The Academic Ponzi Scheme

May 7th, 2008

I want to talk a little bit about the dark side of academic sociology, a dark side that does have a silver lining. This situation I will describe may be obvious to some of you reading, and a complete surprise to others. For those to whom it’s obvious, perhaps I’ll still have some subtle insights that make this post worth the time.

When I’m not being general, I’ll refer to my own field of astronomy which represents a perfect case study.

In a zero growth situation, every professor in a graduate program needs only to train one student during their career to replace them when they retire. Every University with graduate programs expect professors to get funding to support themselves and their graduate students, and wants to see as many PhDs awarded as possible. The average professor trains way more than one graduate student during their career. I currently have three graduate students, and expect to have four in the near future. Getting half a dozen through to PhDs during my career is not unlikely.

Are you starting to glimpse the problem?

I recall seeing a paper maybe some ten years ago that suggested that about half of all astronomy PhD recipients managed to stay in astronomy one way or another, and that this number hadn’t changed much over the past few decades. Well, there was a lot of growth in astronomy programs in the 1960s and 1970s, and the establishment of places like the Space Telescope Science Institute in the 1980s continued growth. The 1990s saw the first real job crunch that I’m aware of, with highly qualified people — award-winning young scientists — failing to land jobs, or at least ones they thought to be acceptable in comparison with their expectations. And that’s continuing and becoming tougher at least in quality of positions.

There’s also resistance to recognizing the situation on the faculty side. Some of us, especially the older professors at the more prestigious places, don’t want to consider this a problem. I’ve heard first or second-hand some big name astronomers you may have seen on TV documentaries flat out ridicule the idea of graduate programs providing guidance toward non-traditional jobs, or, in another case, idly muse about how graduates of Princeton, Caltech, and Harvard seem to be the only ones getting jobs at Princeton, Caltech, and Harvard. (More on this point in a moment.)

The situation now is worse. It’s relatively easy these days to follow the professional astronomy job market. There’s a wiki page all about it. With a couple of post-docs seeking permanent positions, I’ve been paying attention. Think about how each Princeton, Caltech, or Harvard professor may produce a handful of PhDs, and about how only one of them gets to be the replacement. The others can get jobs at places down a rung or two on the ladder, which displaces all of those University’s graduates down another few rungs. You finally end up with graduates from the top Universities, top-notch researchers, taking jobs at places you’ve never heard of, often teaching-intensive departments in which research time and support is limited. I don’t want to knock teaching — it’s important and a lot of astronomers enjoy it immensely (I do) — but spending more time writing multiple choice tests for non-major students than doing original research is not what most Princeton graduates signed on for originally.

This can and does have a significant effect on morale among astronomers at all levels. The academic system has set up a Ponzi scheme of sorts that, at least in astronomy, seems to be threatening to collapse. Okay, maybe collapse is too strong a term, but it’s going to shake up things in a profound manner.

What’s the silver lining? Well, lower-rung Universities can now attract much better talent. The difference in quality of faculty between the top departments and the lower-ranked departments is narrowing. The top departments are still likely to give their faculty more time for research, better facilities, and better support in general, but really good people are spread throughout the system teaching undergrads and graduate students both.

Maybe some people will reading this will be rolling their eyes, having seen similar issues years ago in the humanities, or any academic field that didn’t experience the growth of science and has few positions for PhD holders outside of academia. Well, it’s part of my professional landscape on a regular basis and I’m talking about it now.

I advise a lot of students. Is it ethical for me to push any but the most exceptional students toward advanced degrees in astronomy?

I think it is, but in much more limited terms than in the past. If you love astronomy, or any field, pursuing it at the highest levels can’t be a bad way to spend a few years. Moreover, there are a lot of ways to be successful in a field and it isn’t only the people with the highest GPAs and GRE scores that turn out to be the best scientists. I mean, it helps, but there are a lot of other important qualities, and many of them are not well measured by grad school applications.

And departments like my own at the University of Wyoming? In order to best prepare our students, we really need to specialize a bit and make sure our students are among the best in some respect and can compete. For instance, I think our niche is going to be to turn out top-notch observational astronomers. We have our own 2.3 meter telescope and our students can get a lot of experience that’s not so easy at many other institutions. We can do this thing well, and get a reputation for it.

The situation isn’t really fair or unfair. It’s just how it is, and while we can adapt to it, we aren’t going to be able to change it without fundamentally altering how academia works. There’s steady or growing demand for students, and diminishing demand for PhDs.

More so than ever, students should only go into grad school for love, because the dream job may not be waiting at the other end.

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