For some reason, the infamous “Don’t Become a Scientist” rant by Jonathan Katz has bubbled up again, with Scott Aaronson giving his take. I commented on this a while back, and the intervening year and a half hasn’t really improved my opinion of the piece.
The discussion in Scott’s comments is better than the rant really deserves, and includes a link to another piece of academic catastrophilia, Phillip Greenspun’s Women in Science, which I also remarked on back in the day. I didn’t make any substantial comment about his time-line then, though, and that’s what really jumped out at me:
The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
- age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
- age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a
stipend of $1800 per month- age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
- age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for
$65,000 per year- age 44: with young children at home (if lucky), fired by the
university (“denied tenure” is the more polite term for the folks that
universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where
employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
The time spans here are a bit longer than my experience, but then, I’ve been very fortunate in my career. He also seems to have been paid better than I was as a graduate student– my stipend was more like $1,200/month– so that’s probably a wash.
That last step is a doozy, though. Does the average academic scientist really get denied tenure?
Well, no. At least, not as far as I can tell.
It’s really difficult to find hard statistics on the pass rates for faculty coming up for tenure, and these vary from institution to institution, but it’s just not true that most people coming up for tenure get denied, particularly not at “good, but not great” universities. Maybe for new assistant professors in the Ivy League, but there, they know what they’re getting.
You can get some idea of tenure rates by Googling news stories, though it can be difficult because most institutions only announce positive news– my alma mater just tenured twelve professors, for example, but they don’t say whether they denied anyone. Amherst just tenured seven of eight faculty who came up this year. Last year, my tenure cohort was ten-for-ten– everybody passed. Eighty-five percent of agricultural economists in the mid-80’s got tenure. The famous Gonzales case at Iowa State led to creationist loons pointing out that as many as 91% of faculty passed tenure review at Iowa State. The Scientist estimates the pass rate at 80% nationwide.
Now, this isn’t the whole story by any stretch– a more detailed analysis suggests that roughly half of faculty get tenure at the institution where they’re first hired. A fairly significant number of people just never come up for the formal tenure review, either because they voluntarily move elsewhere, or because they fail some earlier review– we have a comprehensive review in the third year here, for example, and I know that the pass rate for that review is significantly lower than for the final tenure review.
This is a relatively minor point as far as the Greenspun article goes– his basic conclusion, that science is not a career for those who would like to make a whole bunch of money, is still sound. As much as it’s important to prevent students from traipsing off to graduate school with delusions of wealth and fame, though, we also shouldn’t over-sell the horror of the academic career track.
(This isn’t the only piece of dubious hyperbole in the Greenspun article, either… This is just what jumped out at me when I looked at it last night.)
Academic science is also crippled by requiring ridiculous working hours for the rest of your life. I’ll be damned if I regularly work 60+ hours a week when I’m in my 40’s.
his basic conclusion, that science is not a career for those who would like to make a whole bunch of money, is still sound.
Correction: replace “science” with “academic science”.
None of those observations apply to the track that goes straight (more or less) from grad school to industry, particularly for applied physics. Only about 1/3 of physicists are employed in academia according to AIP statistics, a number that has been stable for a long time.
One can become a scientist without becoming an academic.
Grad school colleagues who went that route have done pretty well, better on average than academic pay, although some sectors experience layoffs that are far less predictable than being denied tenure.
Postdocs in physics make better money these days. Academic postdocs at decent institutions are ~45k and at government labs are typically in the 55k-60k range. Hardly exploitative.
Re: working hours, I don’t get the complaint. Most people are *in* academic science because, on the good days, it’s absolutely thrilling work that one is amazed one is paid to do. Complaining about the hours? You put in the hours you want to…that’s the point.
Everyone should read Feibelman’s A PhD is not enough. It’s a bit dated, and he lies a bit about the perils of academia, but it’s absolutely essential to grasp all of his key points.
The other numbers are off here too. My postdoc paid better than $35k nineteen years ago, and my base faculty salary started around $60k in 1994 and is now in six figures (at a public institution). And summer salary adds a lot to those numbers. I’m not 44 yet, and have been tenured a long time.
I know lots of people from grad school who aren’t in academe any longer, but all of them are in good jobs. They might not be jobs where they need the skills of a PhD, but they needed the PhD to get the jobs. Did grad school take them where they thought they were going? No. Was grad school a bad bet for them? Not so clear.
I’m a little more reticent about giving Katz’ rants airtime after poking around his website:
In Defense of Homophobia. Pretty loathsome.
His other essays are mostly exercises in crankiness. Dude needs to have a smoothie and relax a little.
his basic conclusion, that science is not a career for those who would like to make a whole bunch of money, is still sound.
Correction: replace “science” with “academic science”.
You’re absolutely right. That’s a slip on my part.
I’m a little more reticent about giving Katz’ rants airtime after poking around his website:
In Defense of Homophobia. Pretty loathsome.
Yeah, that’s a piece of work, all right.
Of course, the original screed isn’t worth all that much, either. But the homophobia thing is really impressivle awful.
Half of all marriages end in divorce and the other half in DEATH. Likewise, successful scientists have multiple carreer trajectory options, including working in industries where there is no expectation of tenure.
Of course if you are an organic chemist and you wind up in a converted US Germ Warfare lab in [a state known for poverty] with bricked up labs in the basement where the anti-bacterial UV lights are still kept running and your closet has paint cans with “Dioxin” written in Sharpie on the bare metal stacked up in the hall closet, you might want to reconsider your trajectory.
The rant is also self-contradictory:
If the market is looking for folks in their early thirties, then why does his ‘average’ postdoc languish there until 35?
Thanks for that pointer, #5.
It is always amusing to see the current “logic” behind such arguments. I note that he quotes the part of Leviticus that is convenient, skipping over adultery and pork (to pick two that no longer concern Christians, who now use ham at Easter as a sacrament to identify Jews and Muslims). He also ignores what Christ said about all of the Levitical crimes, which always struck me as more relevant for Christians than what the Torah or Koran says about them.
Back on topic, I would love to track down the old classified ad that ran in Physics Today (in the 70s) under “seeking position”. It was for a theoretical physicist seeking work as a cab driver or dish washer. Anyone in physics who does not know why someone paid to run that ad needs to go to my blog, click on “jobs”, and read the first article about the history of physics PhD production.
I don’t like this kind of “the sky is falling” reasoning. But the tenure thing, is, I believe, one point where perhaps he’s closer to the truth than you. As you say, people coming up for tenure review mostly get accepted, but people coming up for review is not a fair basis of comparison. It’s like saying the pass rate of PhD students is 99% just because almost every thesis defence passes. The correct base of comparison in that case is people entering graduate school versus graduating. The correct basis for post-PhD career is probably the number of people accepting their first post-doc (and thus begin an academic career) rather than go into other fields.
And from that basis then yes, most academics do not achieve tenure. You can see it this way: one tenured researcher has, on average, how many post-docs working under him during his tenured career? And on average, how many post-docs does a researcher do before getting accepted for tenure? The ratio of the first to the second will give you the failure rate (given a steady number of tenured positions).
This is in part a reply to #8. From what I see, getting a tenure track job is less trivial then getting tenure once in a tenure track position. That tends to lengthen the “post-doc” interval, which can get pretty long, depending on one’s field.
I guess this is more the case in (especially theoretical) physics where there are really no industry jobs — other than things you could have done just as well two years into graduate school.
1) Greenspun’s impression of science is based on the people he’s met at MIT and Harvard. Accordingly, he has an exaggerated idea of the difficulty of getting tenure in most universities, and his idea of the economic and class sacrifices required doesn’t quite hold outside of Boston (and SF, SD, …) That said, Janne is correct that his negative misconceptions are balanced out by misconceptions in the other direction from extrapolating from MIT junior faculty.
2) re: “Correction: replace “science” with “academic science”.” If you’re talking about PhD level science, I think the original formulation is correct. The notion that industry jobs are trivially attainable for unsuccessful academic job applicants is completely false, and indicative only of professors’ petty, ignorant contempt of industry. And if you do get one, the slightly greater salary doesn’t begin to outweigh the opportunity costs of your 20’s and early 30’s.
re: working 60+ hours a week… the reality is, most professional jobs (lawyer, architect, doctor, etc.) and business-oriented (management / sales) are in the same boat or worse these days. That latter point is also why it’s deceptive to judge non-academic scientists working fewer hours – the closer they get to “ownership” – going into management positions, working at a small company with opportunities for lucrative stock options – the longer the work hours get. On the flip side, tenuring statistics are ludicrous – if someone isn’t going to get tenure, besides the pre-tenure review checkpoints, in many cases faculty are told and they drop out on their own to not have the “denied tenure” stigma (the department also can get a jump on the follow-up faculty search that way as well). But the idea that not getting tenure is reason to not pursue academic science is asinine – imagine a job where getting laid off also comes with a WHOLE YEAR at FULL PAY. (Even though courses get assigned to faculty during that year, consider how little of a person’s time is spend on teaching at a research-intensive institution – the ones where tenure cases get denied, mostly – so that’s basically a year of working at 20-30% effort.) The reason to not go into academics to do research is that it’s hard to get a tenure-track job with a research component – it is emphatically not because once you have a tenure-track position you won’t get tenure.