The Arc of the Academic Research Career Issues and Implications for U.S. Science and Engineering Leadership: Summary of a Workshop (2014) / Chapter Skim
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3 Getting Started
3 Getting Started
Pages 13-26
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From page 13... ...
As Ginther and Malcom suggested, however, universities continue to admit graduate students and recruit postdocs based not on the career opportunities awaiting them but on the supply of grant funding and on professors' and departments' resulting need for their labor in laboratories and classrooms. Today, competition is most intense, at least numerically speaking, at the earliest stages of the career.
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From page 14... ...
"Postdocs perform a substantial fraction of the skilled work in research labs and are responsible for a disproportionate share of the new discoveries. A 1999 study found that 43 percent of first authors of research article in Science were postdocs." - Geoff Davis, author of the Sigma Xi Postdoctoral Survey SOURCE: NSF-NIH Survey of Graduate Students and Postdocs in Science and Engineering, (2008)
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From page 15... ...
You can't combine all of science together and say, ‘This is what is happening.' You can't combine all academics together and say, ‘This is what is happening.' " Salary rates differ among academic fields "because there are different demands for our services, both inside and outside of academia." Faculty members who have real opportunities to earn good incomes off campus, such as physicians, lawyers, economists, and some scientists, tend to command higher incomes on campus, too. Ginther argued that science breaks down into four broad categories: life science, including biomedical, agricultural, and environmental sciences; physical science, including chemistry and physics, geosciences, and math and computer sciences; social science, including psychology, sociology, and economics; and engineering.
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From page 16... ...
Figure 3-2 Growth rate of the number of doctorates in four broad fields (engineering, life sciences, physical sciences, and social science)
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From page 17... ...
SOURCE: Survey of Earned Doctorates, National Science Foundation, Human Resources Statistics Program, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. Arlington, VA; Prepared for the National Institutes of Health Advisory Committee to the Director Biomedical Workforce report (2012)
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From page 18... ...
The one exception is math and computer sciences, and to a lesser extent…in psychology and social science." In many fields, however, the postdoc has become entrenched as a de facto requirement for an assistant professorship, with Ph.D.s now routinely spending several years -- including, according to Ginther, a "nontrivial percentage" who "have more than 8 years in a postdoc." Those who get to the tenure track today are therefore older than new assistant professors of past generations. Moreover, even for the minority of scientists who do attain an assistant professorship, winning research funding has become more difficult than in past decades, in part because of the larger numbers of people, including many with non-tenure track university appointments such as research professorships, who are eligible to compete.
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From page 19... ...
SOURCE: Survey of Earned Doctorates, National Science Foundation, Human Resources Statistics Program, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. Arlington, VA; and National Institutes of Health IMPAC II; Prepared for the National Institutes of Health Advisory Committee to the Director Biomedical Workforce report (2012)
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From page 20... ...
it is not the only one." Scientists' career interests are not only broad, Sauermann's research shows, but also change over time. In 2010 and again in 2013, the same group of graduate students in life sciences, chemistry, physics, and engineering rated the attractiveness of careers as university faculty with an emphasis on research, in government, in an established firm, or elsewhere.
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From page 21... ...
Asking life sciences, chemistry, physics, and engineering postdocs to choose their most preferred career from among a faculty job emphasizing teaching, a faculty job emphasizing research, and working for government, an established firm, a start-up firm, or other, showed that faculty with a research emphasis led in all groups by very wide margins. Given the very tight academic job market, however, do Ph.D.s enter their postdoc appointments aware that they face such low odds of ending up in the faculty job they hope for?
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From page 22... ...
"We found that about 80 percent of students [say] that my advisor most strongly supports an academic research career, even though we know most of them don't get those careers." Young scientists, Sauermann continued, need "a broader set of information sources…to understand labor market and the different kinds of careers [available to them]
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From page 23... ...
born during the postdoc years," which, given postdocs' ages -- generally the early to middle thirties -- "is natural," especially since fewer women have babies while graduate students, at least at research universities, she said. When asked why they changed their career plans, female graduate students at the University of California-Berkeley "almost uniformly said for family reasons.
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From page 24... ...
Some universities, however, include graduate students and postdocs in the maternity leave plans that they provide to faculty members. The University of California, for example, is among the minority of universities that give graduate students and postdocs at least 6 weeks of paid maternity leave (see Figure 3-6)
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From page 25... ...
GETTING STARTED 25 Figure 3-6 Percentage of institutions in the Association of American Universities (N = 62) which provide at least 6 weeks of paid maternity leave for academic populations: 2008.
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