

football coaches can make $1M/year.

See
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1086.