In article <33F34859.1064FDEE at ag.arizona.edu>, Bart Janssen
<bjanssen at ag.arizona.edu> wrote:
>Remember also that for Linus Pauling and Jim Watson there
> was no question that they would have jobs when they returned "home".
>> All that means is that the post-doc is a completely different job from
> what it was 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Has the change been for the
> good?????
>> cheers
> Bart
At the risk of being pedantic, I'd like to point out that Watson was a
postdoc nearly 50 years ago, not 30 years ago.
The roots of the employment problems for students and postdocs probably
reach back to Sputnik 1, when the US realized that it could only
outcompete the Commies/Ruskies if it had a strong science education
program. On top of that there was the Baby Boom, with zillions of
children needing education for the next 15 or 20 years. So universities
expanded and also developed a taste for overhead funds.
Now we are in a stage with relatively few college-age students, and less
need for large faculties. But was anyone thinking about that for the past
15 or 20 years? If so, it was nobody with any influence. So we have been
training a huge excess of scientists without considering that at the very
best, each current faculty member needs to train only one replacement in a
lifetime. (In ecological terms, academia is k-selected, and everyone has
been acting as though it is r-selected.) Furthermore, the cost of
research and education has increased dramatically but the available
research funding has remained flat or dropped in constant dollars.
Mary Clutter, who heads Biology at NSF, is certainly aware of the
overproduction of PhDs and thinks it is a mistake. However, universities
gain prestige by the number of MS and PhD degrees that they award, and
they are not likely to encourage faculty to run more modest labs (or to
hire technicians instead of students). Here in Tennessee, our campus is
partially funded by the state according to a formula that includes how
many graduate students are enrolled here. I don't know how many other
states operate in the same way, but I doubt that we are alone in being
pressed to keep large numbers of graduate students on hand.
Consequently, although some advisors are short-sighted and see having a
big lab as a sign of personal worth, many are quite aware of the
difficulties of the current system. But overall I think the system needs
to be changed, because overtraining is institutionalized and not merely
the result of a few academic personalities.
Chris Boake
Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
University of Tennessee at Knoxville
