Fewer Grants For Young Researchers Causing Brain Drain In Academia 153
BarbaraHudson writes: Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels has written about the decline of research grants to younger researchers. "For more than a generation, grants for young scientists have declined. The number of principal investigators with a leading National Institutes of Health grant who are 36 years old or younger dropped from 18 percent in 1983 to 3 percent in 2010. Meanwhile, the average age when a scientist with a medical degree gets her first of these grants has risen from just under 38 years old in 1980 to more than 45 in 2013. The implications of these data for our young scientists are arresting. Without their own funding, young researchers are prevented from starting their own laboratories, pursuing their own research, and advancing their own careers in academic science. It is not surprising that many of our youngest minds are choosing to leave their positions."
Quarterly forecast (Score:5, Insightful)
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So, be ready to see basic research shift to another country in about 15 years.
Despite the cuts, the US still spends more per capita on R&D than any other country except South Korea, and far more than any other in absolute terms. Source: List of countries by R&D spending [wikipedia.org].
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Microsoft spent more on r&d than Apple for the last decade.
Which company spent it better?
Spending matters little if you don't do much with it. Even pure research while costing a lot for little return can have benefits. (See HP and mem resistor )
The USA doesn't do much of either type any more.
Re:Quarterly forecast (Score:4, Informative)
The USA doesn't do much of either type any more.
I don't really think that is true. Just read Science and Nature on a regular basis. Lots and lots of new insights and discoveries by mostly US centers. It can and should be better - we're on a Red Queen type journey and much of our problems can be solved either by dropping us back into the Bronze age or moving forward understanding our world and how to live in it. Standing around staring at the scenery isn't going to get society very far.
But despite all attempts to the contrary, we haven't fallen off that cliff just yet. We're getting closer and it takes multiple generations to really effect a useful turn - our decreasing literacy is very, very concerning. It would be wonderful if the US could come up with stable funding for STEM (and general) literacy from childhood to post doctoral level and we need to push and squeal for the limited resources available to us, but one needs to understand how large and robust the system really is.*
* Assuming general social stability. If the Doomers are correct then we're in a heap of trouble and the next age will be the 'Recycled Plastics' Age.
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I don't really think that is true. Just read Science and Nature on a regular basis. Lots and lots of new insights and discoveries by mostly US centers. It can and should be better - we're on a Red Queen type journey and much of our problems can be solved either by dropping us back into the Bronze age or moving forward understanding our world and how to live in it. Standing around staring at the scenery isn't going to get society very far.
Although I don't doubt for a second that US centers produce first-tier research, I am also inclined to believe that publishing in Nature is far easier when you come from a big US center. So, it is, in a way, a self-sustaining situation. Friends who have been to famous US centers (Dana-Farber, NIH, MIT), find it far more difficult to publish when they come back to Europe, and that is even after having established connections around the world.
With respect to TFA, I would just like to add two parallel phenomen
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Re:Quarterly forecast (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Quarterly forecast (Score:5, Interesting)
So, be ready to see basic research shift to another country in about 15 years.
Despite the cuts, the US still spends more per capita on R&D than any other country except South Korea, and far more than any other in absolute terms. Source: List of countries by R&D spending [wikipedia.org].
This really makes me ask: Is there a real shift here that is problematic, or was there a bubble where research increased very rapidly in new fields, where older people didn't have right degrees to get the money, and so it started out with an unusually young group of people? Like in CS at the start of the modern research efforts the people had math and physics degrees. In medicine I'm assuming that wasn't done; they didn't just have veterinarians doing human studies because there weren't enough research doctors. There doesn't seem to be any closely related fields to draw people from either. So I would expect there to be research age bubbles whenever there is a major new round of medical tech.
A big question I don't know the answer to: What percent of NIH grants go to that sort of degree-restricted field, compared to degree-portable fields like CS? My initial guess is that most of the NIH grants would be degree-restricted and require a medical degree.
Just having 1983 and 2010 as data points, without anything farther back, seems dubious, even with the other data point in TFA using 1980 instead of `83.
If you were 36 in 1980 you were born in `44. So it may even just be as simple as, "baby boomer generation had a baby boom, news at 11." If the percent of young researchers had remained level, that would actually mean that researchers were getting younger, because there are a higher percent of older people with medical degrees now.
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What percent of NIH grants go to that sort of degree-restricted field, compared to degree-portable fields like CS? My initial guess is that most of the NIH grants would be degree-restricted and require a medical degree.
I don't have hard numbers on this, but my guess would be a lot. Many people getting NIH degrees do not have a medical degree. You have people studying stem cells (biologists and physiologists), people studying drugs (chemists and pharmacologists), people studying public health (epidemiologists), people studying radiation therapy (physicists and engineers), imaging and medical informatics (computer scientists) and so on all drawing funding from the NIH.
So it may even just be as simple as, "baby boomer generation had a baby boom, news at 11." If the percent of young researchers had remained level, that would actually mean that researchers were getting younger, because there are a higher percent of older people with medical degrees now.
It might be, but my gut tells me that it isn't. There wa
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Just because R&D is Research and Development that does not mean it is *basic* research and development.
Well, normally, I'd just point out that the latter is a subset of the former. But I already did that.
R&D is usually more of taking existing areas of research and cobbling them together to develop something useful.
So research is part of R&D, if it's useful? And it is *besic* research which is not part of R&D, if it is not useful or even harmful?
My lab does both R&D and basic research, and I can tell you from personal experience, the two are quite different.
I have a quick suggestion based on what I've read so far, stop doing the useless and harmful research, and just focus on the useful research. Another weighty problem solved by the Slashdot hive mind.
I find it bizarre how time and time again, proponents of "basic rese
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I don't think this is a business issue. This is really more about one especially self centered generation looking out for itself and controlling most of the funding mechanisms.
If it were a race or ethnicity or religion it would be an obvious example of favoritism.
But they're the baby boomers so they get a pass, mostly because the people in a position to call out such BS are themselves baby boomers.
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I don't think this is a business issue.
Never said anything about business. Government does the same thing but worse. They only care about the quarter before the election cycle.
Glut of postdocs (Score:1, Interesting)
This is really driven by the glut of postdocs. With half a dozen post docs per professorial position, there's no surprise that the average age of the professors is creeping up, and therefore the average age of the PI is creeping up.
Research grants are still there (Score:1)
You just have to be researching solar panels.
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in China
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>The number of principal investigators with a leading National Institutes of *Health* grant
When they figure out how to research global warming they will have funding running out their ears.
Bad research (Score:1, Insightful)
When the public funds crappy studies that are designed to keep people employed at a University what do you expect?
Hypocrisy. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wouldn't that cut into sports team funding?
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Wouldn't that cut into sports team funding?
Does Johns Hopkins have a sports team? I don't know.
I was being recruited for Hopkins' football team, which was Division III. They are actually well known for their lacrosse team, which is Division I and is one of the top collegiate lacrosse teams in the country.
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Their basketball team is also Division III. So they have sports, but they don't have big money sports.
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Sorry, but nobody's well known for their lacrosse team.
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Duke is.
Re:Sports TAKES the money. (Score:5, Informative)
No, not really. The vast majority of Division I schools lose money on athletics, none of the Division III schools cover their athletic expenses.
from http://www.usatoday.com/story/... [usatoday.com]
"Just 23 of 228 athletics departments at NCAA Division I public schools generated enough money on their own to cover their expenses in 2012. Of that group, 16 also received some type of subsidy — and 10 of those 16 athletics departments received more subsidy money in 2012 than they did in 2011."
Sports provides valuable marketing (for the top schools), and that has value, but don't kid yourself that sports is generating net revenue.
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Perhaps he is writing this paper in order to point out a problem with the field, as part of a broader plan to do exactly what you mention.
I know researchers who have followed a similar plan before (in Computer Science education), to great success:
1 - Publish paper pointing out and systematically describing a problem.
2 - Write a research proposal citing an existing problem with the intention of fixing it.
3 - Implement intended fix while measuring results. Write paper reporting results.
4 - Attempt to affect
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postdoc slave labor (Score:2, Insightful)
With 5+ postdocs for every position, .... now if they only had a postdoc in fear mongering maybe they could get some of the $500+ billion in government security spending in the US this year. Who needs medicine or basic research when there is terrists.
Illogical world - that's what this is.
Weeding them out earlier (Score:2)
5 postdocs per research position is great, compared to the number of potential candidates per tenure-track professor position. Getting rid of people at the postdoc stage means they're not stringing them along pretending there's an upward career track in academia, and means they'll be less tempted to take an adjunct job while waiting for the real thing. (And yes, it sucks.)
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Simple solution. End your proposal to investigate the mating habits of the pygmy snipes of Upper Volta with "we must secure this information vital to national security before the terrorists do."
Indicative of General Attitudes (Score:5, Insightful)
This is really a general issue with our society right now. Young people can't be researchers because they don't get grant money, because no one trusts them to be doing research. Young people can't get jobs because everyone knows that you need at least 10 years experience to get a job -- never mind how you get 10 years of experience these days when no apprenticeships or similar seem to exist anymore. If you're lucky enough to find some job that doesn't make a big deal about experience, then young people aren't allowed enough pay to actually cover their bills and student loans. Instead of supporting educated young people and thinking of them as an investment that will bring us new ideas, new businesses, etc., I feel the elders tend to look at this young generation as lazy entitled bums (which is not true at all, at least not in general).
I was a young person college instructor for a few years before I quit. Why? Because pay is low as an adjunct, and the number of courses you can count on kept declining because I was continually at the mercy of what the elder teachers decided to do. (If one of them wanted a class, I was bumped and simply lost pay because I was contract and they could do that.). I had excellent ratings from all my students, many telling me personally that I was one of the best professors they had because I put effort into my lectures... and now academics has lost me, probably for good, because of how I was treated. (Not that I mean to be tooting my own horn here, but I hope you understand it as a situation that is probably being repeated across the country right now with people much more intelligent than I). There was a movement to form an adjunct union at one of my schools, and when I spoke up saying that we young professors need to be able to pay bills and given a chance to grow our careers, I was shouted down by elders saying I was entitled and need to go work a full time job and teach on the side if I wanted to be a professor and heaven forbid also be able to pay my monthly bills. I don't recall past professors having to do all that extra work, but it is expected of a young person now. So I took their advice and got a full time job... but left teaching entirely. I don't want to be in an environment like that, and it's not fair to my students to half-ass a class because I'm exhausted from my full time job. Most of those professors were at least in their 60s -- what will universities do in 10 years when they start to retire, and they've driven off of all the people like me that wanted to teach?
There just doesn't seem to be any opportunity left for a young person, especially in the technical fields. The older people are eeking out what they can until retirement, but at the cost of preventing younger people from having access to jobs where they can build their skills. I fear that in 10 years, our country will be in trouble as the Boomers retire for good and there will be no one left to replace them.
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If there wasn't enough work to keep you busy as a teacher, then leaving is exactly what you should have done. Too much labor supply always results in some kind of barrier-to-entry, and you were bumping into it. This, however, is not indicative of the old people doing it wrong, it is just a consequence of economics. If too many young people are driven out of teaching...when the old people start retiring demand will pick up and incentives will be put in place to get more young people to apply (not that thi
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The older people are eeking out what they can until retirement, but at the cost of preventing younger people from having access to jobs where they can build their skills. I fear that in 10 years, our country will be in trouble as the Boomers retire for good and there will be no one left to replace them.
So what you're saying is, we need "Carrousel"?
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Renew! Renew! Renew!
Agism bites BOTH ends (Score:3)
It happens in both directions. There is a "Goldilocks age" of between about 7 to 17 years of experience (varies per industry). If you are young, the profiling is that you don't have enough practical experience; and if you are old, the profiling is that you don't adapt to new technologies and trends.
When the economy is tight and international competition strong, then companies can pick and choose who they hire, and they prefer the Goldilocks age range.
The profiling may not be accurate for any given individua
The Big Crunch by David Goodstein (from 1994!) etc (Score:5, Informative)
I agree with another comment that what you are experiencing is a consequence of supply relative to demand for academic labor. This reflects a "big crunch" in the words of Dr. David Goodstein from 1994, then vice-provost of Caltech. He testified to Congress about this then too. Essentially, US academia had been growing exponentially since around 1900, but that era of exponential growth stopped in the 1970s, yet the production of PhDs continued at an exponential rate. There are other consequences of this trend, including "creeping credentialism" in all areas of US American life, including the social need for a college degree (or even sometimes masters now) as screening for the most basic entry-level jobs. I feel one answer to the pyramid scheme nature of all this is a "basic income" for all, because then anyoen who wanted to research or teach could live like a present day graduate student, but without the new to kowtow to a specific academic hierarchy just to survive economically (publishing in prestigious journals or getting access to expensive lab equipment might be a different issue...)
From the Goodstein article:
https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d... [caltech.edu]
"The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. The impressive successes of scientific projects during the Second World War had paved the way for the federal government to assume responsibility for the support of basic research. Moreover, much of the rest of the world was still crippled by the after-effects of the war. At the same time, the G.I. Bill of Rights sent a whole generation back to college transforming the United States from a nation of elite higher education to a nation of mass higher education. Before the war, about 8% of Americans went to college, a figure comparable to that in France or England. By now more than half of all Americans receive some sort of post-secondary education. The American academic enterprise grew explosively, especially in science and technology. The expanding academic world in 1950-1970 created posts for the exploding number of new science Ph.D.s, whose research led to the founding of journals, to the acquisition of prizes and awards, and to increases in every other measure of the size and quality of science. At the same time, great American corporations such as AT&T, IBM and others decided they needed to create or expand their central research laboratories to solve technological problems, and also to pursue basic research that would provide ideas for future developments. And the federal government itself established a network of excellent national laboratories that also became the source of jobs and opportunities for aspiring scientists. Even so, that explosive growth was merely a seamless continuation of a hundred years of exponential growth of American science. It seemed to one and all (with the notable exception of Derek da Solla Price) that these happy conditions would go on forever.
By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service, and service industries like banking and insurance don't support much scientific research. To make matters worse, the country is almost 5 trillion dollars in debt, and scientific research is among the few items of discretionary spending left in the national budget. There is much wringing of hands about impending shortages of trained scientific
Re: The Big Crunch by David Goodstein (from 1994!) (Score:1)
I am an Assistant Prof at a tier one research univ and reading this depressed the hell out of me.
Oh well, back to work!
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Was this university public or private, profit or nonprofit?
I went to a private nonprofit university and had some really good adjuncts teaching computer science.
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the problem with this stupid reply is it presupposes everyone from every generation is the same. The point of this article is that even this generations best and brightest aren't getting by in a way that will ensure they end up at the top of the system when they are ready to retire.
...and you're presupposing that the generation's best and brightest are these scientists. In my (personal) experience, the smartest people I know (both intrinsically and academically) opted to go into the private sector, not stay in academia and work for grants & peanuts.
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It's not that simple if overall funding is also declining. Funding for science is objectively getting harder regardless of age of the applicant, and there's less acceptance of risk. It's not entitlement and lack of hard work, it's universities squeezing every dollar out of their teaching staff that they can, and slowly but surely replacing full-time expensive faculty with part-time people they can hire and fire on contract at will, while paying them what amounts to barely a living wage unless they take on
Re:Indicative of General Attitudes (Score:5, Informative)
Parent is likely a troll, but I'm going into the numbers.
From 1980 to 2008, the average investigator age at NIH has gone from 39 to 51. Source: http://www.plosone.org/article... [plosone.org]
In 1980, I had to derive the damn number (http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1982/07/rpt2full.pdf), the median worker age is approximately ~31, while the 2013 average worker age is 42.4 (http://www.bls.gov/cps/industry_age.htm).
The average age of workers has increased by 11 years while the average age of investigators has increased by 12 years.
Research grants are a "winner take all" system where the total amount of research money is roughly constant (http://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/NIHfunding-fig1.png). Essentially, the older researchers are displacing the younger ones in the field through simply outcompeting for funding and working longer careers. Younger researchers, without funding, simply leave the field, as the old eat the young for breakfast.
Re:Indicative of General Attitudes (Score:4, Informative)
A good hunk of this is just because *everyone* is older. From 1980 to 2009, the average age of a US resident went from almost exactly 30 years to 36.8 years (http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0007.pdf). That's half of your age increase right there.
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Certainly, and that is borne out in the numbers.
I've been having a hard time figuring out where I stand on this. The $ rate for researchers is roughly equivalent (100K average for senor scientist, 89K average for normal, www.glassdoor.com), so there is a good argument to be made for the NIH grant decision authority: "if I can pay someone with 10 extra years of experience for roughly the same money, why shouldn't I?". There is also a good argument for young scientists who claim "we have less than half the
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The "Me" Generation aren't lazy entitled bums.
Which generation is the "Me Generation" again? And how can I tell them apart from all those other generations with the same issues?
Nope, their work isn't shit. (Score:2)
But they can earn 3x as much by going into the non-academic private sector and doing their research for profit-driven corps that will patent and secret the hell out of it, rather than using it for the good of all. Because the general public doesn't want to own the essential everyday technologies of the future; they'd rather it be kept inside high corporate walls and be forced to pay through the nose for it to wealthy billionaires.
And because bright young researchers actually have to eat, and actually want a
Missing data (Score:5, Insightful)
The article talks about the number of principal investigators with a leading National Institutes of Health grant and the average age of principal investigators who get these grants. To me, there is a very important missing data point; the age distribution of principal investigators submitting grant requests. This will show whether or not the age difference is due to the selection process or the age distribution of the grant requests. It is not a given that the age distribution of grant requests is the same year by year.
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Like grants to fund research to create cute catgirls! Where are the grants?
Re:The one leaving (Score:5, Insightful)
Supply and demand. The US elderly have voted themselves a limitless supply of funding for their medical care, so demand for doctors is very high and every other prerogative of our nation is pushed down the list. We've got Medicare paying for 74 year old gender reassignments. You want to know where they've spent your dreams [nbcnews.com]?
So you take your little degree and your dreams of academic success and sod off. We have millions upon millions of knees and hips to replace. Find something that pays well too, mule; we're going to need you to cover that ACA mandate no matter how high it climbs.
Seniors also get a "basic income" (social security (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org]
In my opinion, if Medicare and Social Security were available to all from birth, the USA would be a much happier and fairer society.
Your point on doctors for the elderly connects with my previous post here mentioning Philip Greenspun's writing on why women avoid academic science careers.
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
"What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers. I've taught a fair number of wome
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We are losing the best and brightest and their lines of research, I am one of them.
No you're not. You have trouble making simple decisions about the future.
A Word to the young bright kids out there (Score:5, Interesting)
The science job system is broken. The main problem is the federal subsidy of Graduate Student Stipends and Postdoctoral Fellowship salaries from grants. This has led to the situation of an oversupply of bright people in what amount to full time jobs with no benefits with little chance to achieve a rare faculty post. The fix is to stop the subsidy. Institutions need to take on fewer graduate students, pay them more and train them fully. Bolster the Master's degree for the less committed. The Postdoc should be eliminated and replaced with the term Contract Researcher which should be treated like a job. These people should be paid market rates so they can move to whomever is smart enough to get a grant.
For the kids out there, the current system is a sort of feudal concoction built to maximize imperious egos and is fundamentally exploitive.
Advise: go into science if you have the desire. Go to a good undergraduate school but if you do not get into one of the best institutions for grad school DO NOT GO.
It's that bad out there and it's winner take all.
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Actually we do get some benefits (Score:2)
I got free health insurance and several minor fringe benefits in graduate school. As a postdoc, I get a number of subsidized benefits. The details of the benefits vary from program to program. The thing that early career scientists do not get in my experience is a retirement benefit. Graduate students also do not get social security.
pyiramid scheme (Score:1)
Even if they *do* "pay for it" (i.e., free tuition + small stipend as a phd student), it's still a huge opportunity cost -- you could be getting a real job, and making real money.
PhD programs are basically an unsustainable pyramid scheme: become a professor, get lots of grant money to stay employed/receive tenure, hire lots of grad students, make them all PhDs, with the expectation that they will mostly go out and get professor jobs and universities, rinse and repeat.
Right now, we've reached saturation, and
Another nail in the College Coffin (Score:2)
Colleges and Universities compete with one another for grant getting researchers as much as they do for enrollment. From my vantage point, college today is big business with posh offerings for both faculty and students while being short on rigor and learning. What the article doesn't say is that there are more grants available now than at any time. The fact that older researchers are getting them may point to the fact that young people simply aren't being trained in grant writing techniques or they are bein
From experience (Score:5, Insightful)
I just got a fairly substantial grant for a project from an external agency. However, as things stand, on this project I will not be the PI (primary investigator ) - that will be our head of dept. So why do I call it my grant? Because I wrote the proposal, handled all interactions with the funding agency, wrote the budget and arranged everything. My boss simply signed on a dotted line and shook a few hands. A symptom of the endless cycle of postdocs is that you don't have a permanent post until you're quite far on in your career. Therefore your own institution won't let you be the PI. The way around it is that you get a figurehead to be in charge, but you really end up running things.
This has its advantages and disadvantages. The big advantage is that you tend to have a fairly heavy hitter politically to back you up. He (and it's so often He that it's an insult to my female colleagues to pretend that they are equally represented) should have your back in exchange for drawing a fraction of his salary from your grant. The disadvantages are that you aren't officially PI for the sake of your CV - when you apply for jobs you are asked "Wasn't that X's grant?" when you talk about it - an it doesn't count as much for you. Likewise, they pay is miniscule. One of the things you learn writing a budget is just how much more a senior academic makes than a postdoc. It's depressing both how large the ratio is, and how relatively low the higher figure actually is.
Of course the whole process is a vicious cycle: You can't be PI, so you don't have PI positions on grants on your CV, so you have a hard time getting a permanent job, and so you can't be a PI... You just spend three of four months working on a proposal, sacrifice your dignity to the gods of the funding agency, ask someone else to take 90% of the credit, and prepare for hard work. On the plus side, you might just get paid enough to live and do what you love.
Income Inequality? (Score:1)
It's amusing that academics complain about the salary differentials in the private sector, then do the same thing in their universities. Change yourself first, then agitate for change in the outside world.
If you aren't willing to eat your own dog food why are you trying to get someone else to eat it?
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Running existing (budgeted) operations is not the same as controlling the budget. Essentially the GOP has controlled the budget by blocking everything and threatening to shut down the gov't.
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Ok, I'll bite.
Howso? What specific policies are in place as a result of Republican votes that caused this? Can you tie any policies to specific acts of Congress and/or specific Governors and their policies? Did Democrats, while they held both houses of Congress and the White House, take action to reverse these policies? Is there a third-party option that you prefer instead, and can you explain how said third-party's platform fixes the problem?
It's really difficult for me to make a connection to a partisan
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Acts of Congress? You mean Non-acts? See nearby message about obstruction. True, we can't tell for sure what would pass if GOP didn't exist because the reality is that they exist and DNC has to work their politics taking them into account. In general, GOP has favored reducing basic research. They believe that tax-cuts ALONE will cause co's to spend sufficiently on research.
I know the solution... (Score:3)
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Either that or we should ease off the H1-B limits, obviously. We're just shooting ourselves in the foot in the meantime.
We're going to see less creative breakthroughs.... (Score:1)
NSF Young Investigator Awards (Score:2)
Is NIH unique here? (Score:2)
Oh, I don't know. (Score:1)
The NSF budget has gone from $3.2 Billion in 1998 to $7.1 Billion in 2014. A bigger issue might be that demographics of native born Americans shows there are many more 40 somethings than 20 somethings. America is making up this deficet of young people by allowing a lot of immigration. The possibility is that many 1st or 2nd generation immigrants are not taking enough school to become researchers.
Broken model? (Score:2)
Perhaps building your career around a model that assumes that someone will simply give you money to do what you want is a foolish choice? Is it unsurprising in a country that is trillions of dollars in debt, that there seems to be less interest in continuing to do that?
There's however a reasonably successful model close to that, where they give you money to do what THEY want - it's called a JOB. Of course, then there are things like expectations and consequences if you don't, usually stopping the flow of
What is this world coming to? (Score:2)
In the 60's all you needed for brain drain was a six pack and a lid. Now get off my lawn!
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Re:Our 'young scientists' (Score:4, Insightful)
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Back when people rode horses relatively few people did it. In the 1870s US, the cost to keep a horse in stable would cost almost a third of a typical laborer's daily wage ($0.50 out of $1.75), most of which was already spoken for.
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But still, it would be interesting to hear his rationalization of how government grants created the automobile or developed penicillin. Ironically, the letters which he so casually dismisses are a governmen
Re: Our 'young scientists' (Score:3)
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Re: Our 'young scientists' (Score:2)
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Telling lies won't convince anyone.
Maybe you should follow your own advice then. Fleming was a professor at the University of London at the same time that he was working at St. Mary's, and it was in this capacity that he was conducting the research.
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Oh and the jet engine was developed on government money too.
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can get a damn job waiting tables and washing floors and delivering newspapers
It would be better to send the old geezers to wait on tables. Most scientific breakthroughs are made by young people without all the status quo cobwebs clogging up their brains. The most famous pictures of Albert Einstein show him with gray hair and wrinkled skin. But all his big breakthroughs happened by the time he was 26 years old. After than, he was just a cantankerous old coot whining that "God doesn't play dice".
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Ha!
I do believe he was working in the patent office at the time or thereabouts. He was looking for a job in academia if I remember the documentary correctly. Not quite the QuickieMart, but not really in his degree area either.