Once more into week out and once more time to begin the culling of the tabs. There is one article [Link] that I had commented on earlier this week but for some reason it refused to recede. Then I got innundated on a couple of social sites with posts (?) by angry grad students and post-docs who had been pinged by some professor about the idiocy of an academic career.
My initial reaction was to ask which of the collapsed dimensions have these people been hiding in, but then I realized they had been cozened by the system and themselves. To make a comparison, academia, or more properly, a tenured position in collegiate academia, is on a par with being an entertainer. Lots of folks want to be rich and successful and worshiped but only a SMALL fraction ever achieve such, as much a matter of stochastic sampling as hard work. But we still have huge numbers who live in poverty and health crushing conditions to try. And we have those pathetic evil programs on television that pretend to short circuit the process. And despite the stupidity, people still try even when they know the probability of failure is o(1).
Collegiate academia is the same. Just as the lower class entertainment industry – night clubs and roadhouses and coffee houses and the like – need mediocre but cheap entertainers to sell their product better, so too have colleges come to need grad students and post docs. Someone has to work hard and cheap to do the work that turns into grants for the tenured professors.
Back when I was a new grad student and discovered my advisor was more interested in making speeches in the faculty senate about The Pentagon Papers than in actually doing any teaching or mentoring, and I began to study the academic employment situation. I soon discovered that it was rotten, in more ways than one. First of all, job creation in the industry is very slow, essentially stagnant. The rate is less than one per decade per department. Second, professors, absent exterior forces, have very long careers. And third, they have lots of graduate students, most of which graduate.
Now all of these are variables with at least some stochastic component, but the bottom line is fairly easily approximated: each professor works for Y years and graduates S students per year. That means that each professor (in the mean) produces YS graduates in his career and only one can get a job replacing him (assuming no effective job creation.) The probability any particular graduate gets an academic job is thus 1/YS. If Y = 33 years and S = 3 students per year, the chances of getting a tenured professor job are 0.01. For the bogs, that’s 1%.
So the folks who are going to graduate school to get professor jobs and do research and teaching are delusional. And abused, because the colleges don’t share this information. It’s one of their dirty secrets. Because they need all those grad students and post-docs to support the professors they already have.
Where does the article come in? Consider this
“Grooming the next generation of scientists is also key to our country’s health and prosperity. More than 70 percent of Americans believe that the federal government should place more emphasis on the number of American students who pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers.”
The problem is that these grad students and post-docs, at least the ‘occupy’ fraction, don’t have careers. The problem is not just to get people to study nerdery, it’s to be honest with them that 0.99 aren’t going to get to be tenured professors (and probably fewer than that the way the colleges are going,) and giving them real career paths and jobs that support living.
No more nerds wanting to be celebrities.
