{"id":2303,"date":"2008-02-26T08:00:18","date_gmt":"2008-02-26T08:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/02\/26\/academic-science-isnt-that-bad\/"},"modified":"2008-02-26T08:00:18","modified_gmt":"2008-02-26T08:00:18","slug":"academic-science-isnt-that-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/02\/26\/academic-science-isnt-that-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"Academic Science Isn’t That Bad"},"content":{"rendered":"

For some reason, the infamous “Don’t Become a Scientist<\/a>” rant by Jonathan Katz has bubbled up again, with Scott Aaronson giving his take<\/a>. I commented on this a while back<\/a>, and the intervening year and a half hasn’t really improved my opinion of the piece.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, which I also remarked on back in the day<\/a>. I didn’t make any substantial comment about his time-line then, though, and that’s what really jumped out at me:<\/p>\n

\n

The average trajectory for a successful<\/em> scientist is the following:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college<\/li>\n
  2. age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a
    \nstipend of $1800 per month<\/li>\n
  3. age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year<\/li>\n
  4. age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for
    \n$65,000 per year<\/li>\n
  5. age 44: with young children at home (if lucky), fired by the
    \nuniversity (“denied tenure” is the more polite term for the folks that
    \nuniversities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where
    \nemployers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    That last step is a doozy, though. Does the average<\/strong> academic scientist really get denied tenure?<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

    Well, no. At least, not as far as I can tell.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    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<\/a>, for example, but they don’t say whether they denied anyone. Amherst just tenured seven of eight<\/a> faculty who came up this year. Last year, my tenure cohort was ten-for-ten– everybody passed. Eighty-five percent of agricultural economists<\/a> 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<\/a> at Iowa State. The Scientist<\/cite> estimates the pass rate at 80%<\/a> nationwide.<\/p>\n

    Now, this isn’t the whole story by any stretch– a more detailed analysis<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    (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.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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… Continue reading Academic Science Isn’t That Bad<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}