Are jobs in academia really as rare as two-fish says?

[Oriako]

I'm finishing my first semester in university with a 4.0 GPA taking Honours classes, I'm working on a paper that will be published with a post-doc in Physics, and I have a summer research position lined up. I'm doing a double Honours Astrophysics and Mathematics program and I've already read ahead in many textbooks such as topology, real analysis, and convex geometry.

Given this initial head start, if I continue to get lucky with my opportunities and finish my undergraduate with a very high GPA (3.9-4.0), would I be in a suitable position to get into a top grad school and then a professorship (later)? I know that is a massive assumption that I would be able to make it as far as finishing my undergraduate with a 4.0, but entertain the thought for a minute.

Are there thousands of other students out there just like me, who would be applying to the top grad schools as well in a couple of years? Anyone who has been at the top, gone to graduate school at a top 10-25 school, is the competition really as fierce as everyone on this forum makes it out to be? I know it is quite premature to be saying any of this, but I would rather crawl up in a hole and die than not pursue an academic career... I would not be able to work on some menial tasks all day long that do not contribute to human knowledge or grant the personal satisfaction and excitement that deep thinking does.

tl;dr: For someone who is having a good start in their undergraduate and "seems" like they have the potential to continue with that success, if I play my cards right will I be able to end up in a research position if I keep at it for as long as it takes?

 

[eri]

It's not easy to get a job as a professor. Many people start out strong, then things just don't work out at some point - I was in a similar position to you at that point in my career, but didn't get into a top grad school (too many people with similar resumes), got a good postdoc after grad school at a lower-ranked school, and just got a tenure-track position. It's not at a top school, but I'm happy with it. Friends of mine aren't so lucky; many aren't getting interviews at all. It depends on a lot of factors. If you can manage to keep going strong, do some really impressive research in grad school, get a great postdoc or prize fellowship, you'll be on your way to a good job in academia. But there are no guarantees, and everyone else thinks they're on the same path.

 

[e.bar.goum]

It all depends. It depends on your specialty, your location, the people you know, etc etc. If you are passionate and do quality science, with a little luck, you should be OK. Your current grades are pretty good, and if you keep going, you should get into a grad school OK. Competition is fierce, so that just means you need to try harder than anyone else.

It's impossible to say "yes, you'll get a professorship", because it's way more complicated than just getting good grades and publishing (unfortunately). Can you give a good talk? Network with others? Work well in teams? Are you female? (Sexism is alive and well in academia). Do you work in a up and coming field?

I was just at a end of year Research School morning tea, and it was mentioned that the school hired 10 new permanent (tenured) staff this year. That's pretty good. In my country, we have a lot of "top heaviness" in academia - a high proportion of researchers are approaching retirement in the next few years, and it looks pretty good for aspiring academics.

 

[Number Nine]

There are orders of magnitude more physics PhD's than there are academic positions available. Many of those PhD's were granted by top institutions. What sets you apart? You haven't even published any research yet, so how can you say that you're any more attractive than the thousands of other PhD's vying for the same ten academic positions? Go for a PhD if you like physics, but don't get it for the job security.

 

[Chunkysalsa]

Seeing as how my small time school keeps hiring MIT graduates, I'd say yes. Its also not a job where you have a constant stream of people leaving.

 

[turbo]

Jobs in academia are not plentiful. Rare? maybe not, but can you find them and clamp on? Probably not unless you are a a star.

 

[Vanadium 50]

There are orders of magnitude more physics PhD's than there are academic positions available.

Well, more like one order of magnitude. If the average professor graduates 10 students over his career, and only one replaces him, that's 10:1. We can argue that maybe it's 15, but it's not 100 or 1000.

There are about 7500 full-time faculty jobs total in the US, a little more than half of which are in PhD-granting institutes. Retirements are about 3% of this (turnover is higher, but shuffling faculty positions doesn't create any new jobs, so there are perhaps 230 new jobs a year. If one is considering only research universities, that's more like 130. There are about 1500 new PhD grads a year.

1500 >> 130. Also, every one of the 1500 is smart enough to earn a PhD in physics. That I think is the real problem: when faced with these numbers, students react "well, I am smart and hardworking and have always achieved academic success despite the odds; this doesn't apply to me." Only 10% or so of them are right.

 

[Oriako]

Vanadium, is the situation similar for Mathematics? I'm not sure whether I wanted to go into Physics or Mathematics, which is why I am doing both for an undergraduate and taking an extra year (it can only help me).

Thanks for the advice.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I have no idea, but probably so. The essential point remains the same: a professor has N students and only one will replace him.

 

[dacruick]

I would not be able to work on some menial tasks all day long that do not contribute to human knowledge or grant the personal satisfaction and excitement that deep thinking does.

Given this, what makes you think academia is the only route? If you love the schooling, which it seams you do, pursue that PhD. Try and work on something relevant to industry so that even if you don't land your dream job of professor, you still have transferable skills.

 

[f95toli]

Another thing worth mentioning is that luck plays a large role: in the research (a.k.a. serendipidy), funding to the field you work in (a major disovery in your field can open up lots of doors, and make it easier to get funding), access to people/equipment (it IS much easier to do novel experiments if you have access to rare equipment) and last but not least being in the right place at the right time; even a very impressive CV won't help if there are no open positions in your field.

Hence, whereas hard work will (obviously) increase your chances, you will always need a plan B.

 

[diligence]

Given this initial head start, if I continue to get lucky with my opportunities and finish my undergraduate with a very high GPA (3.9-4.0), would I be in a suitable position to get into a top grad school and then a professorship (later)?

I don't think gaining a professorship hinges on your GPA and where you went to grad school as much as it seems to. Yes, there are more professors coming from the top schools, but how do you know the reason they're good is because they came from a top school? They could've have gone anywhere and been every bit the academic star they are. Of course, if you have a GPA so bad that you can't get in anywhere, then you're obviously screwed. But I see enough professors (usually foreign) coming from obscure and random schools who are stars at my school.

This leads me to believe it's really more about the science you do than where you do it. If you want to pick a point of your academic career and label it "most important towards getting tenured professorship", I would say it's probably post-doc.

 

[AlephZero]

I would rather crawl up in a hole and die than not pursue an academic career... I would not be able to work on some menial tasks all day long that do not contribute to human knowledge or grant the personal satisfaction and excitement that deep thinking does.

The only reason you would spend your whole career doing "menial tasks" in industry is because you aren't good enough to do anything more challenging. (And the fact is that there are plenty of graduates who aren't good enough to do any more than that, whatever it says on their degree certificate). Of course you will have to do some grunt work at the start, but that's how you find out what are the real world problems that need deep thinking to solve them.

The amount of personal satisfaction, excitement, or deep thinking you get from what you do is mostly a fuction of yourself.

And don't forget that the further you progress as an academic, the more time you will spend on "menial tasks" like paperwork, fundraising, sitting in endless committee meetings, reading applications from the next generation of wannabee no-hopers, etc, etc...

 

[deRham]

Yes, there are more professors coming from the top schools, but how do you know the reason they're good is because they came from a top school?

I think this is correct, and to add, I should note that having what it takes to succeed in academia seems to involve more than merely having great talent for the subject. One needs to find a niche to be productive in, so that other people are willing to even consider the possibility of offering a life-long position to you. That means they'd like you as a colleague for a lifetime, and that one of those precious few spots Vanadium described will go to you.

I would not be able to work on some menial tasks all day long that do not contribute to human knowledge or grant the personal satisfaction and excitement that deep thinking does.

Well you know, you eat and drink water - perhaps that doesn't contribute to human knowledge, and probably doesn't always grant great excitement.

All said, you might end up with an academic career. But think of it this way - you may have no choice where you are ending up, and not everyone wants to accept every last downside to the life *prior* to getting a tenure-track position. They may take some temporary positions initially, but it starts getting to be ridiculous after a certain point, if nobody is taking you. When getting into a good graduate school is so hard in physics and mathematics, there is no way it isn't insanely tough to get past that stage. Even at the stage of graduate school, I get the feeling there are more candidates who are very prepared for X program than are spots, so some selection process need be made, come what may.

 

[deRham]

Regarding AlephZero's comment - I believe it is true that one won't end up doing something totally menial unless that's all one is trained to do. But, I do think finding a very interesting real-world problem to solve and solving it, depending on what one means by this, can be something only a few people actually will end up doing, and not *just* because they are talented enough to notice these problems, but also that they were in the right place at the right time. Unlike in academia, where you can sit down and keep thinking and thinking, industry seems to be quite ruthless about keeping people productive... of course those who aren't productive in academia will eventually lose the game, but it can be some time before they do. There are a LOT more tasks involving some relatively menial work than there are creative solutions to fairly big real-world issues. I do believe quite a few people with the intelligence and drive to do something less "menial" might not end up doing so simply because of the hard facts.

But I don't know for sure that this is the case - I only suspect it. This means I certainly don't know for sure that this is not the case.

 

[ander]

Unlike in academia, where you can sit down and keep thinking and thinking, industry seems to be quite ruthless about keeping people productive... of course those who aren't productive in academia will eventually lose the game, but it can be some time before they do. There are a LOT more tasks involving some relatively menial work than there are creative solutions to fairly big real-world issues.

If you're really, really good and decide to go into academia, you may get to work on interesting problems. If you're really, really good and you decide to go into industry, you may get to work on interesting problems. There are plenty of people in the University of South XYZ running the same experiments 1000x. The only way that's not menial is if you manage to rip it out of context and romanticize it. But the same can be done (perhaps more easily) in industry or medicine.

 

[deRham]

^ Ah yes, you're very correct - there's a big difference between academia in different fields. I get the feeling one is more likely to get away with doing something non-menial in a field such as mathematics, as opposed to a field where someone can tell you what to do in a lab, and you have to do it.

 

[bigfooted]

Here's my idea on the whole. Yes, it is a pyramid structure, with only a few on the academic top. However, not everybody sees becoming a professor as the best possible career. Actually, only a few of my PhD colleagues even considered continuing in academia after finishing their PhDs. So if you really want to continue in academia and you have a good track record (i.e. they have actually heard of you and read some of your papers even before you applied for a vacancy) then you will have a very good chance.

But: you also must realize that this is an international thing. You should be prepared to do a postdoc on the other side of the world, take an assistant professorship at yet another place and realize that the chances of becoming a professor at your alma mater will be pretty slim.

 

[ander]

^ Ah yes, you're very correct - there's a big difference between academia in different fields. I get the feeling one is more likely to get away with doing something non-menial in a field such as mathematics, as opposed to a field where someone can tell you what to do in a lab, and you have to do it.

I don't think it matters what discipline you're in. Besides, there is a lot to learn from menial tasks. Wisdom rather than knowledge. I learned more about 21st century late capitalist existence hole-punching manuscripts than I ever did reading books on cultural theory.

 

[deRham]

@ander: at the "lower levels," I am fairly sure it matters, in that you are less likely to be a smart person ending up having little say in what you're working on, assigned to work under some professor in a lab, if you are in a field that is more "pen and paper". At the end of the day though, everyone faces the music and getting a full time position seems to be tough, regardless the field, and certainly in some of the hyper-competitive "pen and paper" fields.

I don't deny there is an experience to be gained from everything.

 

[ander]

@ander: at the "lower levels," I am fairly sure it matters, in that you are less likely to be a smart person ending up having little say in what you're working on, assigned to work under some professor in a lab, if you are in a field that is more "pen and paper". At the end of the day though, everyone faces the music and getting a full time position seems to be tough, regardless the field, and certainly in some of the hyper-competitive "pen and paper" fields.

I don't deny there is an experience to be gained from everything.

True, and not all menial work is created equal. I (like you maybe) have a fear of ending up spending my life carrying out experiments I care nothing about in a lab somewhere. This is maybe caused by the story of my hs chem teacher who left a prestigious chem phd program because as I understood it he got sick of being a poorly paid lab rat for some professor.On the other hand I don't think I'd mind as much writing code all day.

 

[twofish-quant]

Are there thousands of other students out there just like me, who would be applying to the top grad schools as well in a couple of years? Anyone who has been at the top, gone to graduate school at a top 10-25 school, is the competition really as fierce as everyone on this forum makes it out to be?

Yes and no.

The bad news is that research professorships in physics are rather uncommon, and even if everything works out for you, you are likely not going to get a research professorships.

The *GOOD* news is that most people that do physics research are *NOT* research professors. First of all, if you successfully finish a Ph.D. you will be a physics researcher. The requirement for getting a physics Ph.D. is that you complete a piece of original research, and the reason that universities have graduate students is so that they can get physics researchers cheap.

The other *GOOD* news is that while most Ph.D.'s don't become physics professors, a majority do end up with research careers. Among the jobs available are:

1) non-tenured research scientist at a university - At my old department, you had about 20 tenure/tenure-track faculty and about 20 or so non-tenured research scientists. I have a good friend that ended up director of supercomputing at a major university. He isn't a professor, and does not have tenure track, but it's a very important and impressive job.

2) "backdoor" researcher - I know of several people that work as system administrators at universities. Their job description is that they just do network programming and system administration, but they've been able to publish papers, and being a researcher is an "informal" part of their job description

3) research scientist at a national lab - know a lot of people that did this

4) industrial researcher - Which is what I'm doing. There are industrial researchers that have the title physicists, and also people like me that do what is computational physics in all but name.

5) People that end up doing nothing to do with physics. I know several Ph.D.'s that have ended up doing nothing to do with physics, but even they did physics for several years while doing their Ph.D.

My point is if you absolutely want be a physics professor then it looks bad, but this obsession with becoming a physics professor is very unhealthy. If you want to research physics, then everything changes.

I know it is quite premature to be saying any of this, but I would rather crawl up in a hole and die than not pursue an academic career... I would not be able to work on some menial tasks all day long that do not contribute to human knowledge or grant the personal satisfaction and excitement that deep thinking does.

That's the attitude that I want to get rid of. It's simply not the case that academia is the only place where you can "contribute to human knowledge." Also you *will* be spending a lot of your time in industry doing menial tasks, but you'll be spending most of your time in academia doing menial tasks to. About 95% of research involves lots of things that are menial. That's why having a ton of graduate students is important.

For someone who is having a good start in their undergraduate and "seems" like they have the potential to continue with that success, if I play my cards right will I be able to end up in a research position if I keep at it for as long as it takes?

It's not particularly difficult to end up with a *research position*. All you really have to do is to get admitted to graduate school and you'll be a physics researcher.

 

[twofish-quant]

Given this, what makes you think academia is the only route?

It's not. Also academia and industry are not separate streams. I know of a half dozen people that I work with that have gotten appointments as adjunct instructors in big name schools. Conversely most professors that I know have something in the back room.

Try and work on something relevant to industry so that even if you don't land your dream job of professor, you still have transferable skills.

Something about professors is that once you look at them closely they look less and less like dream jobs. It's wonderful to end up a senior full professor, but getting there doesn't look like much fun, and there are alternative better routes to that.

 

[twofish-quant]

It all depends. It depends on your specialty, your location, the people you know, etc etc. If you are passionate and do quality science, with a little luck, you should be OK

As far as getting a research professorship, that's total false. You have N spots and 10*N applicants. As far as your specialty, your location, the people you know, the quality of your research, you are not likely to be any better than the other applicants.

So it boils down to luck and 1 in 10 is not a "little luck."

One problem is that most people that go into physics have usually been at the top of their class in the past. In high school, you can get ahead by studying harder than the next person. However, this stops working once you get to graduate levels since you are competing against people that are as good as you are.

Now if you are looking at a career doing physics research then the odds are 2 in 3, and if you are looking at doing physics research your odds are 1 in 1. By definition you will get a physics Ph.D. unless you convince your committee that you are a physics researcher.

It's impossible to say "yes, you'll get a professorship"

It's possible to say that you probably won't, and that you should think about what happens if you don't.

In my country, we have a lot of "top heaviness" in academia - a high proportion of researchers are approaching retirement in the next few years, and it looks pretty good for aspiring academics.

In the US, people have been talking about retiring professors for the last thirty years, and it hasn't happened. The problem is that everyone is in a budget cutting mood, so when a professor retires, that's an excuse to save money by not hiring anyone new.

 

[twofish-quant]

This is going to be sound a bit harsh, but it needs to be said, and it's not really directed at you.

People have just got to stop thinking about non-academic positions as Plan B. A non-academic position is not Plan B, it should be Plan A. Getting an academic position should be a "this is what I will do if I win the lottery" plan.

The reason is that as long as people keep thinking of non-academia positions as "Plan B" it's going to be thought of as secondary when in fact the reality that most Ph.d.'s are *NOT* going into academia needs to be put at the core of the Ph.D. curriculum. Also saying that non-academia is "Plan B" makes those jobs seem "worse" which is a bad thing to do if you want to offer Ph.D.'s with diverse choices.

A lot of what I say here is what I wish someone had told me when I was an undergraduate. Part of it is that there is this annoying voice in the back of my head that tells me that I'm "dirty" and "shameful" for not take the post-doc route, and a lot of my personal struggle has been a largely but not completely successful effort to tell that voice to *SHUT UP*. I think that we'd all be better off if Ph.D students never have that voice to begin with, and talking about non-academic careers as "Plan B" just reinforces some of the bad traits in physics training.

And it wasn't also this way. One great page is this one by David Kaiser

http://web.mit.edu/dikaiser/www/CWB.html

One curious page is chapter 2, the Suburbanization of Cold War Physics. What's interested in that chapter, is that I get the sense that a physics Ph.D. graduating in 1960 *didn't* consider academia plan A. So something happened between 1960 and 1990. Maybe.

Maybe, it had something to do with Vietnam, since a lot of the demand for physics Ph.D.'s were in defense industries, and as Vietnam became more and more unpopular on college campuses, there was a desire by faculty to "save" their students from industry. Or maybe not. It would be useful for someone to do some research on this topic. Or maybe my perceptions are incorrect and people graduating in 1960 did consider academia to be plan A. I don't know, and I'd appreciate it if someone found out.

 

[twofish-quant]

Yes, there are more professors coming from the top schools, but how do you know the reason they're good is because they came from a top school?

You can talk with your professor and learn stuff from them. For example in astrophysics, there are a huge number of people with Harvard connections so much so that sometimes my department and school feels like a Harvard alumni chapter.

Finding out why that happened is interesting. It seems that what happened was that in the early 1970's, there was a massive expansion in mid-Western public schools, and they had to hire people from Harvard because Harvard was churning out a ton of Ph.D.'s and post-docs. Also, you can think of a lot of these schools as "Harvard West"

Now once I heard that story, it got me thinking. In 1970, the Midwest was the "frontier" but it's 2011. So I've been thinking a lot about where I can find a science frontier.

This leads me to believe it's really more about the science you do than where you do it.

That's obvious not true. If you can't get funding and professional relationships, you can't do science.

 

[twofish-quant]

So if you really want to continue in academia and you have a good track record (i.e. they have actually heard of you and read some of your papers even before you applied for a vacancy) then you will have a very good chance.

No. Academia is small enough so that "having heard of you before you apply" is a *minimum* requirement. In my field, there are at most fifty or so researchers at any given time (including graduate students). If a job opens up, and they haven't heard of you, then you aren't getting it. If they've never seen your papers before you apply, then you aren't getting the job.

More often than not, they want to hire someone and so they tailor the job requirements so that the person they want is the most qualified person for the job. This is not hard to do. Also, any time you have a small group of people all of whom know each other, you very quickly start getting cliques, and it sometimes starts feeling like high school all over again.

Also it's easy to get into a death spiral. The way that academia works is "citations" -> "grants" -> "research" -> "citations." If something trips you up, then it can push you out of the game pretty quick.

 

[ander]

Something about professors is that once you look at them closely they look less and less like dream jobs. It's wonderful to end up a senior full professor, but getting there doesn't look like much fun, and there are alternative better routes to that.

This is very true. I grew up in a family of tenured professors with 45+ years teaching at the same university. One point that nobody has made so far in this thread (as far as I've read) is that no matter how hard it is to get a full professorship, there are many downsides to academic life. You have little to no choice in where you live, and a lot of universities are in miserable, sleepy towns. And if you do get tenure, you're not likely to leave that position anytime soon. So you spend most of your life and you raise your kids in a place that you either didn't choose or chose fifteen years ago. What I got exposed to growing up was the monotony of academia. The same courses every year, year after year. Grading 80 assignments done by hung-over undergrads because the school doesn't want to pay for a TA. Petty departmental politics. Huge egos. An almost unbelievable close-mindedness and incredible disdain for "them" (i.e. non-academics). In some ways there is more potential for variety and learning (new skills, new methods, new perspectives) outside of academia than in academia. Anyway, I thought I'd throw this in since academia is being talking about as some kind of unattainable paradise.

 

[jtbell]

You have little to no choice in where you live, and a lot of universities are in miserable, sleepy towns. And if you do get tenure, you're not likely to leave that position anytime soon. So you spend most of your life and you raise your kids in a place that you either didn't choose or chose fifteen years ago.

You have to be willing to go wherever you get a job offer, unless you're really really brilliant and can attract multiple offers. I've been in the academic job-search cycle twice, in the mid 1980s, for teaching-oriented positions, and got one offer each time.

The first time I ended up in Schenectady, New York, a down-at-the-heels industrial city that actually felt rather familiar to me because I grew up in a down-at-the-heels industrial city in the Midwest. I liked it there because the surrounding countryside was nice, and I could easily do weekend trips to New York City or Boston, a big improvement over Cleveland, Detroit and Pittsburgh. But it was only a temporary position, so I had to move on.

The second time, I ended up in a small rural town in the Southeast. The "small town" part was OK with me, because I did my undergrad in a small town (actually a village) in the Midwest and liked it there. The "Southeast" part I was a bit skeptical about at first, but in the end I haven't been tempted to try to "move on" to a different position elsewhere. One factor is that I met my wife here, and she also teaches at the same college, so if we were to move we would have had the classic academic "two body problem."

There are advantages to living in a place like this. Our commute to work is a 10-15 minute walk, so we save money on gasoline, and time. Our house cost half what we would have had to pay in a major metro area. Our annual property-tax bill is a lot less than in many other places. Our salaries are smaller than they would have been in some other places, or in other jobs, but we've still been able to save up a decent amount for retirement.

 

[f95toli]

This is going to be sound a bit harsh, but it needs to be said, and it's not really directed at you.

People have just got to stop thinking about non-academic positions as Plan B. A non-academic position is not Plan B, it should be Plan A. Getting an academic position should be a "this is what I will do if I win the lottery" plan.

Well, getting a academic postions is at least somewhat easier than winning the lottery. All I meant was that there is nothing wrong with trying to get a postion in academia , but one should be prepared for the fact that it is not very likely to succeed.
Just as plan A might be competing in the olympics for someone who does sport at university, but plan B might be to become a coach is something similar; most people will end up going with plan B but that does not mean that plan A is the main reason for why people decide to pursue this type of career in the first place.

Also, note that once you've reached a point where you are offered a permanent research postion there is no guarantee that you'll want it; but that time you will probably have reached a point in life where other things matter more than work (i.e. familiy and kids); and things like salary and the amount of travel/overtime matter a lot.

 

[Oriako]

I really appreciate everyone commenting with a massive amount of advice. It's been somewhat on an eye-opener to me about how a lot of people who have actually been through academia don't play it out to be as amazing as I (and many others) "think it is".

In developing somewhat of a plan, in case academia does not work out, (I'm going to say I wouldn't WANT to do that), are there any courses in my undergraduate or overarching skills that you would recommend me learning? I'm leaning more to the Math side of things than Physics, so I likely will not have a ton of lab skills, or computer programming. Will I be pretty much screwed for finding a job in a technical field like this in industry if I'm not a programming expert?

 

[bigfooted]

In developing somewhat of a plan, in case academia does not work out, (I'm going to say I wouldn't WANT to do that), are there any courses in my undergraduate or overarching skills that you would recommend me learning?

EVERYBODY you compete with, in academia as well as in industry, will be smart and knowledgeable. My advice is: do something that REALLY sets you apart from the rest. Work on something real. Don't focus on courses alone. We had student groups that were building their own airplane, we had people building soccer-playing robots, we had people building solar cars... People will definitely be interested in 'this guy that built/designed/worked on the xxx that was covered on the news'.

 

[Oriako]

I'm not in engineering, I'm doing Pure Math and the theoretical side of Physics. How would I not focus on courses alone? For me, that extra time that sets me apart would be working on coming up with my own ideas about math and getting some preliminary research interests. I have about 3 or 4 papers that I've started working on with a bunch of ideas laid out that I want to investigate that I just don't have the tools yet (understanding of manifolds) to actually complete.

 

[Mute]

This is going to be sound a bit harsh, but it needs to be said, and it's not really directed at you.

People have just got to stop thinking about non-academic positions as Plan B. A non-academic position is not Plan B, it should be Plan A. Getting an academic position should be a "this is what I will do if I win the lottery" plan.

The reason is that as long as people keep thinking of non-academia positions as "Plan B" it's going to be thought of as secondary when in fact the reality that most Ph.d.'s are *NOT* going into academia needs to be put at the core of the Ph.D. curriculum. Also saying that non-academia is "Plan B" makes those jobs seem "worse" which is a bad thing to do if you want to offer Ph.D.'s with diverse choices.

Hm. Although actually landing an academic job may come down to a lottery, the amount of work required to get into that lottery doesn't seem to be adequately reflected by that comparison. I agree that people should not be taught to believe that non-academic positions are "secondary" to academic positions, but the fact of the matter is that the amount of work and focus required to get an academic job is greater than what is required to get a non-academic position, and that itself pretty much forces "get an academic job" to become "Plan A". One can drop out of the academic career path to get a non-academic job at nearly any point, but getting back on the academic track once off is much harder, hence non-academic jobs become "Plan B". If getting back on the academic track after not strictly following it were easier - i.e., if the amount of work to get either kind of job were essentially the same except that the getting an academic job also required a lot of luck - then I think your argument would be more apt.

This is not to say that I don't think it is a problem that everyone regards getting an academic job as Plan A, just that the system seems set up in such a way that we are forced to regard them as Plan A if we want to stand any reasonable chance of getting one.

 

[Cuauhtemoc]

I don't understand why people would want to get into academia, industry pays much more.