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发帖数: 5516 | 1 http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_i
Taken for Granted
The not-quite-stated, awful truth
By
Beryl Lieff Benderly
January 08, 2015
For all but a small percentage of aspiring researchers, doing a postdoc at a
university is a lousy idea because it will neither result in an academic
job nor otherwise advance one’s career.
My dictionary defines “gaffe” as an embarrassing social blunder. In
Washington, D.C., gaffe means something a little different: It’s when a
political figure unintentionally speaks an impolitic truth—that, at least,
is how it is defined by political journalistMichael Kinsley. Avoiding
such faux pas without uttering provable falsehoods is thus a skill highly
valued in the nation’s capital.
Thereporton postdocs issued by the U.S. National Academies in
December appears to follow this tenet of local etiquette. The penetrating
analysis inThe Postdoctoral Experience Revisitedcomes all the way up
to, but does not actually state, some inconvenient realities: For all but a
small percentage of aspiring researchers, doing a postdoc at a university
is a lousy idea because it will neither result in an academic job nor
otherwise advance one’s career. If graduate students had accurate
information about what lay ahead, many would—and should—choose not to
become postdocs.
Though the report stops just short of thisQ.E.D., it upholds the
National Academies’ scientific standards by providing all the evidence
needed to reach that conclusion. “[T]he number of postdoctoral researchers
is out of equilibrium with the number of available positions that require
advanced training,” it states. “[A]n increasing fraction end up in
nonacademic or non-research careers that do not require the years of
advanced research training provided by the postdoctoral position.”
“For some careers, particularly for faculty positions in the physical and
biomedical sciences at research universities, the postdoctoral experience
can be very helpful,” the report states. For the nonacademic occupations
that the great majority will follow, however, “a new Ph.D. can benefit more
from other types of work experience.” The report’s authors are clear on
one point: The notion of the postdoc as the “default step” after the Ph.D.
must end.
The price of trying
The report recognizes the “continuous need for researchers with advanced
training in the U.S. research enterprise. Postdoctoral researchers are
playing a crucial, but often unrecognized, role in that research. … However
, some principal investigators hire postdoctoral researchers to fill the
need for advanced researchers in lieu of permanent research staff, instead
of as a symbiotic practice that provides advanced training.” “[P]rincipal
investigators are currently under no obligation to provide opportunities for
development” so “in many cases, any training that occurs is a byproduct
of work.”
A “relatively small percentage” of the nation’s postdocs have a much
better situation, however, because they work not at universities but in “
important roles in research groups at national laboratories, in government
and in industry,” the report continues. Compared to their academic
counterparts, these nonuniversity researchers generally “earn more, have
shorter appointment periods, and receive training and guidance with direct
relevance to their career aspirations.” More importantly, they even have “
a reasonable chance that [they] will eventually be hired for permanent
employment” by the organizations where they work, because companies and
government agencies often use postdoc appointments not as a source of cheap,
disposable, temporary labor but as opportunities to try out prospective
long-term employees.
The scientists who do postdocs at universities “pay an extremely high price
” for any training they may receive, the report states. They earn “
approximately 40 percent less per hour” than a bachelor’s degree graduate
of the same age. When they finally enter the nonacademic job market, their
financial “sacrifices … are not compensated later in their careers. On
average, [they] start at lower salaries than … graduates who entered
similar jobs immediately after earning their Ph.D.”
Despite the disadvantages, some people take a postdoc in hopes of landing a
scarce faculty post. “Doctorate recipients are adults who have the right to
choose a career path and accept low wages if they think that it will
eventually lead to a satisfying career,” the report notes. They’re as free
to shoot for the job of their dreams as anyone else pursuing an unlikely
ambition—say, to become a major league baseball player or a violinist in a
major orchestra.
“The difference is that we don't support” would-be pro athletes and
budding virtuosi with federal tax dollars, notes report committee member and
Georgia State University labor economistPaula Stephan, in an interview
withScienceCareers. Another difference, she adds, is that the long
odds against reaching the majors or a symphony chair are widely understood
in the sports and music worlds—unlike the academic world, where many
graduate students lack accurate information about career prospects.
Ending the mismatch
The “mismatch” between the number of postdocs and the number of available
career positions requiring that kind of training creates “a need to
reexamine the human capital needs (i.e., job structure, salary practices,
and career pathways) of the research enterprise,” the report states. “Some
of the work now being done by postdoctoral researchers might more
appropriately be done by permanent research staff [receiving] the salary,
benefits, and job security commensurate with full-time employment [as is]
common in government, industrial laboratories, and outside the United States
. The postdoctoral experience itself should be refocused, with training and
mentoring at its center.”
This evidence certainly implies—although the report does not explicitly
state it—that the number of postdocs needs to shrink. Such a conclusion is
“not for us to say explicitly,” the report committee’s chair, Gregory
Petsko of Weill Cornell Medical College,has toldScienceCareers.
For Stephan, on the other hand, that conclusion is obvious and necessary
. She believes that fewer postdocs need not imply less research, because
science can be effectively conducted under a number of organizational models
, as demonstrated by institutions in the United States and abroad that do
not use university-based models. There is no reason, she says, that research
must be tied to training or take place at universities.
Stephan believes an effective way of reshaping the research enterprise is
altering the incentives that drive the current system. Among
therecommendations in the report,one she sees as especially crucial is
assuring that graduate students, starting early in their graduate work or
even before, get information about the career outcomes of Ph.D.s and
postdocs that is accurate, specific, and timely—and, as the report states,
“broken down by field and institution.” (As we’venoted, the Royal
Society, which serves as the United Kingdom’s national academy of science,
recently made a similar recommendation.) Providing this information, as both
Stephan and the report emphasize, will require collecting much better data
on scientists’ professional fates.
Equally important, Stephan says, is the report’s proposal to substantially
raise postdoc pay, which, given today’s static federal funding, will
automatically reduce the number hired. “As long as they are dirt cheap,”
lab chiefs will continue using excessive numbers of postdocs, she adds. The
report proposes hiking the minimum National Institutes of Health Ruth L.
Kirschstein National Research Service Award payment, which serves as ade
factonational standard, to $50,000 a year (in 2014 dollars), with
adjustments for inflation. Pay should be higher “where regional cost of
living, disciplinary norms, and institutional or sector salary scales
dictate,” and fringe benefits should be “appropriate to [postdocs’] level
of experience and commensurate with benefits given to equivalent full-time
employees,” it adds.
Stephan believes that the “shock to the system” from the current severe
funding crisis is causing the need for change to sink in among academic
science’s leadership. Not everyone concurs, however. Academies reports are
ordinarilyconsensusdocuments, but afootnotereveals that two
committee members “do not support” the $50,000 salary floor as a “
prescriptive ‘salary standard’ based upon one particular field [(
biomedicine)] and funding agency [(NIH)].” The two did, however, agree that
salaries should be “fair and fit rationally within the spectrum of
salaries for researchers in that discipline, at that institution … well
above that of a graduate student and significantly less” than those of
staff scientists and faculty members.
The painful reality, Stephan says, is that “not everyone bears the cost
equally. … I feel terrible for the cohort that’s been caught” in the
current crunch. It may be too late to help them, but if the academic science
community can reach the conclusions implicit in the report and make the
appropriate changes, future generations of young scientists may have much
smoother and less painful transitions to satisfying and productive careers.
Beryl Lieff Benderly writes from Washington, D.C.
10.1126/science.caredit.a1500008 | v**********m
发帖数: 5516 | 2 As long as they are dirt cheap,” lab chiefs will continue using excessive
numbers of postdocs,
a
【在 v**********m 的大作中提到】
: http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_i
: Taken for Granted
: The not-quite-stated, awful truth
: By
: Beryl Lieff Benderly
: January 08, 2015
: For all but a small percentage of aspiring researchers, doing a postdoc at a
: university is a lousy idea because it will neither result in an academic
: job nor otherwise advance one’s career.
: My dictionary defines “gaffe” as an embarrassing social blunder. In
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