World of Bollocks is usually lightweight crap, and rightly so. It's funnier that way. So I've been dancing around the idea of doing this particular post for a while, but kept opting out of it because, frankly, it's a rant, a bleat and a whinge. And it's funnier going off about the inherent shiteness of low-carb beers or poking Lily Allen fans with a stick.
The rant in question is the career, or lack thereof, that science provides. And the catalyst, finally, was Lindsay Tanner's recent PR-flack-penned op-ed piece on Failfax Digital, soliloquising about the joy and the beauty of science and how we need to get more kids into science, so to have more sciency postgrads for the employment market Going Forward.
To which I say: Fuck off we do. We need more postgrads in science like we need additional apertures in the face.
Let's do a thought experiment. (On second thoughts let's find a social scientist and punch them in the teeth for being part of the group of nimrods and fucktards that came up with the term 'thought experiment'.) Let's say there were, for instance, ten times as many electrical or plumbing apprenticeships than there were trade jobs for graduated apprentices to take up. Funded by the government, or industry-government partnerships, of course. Training ten times too many people, wasting years of their lives and millions of dollars in taxpayers money. You'd see outrage in the media, ministers being grilled on current affairs shows, public service mandarins being fired, the fucking works. You'd see apocalyptic fucking shitfire descend on any and all training institutes, technical colleges and government departments responsible for such a palpable waste of resources and of human capital.
You can see where I'm going with this, but let's go there anyway:
There are at any one time, at a rough count, ten times more PhD scholarships advertised than jobs for those PhD graduates - i.e. postdoctoral researchers - to go into. Every one of those PhD students has completed a 4 year undergraduate degree - usually BSc with first class honours - and have spent usually 4 years (plus or minus a year or two) in the lab, on government scholarship. So that's eight years of training, the last half of which have usually been funded by the government (or if you're in a more applied space, maybe industry) at $20-25K a year. Plus consumables for the actual project, of course. And what happens to the overwhelming majority of those PhD students? They leave science, because there's no jobs for them. They go off to become HR managers or sales reps or teach little kids how to read. Which is all lovely and noble of them, and most of them fall on their feet somehow, somewhere - but what was the fucking point in wasting years of their life and hundreds of thousands of taxpayer money training them to be scientists?
The reason, of course, is that PhD students are fucking cheap labour. A PhD student costs $25K a year, a grant-funded postdoctoral fellowship will cost a grant (depending on the country, the uni and the grant fund) $65Kish - plus overheads, which for most govt research grants are costed as a multiplier of salary, so you can effectively double the cost to the grant of having a postdoc. So who cares that you might need 4 PhD students to match the output of one properly trained postdoc, or that the fuel the research machine is burning is actually intelligent, analytical, highly-skilled, highly-trained humans? Certainly not the government, and certainly not the universities, for whom postgraduate student 'output' is rated as a KPI under their government funding. Basically, they get paid for churning out postgrads. It is the stated aim of the school to which my department belongs to have 10% of its students as postgrads, primarily PhDs, and most equivalent research-active organizational units at most universities in Australasia will state similar targets. I sincerely hope they fall short. It is never made clear to this hapless pack of cannon fodder that there is about as much chance of them making a long-term career out of research, or even academia, as there is of your average club cricketer doing a Dougie Bollinger and playing for Australia. And if they do make it, they'll be paid fuck all, will have no career stability to speak of and will generally have to work hours far in excess of those stated on their contract. In research, running is standing still, and standing still is plummetting backwards.
The market-driven capitalist response to that is that the needs of the market define whether there's jobs for these people. If there was a need for more R&D jobs we'd have more R&D jobs, if we needed more uni lecturers we'd have more uni lecturers. There's no unmet need for more research positions beyond postdoc level, says the model. Yeah, OK. I'm pragmatic enough to accept that. Science isn't the most important thing in the world to some people - like the two thirds of Australians who believe in angels for instance - and not everyone sees the truth, beauty and innate wonder of scientific research. The market might not need any more scientists - academic or research - than we already have.
Fine. So stop training people for jobs that don't fucking exist then.
The Doctor is OUT.
19 comments:
Well nothing there I can disagree with, lack of jobs for PhDs, the use of Doctoral students as the slaves for research.
One minor quibble
I believe thought experiments did not originate with social scientists but with the hard practical world of physics. It was Hans Christian Ørsted who first proposed the use of a gedankenexperiment literally -'experiment conducted in the thoughts'.
I agree it is ridiculous to call for more PhDs to be trained if there is no work for them. But what is needed is the recognition that we need more jobs which required PhD trained engineers and scientists.
Also the breakthroughs which the grant endowed teams with their tenured professors make do rely on the work of PhDs so if we stopped paying to employ the PhD candidates simply because they didn’t have full time jobs to go on to then a lot of the current scientific research and thus the engines that drive new technology and understanding would also dry up.
So I agree it is frustrating that you can toil for four/five years and have no job security at the end but I wouldn’t respond by scaping the funding for PhDs because that would also dry up the funding for further discovery and learning.
I would rather see that $ spend on some frugal funded post grad trying to understand some corner of infinite than return 4c to my pocket in taxes so spend on a shinny Ipad, or other such trinket build by the boffins and engineers who did a PhD.
I feel I can comment on this as I worked as PhD candidate for three years at one of Australia's gang of eight.
Oh fuck that's a good rant. Almost feel like a need a smoke after that one.
My industry was similar (journalism), with multitudes of Pretty Young Things being pumped out at the undergrad level to little to know jobs. Luckily, though, the degree was so broad as to allow at least some form of diversification.
Barnes - thanks for your perspectives on this, and you're absolutely right, I was just using 'thought experiments' as a stick to hit practitioners of social science with because they annoy me. There seems to me to be very little actual 'science' in what they do, and if there was truly an 'elephant in the room' as many times as they claimed, it'd be a fucking big game zoo out there.
I've glossed over a lot here. The fact is some people need to get well into a PhD to realise research isn't their game, or isn't necessary to get into the job they want. And that a lot of research is too expensive to get postdocs onto. And that having the wherewithall and determination to get a PhD stands you in good stead to get another job, in whatever field that may be. But even having said all that, there is no acknowledgement by the system of the human cost of this 'apprenticeship' strategy for producing scientists.
I absolutely agree that the ideal fix wouldn't be to cut PhD scholarships and use the money on postdocs (though it'd improve my immediate job prospecs), but to create more postdoc jobs (using that term in the broader sense - whether grant-funded research, industry, government depts, whatever.) But the concern I have - and this is where I change hats to my former-research-grants-administrator one - is that any increase in research spend by the govt won't improve the situation because it will just result in yet more PhD students, because the system has decided More PhDs = Good. Unless it's targeted towards postdocs, the net effect won't be an improvement. Maybe cutting postdocs out of the overhead algorithms so group leaders don't incur additional cost for putting them on grants would be a small step forward.
ALD - cheers - ironically as a high school student I was probably better at humanities than sciences, but looking at the two career options for humanities - journalist or English teacher - I went for science figuring it'd provide better career stability. Ha. In almost any comparable professional vocation you could name, if I'd spent as long being trained as I was as a PhD student, I'd be better paid and have greater job security.
You forgot to mention that because this is all government funded you spend a large ammount of time telling the funding bodies why you should be doing the research instead of DOING THE ACTUAL FUCKING WORK.
If you tried that in the tech industry you'd be so left behind it's not funny. I truly believe the system is built to stilfle true innovation.
Beeso - innovation? Why would we want to promote that? Not when we could be helping to perpetuate a funding bureaucracy so huge, unwieldy and pointless that even Yes, Minister would be hard pressed making it seem more fkn ridiculous.
A lovely and justified rant Doc.
I had no idea this was the case. My former brother-in-law is lucky to be a working Entomologist with the department of health...granted he's on tenterhooks every three or four years or so waiting for funding...but he's one of the lucky ones apparently.
The only thing I can contribute is my own angst at being in the same position musically. That's why I refuse to teach it anymore...it's wrong to take people's money and give them hope that one day they will work as a musician in an orchestra in Australia. I was a victim of false hope and I won't put anyone else through that heartwrenching experience...working your arse off for nothing. PAH.
Yep, good rant, well justified. Not just PhD's either. Two of my three kids were suckered into courses - one undergrad, one post - on the promise of endless jobs and career ops galore. Lies, damned lies and Uni lecturers shilling for bums on seats.
Bangar - thanks mate
Nat - he's probly in better shape if he's with a non-research govt department, more permanency there than in active research in unis or crown research institutes. I might have run into him in a previous life working in Brisbane.
GB - the 'bums on seats' undergraduate model for university funding is equally venal. Slowly moving away from it in NZ but it'll still be the major driver of how unis get teaching funding for years to come. Resulting in 1200-1500 student first year lectures.
Can't comment intelligently on your line of work as I don't know enough about it, but as ALD already mentioned, it's a problem across a whole spectrum of careers/industry. Was reading just a couple of days ago that of the several thousand teaching graduates in QLD this year, only several hundred have jobs this year, and most of those not permanent.
Quite glad The Brat decided to do an apprenticeship while he's working out what he wants to do with the rest of his life.
Still working in a place that basically is powered by burning PhD students, and has spent so many years focused on growth in scale without equivalent spending and development of infrastructure that now people are fleeing at an alarming rate, including the director.
A surprising number of Humanities graduates work in IT, by the way. As a broad area, it has the same absorption of underqualified overeducated people property that used to be the preserve of the advertising industry. From my point of view, or at least at various stages in my career it's been something that comes sort of form my point of view, programming is just another kind of writing. There's surprisingly little different in writing to produce a reaction in a reader, and writing imperative instructions for machines. Sometimes some machines can be more rewarding to deal with than some people.
Larry Wall, the creator of the Perl language was actually a linguist by training, so there's more than just my experience as evidence for this phenomenon.
Entertaining stuff - the whole world is off its rocker
Yeap, as I post-doc research fellow staring down the 10% likelihood that I will be awarded a second 4 year salary to continue with my research, I hear you loud and clear.
What is also an utter waste of resources is the split system for project grants and salary funding. As Beeso said, it take precious months of each year to write grant applications for project funding (of which only 25% get funded). However for the lucky ones who secure grant funding (and I truly believe it is a lucky dip of reviewers who decide your grants fortune) and set about the task of running a research project, they can get part-way through the project and realise they haven't managed to secure any salary funding for themselves (because they have been too busy applying for grant funding and running the projects, that they haven't gotten around to writing up all the publications that actually count towards competitive salary funding applications). ~$400,000 project funding spent and 3/4 of the project done, their projects now fall in a heap because their chief researcher is forced into a different career path to put food on his or her table. What was the FN point of even starting that project, the tax payers may ask.
N.B. minus the system, I love research. Better to have loved and lost....
Mayhem - I think that's actually a deliberate tactic on behalf of the various state education depts not to permanently employ early career teachers until they've been through the 'hazing ritual' of casual/non-permanent teaching appointments at the worst schools in the state. Noone else wants to teach in those schools and of course a casual workforce is easier to mistreat and fail to provide benefits for. And they wonder why the burn rate for early-career teachers is so high.
Damian - I'm glad the humanities kids have somewhere to go. At least it's patently obvious to BA first-years that there is no direct vocational relevance to their degree, whereas in the sciences they're quite good at downplaying that at course selection time.
Lerm - yes. Yes it is.
The Wife - agree with all of that, and when you factor in that NZ's equivalent to the ARC, the Marsden Fund, has a success rate of around 10% of initial applicants (the lowest success rate for a basic science fund among OECD countries) you can see we're even more screwed over here!
Doc, having done both as an undergrad, I'd say that impression was always about the same between arts and science. Vocational degrees are different of course, but it had always seemed the only careers stemming directly from a relevant degree field would be teaching/research in that field itself. The idea being that in the generalist faculties, you either do a masters in some vocational area and move out into the workplace, or you do a PhD and stay in the academy, contributing to the discipline.
One of the IT guys where I work did astrophysics to PhD level, btw. I recall one of the accountants publicly asking rhetorically the "Why would anyone do that?" question and insisted that the "You couldn't DO anything" with the qualification. As though the mission to expand the borders of human knowledge is some sort of meaningless, worthless exercise.
But it's been a conservative mantra and infiltrated into the main stream over rthe last 30 years or so that all degrees are vocational, or should be. The distinction between masters and PhDs that I alluded to above has already evaporated in the humanities, and only persists in the sciences because those are so hierarchical and status-driven. I wouldn't characterise the funding process as a lucky dip, btw. The system actively selects for people who are better at writing grant applications, to the exclusion of other factors. Since "status" is a modifying condition in that sort of success, there's a bit of a vicious cycle that's the only way to explain some of the lab heads where I work.
And it isn't like we're working toward some goal where we have a huge need for scientist types. I'm thinking something like the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program. If we were working toward something like, say, an undersea city or a self-sustaining space colony-something that would require tons of basic research in a lot of different fields to make the whole thing come together, then you can make the case for growing a bumper crop of scientists. Otherwise, yeah, you can train 'em, but you can't keep 'em.
Yankeedog, actually on that point I completely disagree. We're at a point in history where we're aced with the need to feed more people with less land and less energy. We need to convert our entire energy infrastructure to one that does not affect out atmosphere and climate in an uncontrolled way, within 50-100 years. There is the strong possibility that mining the moon for He-3 will prove economically viable in the next 50 years, and the corporations who might do this are already as powerful and wealthy as the historical USA that launched both the projects you describe. For that matter, Branson and Virgin are already developing commercial low-space flight, and it's looking more viable every day. Corporations like Google and Microsoft own globe-spanning million-host data processing capabilities that are beyond the wildest imaginings of science fiction as recently as the 80s and 90s, and the new capabilities emerging from these vast computation resources are still new and will take a generation to even start revealing the possibilities they embody. We think that maybe string theory will eventually give us the answers we need about how matter works, about what holds the universe together, but it will take a generation of talented quantum theorists to do that work, and the ones who will make the breakthrough probably are not born yet.
I guess the issue is we have a strong focus as a society that prompts us to "preserve our way of life" as though we live in aspic or something. Instead I prefer the idea that it's our duty to ennoble and vindicate the human species, and that everything else we do is simply what's necessary to support ourselves along the way. But that's an extreme position, there's somewhere in between that works, I'm sure.
YDog - while I don't want this to sound like we're lining up to give you a kicking - like Damian I completely disagree. Climate change is going to royally screw us over if we don't pour a hell of a lot of resource into tech to save our sorry arses so we don't all have to turn into subsistence-farming vegetarians.
No, we don't necessarily disagree. Climate change might well be the pressing issue for our time.
But the Allies put a lot of effort into getting the atom bomb and allocated resources to make it happen. Kennedy stated that he wanted men on the moon before 1970 and space was made a national priority. It got done.
Either of you gents heard any major governmental body state the goal of reversing climate change or coming up with an alternative energy source by a certain date, and allocating a segment of the national economy to make it happen?
Didn't think so.
Science as a career becomes appealing (and perceived as important and prestigious) when the push to complete a task (You can help design clean, powerful, fusion reactors!) or patriotism (Beat the Chinese to Mars!) is applied. Never mind that many great discoveries were accidents by one person!
If the sciences aren't perceived as glamorous or necessary, many people won't pursue a career in the field.
Perhaps I'm not explaining my views all that clearly.
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