Friday, December 12, 2014

More on postdoc problems


An opinion piece in SCIENCE discusses ways to make research careers more stable, in part by limiting PhD production  (1). I agree with their analysis. Steps to limit PhD production and to introduce stable research career pathways for ‘non-PI’ scientists are clearly needed. But we have known this for some time. The problem is that both senior faculty members and their institutions have a strong self interest in maintaining the current situation. An ample supply of cheap and expendable labor is just too good to pass up.  We have commented on this several times in this blog.

(1) http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6215/1422.full
 



Friday, December 5, 2014

Poor Prospects for Postdocs


This week's Nature (1) highlights two reports, one from the UK and one from the US, that describe the parlous state of the postdoctoral experience for biomedical PhDs. Reduced government support for research, the implosion of the pharmaceutical industry's in-house research, and in the US, cutbacks at state universities, have all limited job prospects. Nonetheless major universities continue to crank out biomedical PhDs.

This is nothing new. See previous posts on this blog elaborating the situation in more detail (2,3).


(1) http://www.nature.com/news/harsh-reality-1.16465

(2) http://scienceforthefuture.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-are-there-still-too-many-graduate_10.html

(3) http://scienceforthefuture.blogspot.com/2014/05/finally-some-sound-thoughts-about-phd.html