This is only surprising if you expect that every postdoc should stay in academia, or would want to. Being in academia is not the only way to do research, and is not a prerequisite to using your degree. The private sector is a thing, and postdocs leaving academia can do perfectly good work in their field while actually making a grown up salary.
Not surprising. I quit after about a year. I could have stayed on but I realized that it just wasn't right for me. By then I had figured out that most research is done by post docs and phd students and it doesn't pay very well. Not that I cared about the money but I started thinking about what is next and did not like the perspective.
Professors are basically there to manage the process and haggle for funding. They tend to not be very hands-on with research for the simple reason that that's not their main job. They mostly delegate that to people in their team.
And you can only become a professor by doing post docs, landing some tenured position and then maybe they'll make you a professor somewhere. It's a long, uncertain process and the failure modes are basically ending up with a teaching position or being otherwise stuck in some faculty mostly not doing research. Nothing wrong with that. But not what I was after. And a lot of teachers in university are basically people that dropped out of the process somehow.
Anyway, the whole management thing had no appeal to me: I did not want to be a manager managing other people doing all the fun stuff (research) while basically dealing with a lot of bureaucratic shit. Not my idea of fun, at least.
So, I left. It was the only logical thing to do. I worked for Nokia Research for a while after that. But the career paths there weren't a whole lot different there. And the whole thing started imploding a bit after the iphone launch.
These days I do startups and a bit of consulting. Mostly as a CTO, and I'm very hands on which is just how I like it. Inevitably, there's a bit of management involved as well. But I like what I do.
My spouse is a molecular biologist pursuing her PhD in RNA therapy. She works ~2x longer and 10x harder than I do, with only a third of the yield. You can only sustain that for so long. She's in academia solely because she's good at it. However, there are a few things I've observed from the sidelines:
- PIs can make your life absolutely miserable for no reason, and it's difficult to switch labs if you're otherwise making good progress.
- The pay is poor, and professors often joke about how cheap PhD students and postdocs are.
- A significant amount of time is wasted on internal politics, such as deciding whose name appears on a paper and in what order.
- Pursuing irrelevant papers just to secure tenure is common.
- Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.
- PIs often treat their subordinates like high school students, expecting them to work weekends for "research" and forgo vacations.
- It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.
It's exhausting, and there are better ways to make a living. She plans to leave academia as soon as possible.
According to https://data.aaup.org/academic-workforce/ there are 270,000 tenured professors in the United States.
Assuming a tenured professor holds that position from age 35 to age 65, that's 9000 tenured positions to be filled per year.
According to https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2023 there are 57,000 research doctorates granted per year.
So 84% of people granted PhDs don't make it in academia.
I would have expected a higher percentage. Few openings and a high bar for whatever there is. It was tough to get an assistant professor job 30 years ago and I can't imagine what it must be like now.
I'm not sure about the situation elsewhere, but in Lithuania, it feels like professors produce articles or tackle topics solely to check a box. Most of the content generated by universities here seems completely irrelevant and ends up being discarded after completion. The courses are very bland and uninformative too.
It might be a bit off-topic, but my friend, after receiving her PhD from the University of Leeds in England, decided to completely abandon the academic path and became an artist. And when asked why that happened, she can't give a clear answer...
Can't read the article, but it's about postdoc.
- Many people who did a PhD and didn't want to do research don't do a postdoc
- I would say, "40% have left so far'. Following the same cohort for a few years might yield even higher numbers (because as long you haven't made your mind about quitting research, you are still a postdoc and not accounted for leaving, even it's your 10th year...).
There are a lot of issues in academia, but that number (40%) is not one of them. Not everyone is suited for an academic job, and doing the PhD is not enough to understand what it is to do independent research/find your niche what you are good at/enjoy. I think in many universities now there are career development programs that help people transition to industry. Also now it is more openly discussed that many people will not get an permanent position, so postdocs are more prepared and that is healthy.
Academia is one of those realms where I just wish things would collapse. Working conditions are terrible for the educational level they expect, yet there are always more and more graduate students and post-docs to exploit, so the wheels keep turning.
A naive perspective is a glut of experts is a good thing because a society with more experts could produce more innovations and development but because of the pecularities of academia, you instead get extreme competition and little to no innovation really. You do get a lot of following and hyping trends for grant money. I'm not sure what the solution is.
I was in academia - I got a PhD, did a postdoc, got a lifetime faculty job.
And I'm so much happier now working in professional software engineering than I was in academia.
Good!
Academia is done growing. For every full professor, there will be ONE spot for a full professor when he retires. That's a lot of grad students and postdocs who need to find something else to do with their education.
Most postdoc positions should not even exist.
Hard work, poor pay, known perverse incentives, and awareness of the probably replication crisis in your field == burnout and tears.
Half my friends are postdocs or associate professors (including my wife) at top universities and none of them are happy with how it’s going. Most apply for jobs every now and then to imagine escaping. And they’re the ones doing well in the system!
As they should. More often then not, going into academia means horrible working conditions and horrible pay... and there's job satisfaction when your instead of doing things you like or ones enrich society, you spend most of your time in a never ending fight for grant money.
Leaving is completely logical for anyone that wants to actually do impactful research, or wants to make a living wage, and wants sane hours and sane management.
There is no longer any incentive to stay in academia. Professorships are rare and not as lucrative as they once were. Staying in academia means living like a 19 yearold student well into your 40's.
Hard to believe that there is 6 available seats in academia for every 10 postdoc.
I’m surprised the number is as low as 40%. You can’t help but question your existence when you, always the top of your class growing up and graduated college with distinctions, are making $50k a year (that was the postdoc salary at my very prestigious department at Princeton less than a decade ago) at a ripe old age of almost 30 and eyeing yet another term of postdoc.
I'm shocked it's that low. I suppose, it's limited by the number and motivations of people who apply for postdocs, but the amount of soul crushing disappointment and borderline abuse of postdocs is legendary.
Logic checks out. Not everyone should be a professor. The question is: should they have done a PhD and postdoc?
The headline figure is not at all surprising. Academia is by design a pyramid, from undergrad through to tenured professor.
Of course. The number of professors in academia remains more or less constant. So each university professor should have, over the course of all their career, a single student that will end up in academia. All the other students have to quit at some point.
Isn't this a good thing?
We want to train highly skilled people and then unleash them in the private sector to create new companies or help push existing companies forward.
I'm not sure what the right percentage would be for postdocs leaving academia, but i would have assumed it was around 90% if you made me guess.
That just seems healthy.
my postdoc advisor (a tenured professor at berkeley) made us clean the air vents in the office by standing on a tall ladder with a vacuum as well as clean the floors.
I didn't leave academia, but I did leave that lab. That's some sort of power-play I have no time for.
Does the 40% include parents leaving the workforce to raise their children?
That's why it is called "postdoctoral treadmill" by an old physics professor: https://yangxiao.cs.ua.edu/Don't%20Become%20a%20Scientist!.h...
Yep. I left without even really trying to make it work. Academia has its good points, but the path to success is very grind-y.
I'd argue it's likely that there are _too many_ postdocs pursuing it in the first place.
How many come back?
I stayed in my tenure-track position for 3.5 years, left for industry for 2.5 years, and am now back in academia :)
Why are 60% staying is the real question it’s almost always the sub optimal choice
More anecdotal evidence: while writing my Master's thesis it became clear that my advisor (the dept. head) was quite interested in the subject matter, and repeatedly asked me to shelve it, do a quick-and-dirty thesis to graduate and return to working on my original draft during a PhD. I was very open to the idea, since I was in love with research ever since childhood.
We sat down and talked about what this meant in particular, the workload, compensation, options after graduating from the PhD program.
It broke my heart, but I had to turn him down. It felt like everybody who wanted to have a shot at having a career in academia needed to put an insane (read: literally destructive) amount of effort into it, all while accepting that it was extremely easy to get stuck for good. There is extreme pressure on postdocs to produce results, with institutions and labs becoming very cautious about working with people in their 2nd or 3rd postdocs if they hadn't published in high-impact journals until then. Also, good luck finding any sort of tenured positions, with more and more universities switching to freelance "collaborators".
I was not going to spend 80 hours a week investing in something where all odds are stacked against me. I was not going to put years of my life into a thing that can go 'poof' just because your stars didn't align, or because the faculty decided instead of hiring you on a professorship track, they would rather extort some more money and "let the contracts expire" when it was no longer convenient to have you there.
The question is: How many decide against doing a post doc, while considering it for some time during the PhD time. When you commit becoming a postdoc, you know how the game is played, you have a good network, you have a good topic to work on.
The whole empire of academia is broken, and although I have went through the whole things, and now in an assistant professor type position, it 1) took too long, 2) paid too little as a post-doc, and still pays too little for my level of expertise, 3) the grant process is a burden that doesn't enhance productivity; it doesn't leverage my expertise; it bogs me down and keeps me from using the scientific skills I've built in order to play grantsmanship to beg for money. Multiple tedious submissions and revisions. 4) professors increasingly just become managers, the least valuable activity of their training set.
I'm surprised to hear that 60% stay in academia.
Likely not enough to incentivize reform?
Does anyone have a link to the actual study? The linked DOI is a 404, and I'm confused by the phrasing of "more than 40%". Does the study not have a more exact number (with error)?
I expected this number to be higher.
I guess more leave between postdoc and phd.
Is this actually a problem for society as a whole? Surely a lot of such people would be valuable in industry.
Had a friend once who wanted to do research in an urgently necessary direction. Didn't get the money or academic support.
Couple years later she told me that happens a lot but one is so focused on their work and the illusion that "once I'm there ..." so strong, that one ignores the hard evidence and much debated proof, despite, well, one's own training.
I am surprised it is that low really, given what I hear about the competition for professor roles.
looks about right, from anecdotal evidence
how many transfer into a tenure track position? There must be a large contribution from people becoming 'research scientists' who are not tenure track professors but remaining in academia, at a subservient position, permanently.
what does it mean to "leave" acadamia? Like it somehow goes away if your not part of an institution?
That’s way too low. What are the other 60% thinking?
> More than 40% of postdoctoral researchers leave academia
Why is that construed as a negative? Isn't it great that they are finding jobs and applying their disciplines in the industry?
Elite overproduction is a thing, you know. It might be a feature but it's also a bug.
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https://archive.ph/E5aqe