Is academia broken?
You've seen the social media rants. Now get the real story.
Hey kids! Are you excited about science? Do you think it would be fun to spend your whole life solving science problems, and making discoveries, and learning new things about the universe that no-one had realised before? If so, you've probably heard that you should go to university and get a science degree, and then get a PhD, and then do some cool research so that you can be hired as a professor and fulfil this wonderful dream.
Think again! Academia is a horrible trap! Graduate students are slave labour. I mean — literal slave labour! Being a postdoc is even worse; they are canon fodder in the trenches of research. And research, don't get me started on research! It's all a sham to fuel the funding gravy trains of egomaniacal professors who work on dead-end ideas and just make shit up. And it's not as if it's fun for the professors, either. However much they brutalise their students and postdocs, it's not enough to make up for the incessant barrage of bureaucratic bullshit tasks that their universities make them complete in a desperate attempt to fend off the inevitable death of the ultimately worthless higher education sector.
Such is the state of academia, as presented by the aggregate wisdom of academic social media.
It is utter tosh. Both visions above are simplistic balderdash, but if I had to judge which was least astronomically far from reality, I would have to go with the first.
Kids, I know this will come as a surprise to you if you've been tuning in to the “system is broken” discourse. What can I say? Academia is hard, and it encourages histrionics. Whether it's a grad student trying to avoid working on their thesis, a manic postdoc who’s gone unhinged, or a professor who was unaware that in addition to looking thoughtful and being arrogant there was also a bit of work to do, you're dealing with unreliable reporters. On top of that, you might have come across a recent entry in the “I'm done!” genre: a video by Sabine Hossenfelder.
The video was entitled “My dream died, and now I'm here”. The dream was of course academia and “here” is, and this is not a joke, and it would be very rude of you to laugh — YouTube.
You definitely will not laugh if you watch the video, which is a grim catalogue of indignities and disappointments on her journey through undergraduate studies, a PhD, a succession of short-term research appointments (those canon-fodder “postdocs” above), and now, it appears, abandoning the whole damn enterprise for what is presumably a moderately successful career as a science explainer, debunker and provocateur.
The video went viral. Didn't it? Is 2.2 million views a lot? It's easy to check. Yep — it's the same order of magnitude as the top hits when I search for “unboxing videos”. And it got at least twice as many views as her videos on hot-button topics like trans athletes and free will1. So I think it's fair to employ the term “viral”.
I took note, and not just because of its popularity. In 2014 I read a blog post she wrote on her experiences in academia. It raised a few of the same points, but was far less bitter. That was ten years ago2.
Given that she has worked on cooler topics than me, has been employed at more renowned places, and is certainly a lot more famous (she has a wikipedia page!) I assumed that a glittering academic career was inevitable. And although I am not her greatest fan — her misguided popularisation of a poor attempt to discredit the first gravitational-wave detection erased any trust I had in her ability to report on work outside her own field — academia is healthier for having a few gadflies, and I was happy to assume that she was chugging along in a permanent position at a university somewhere in Germany, and publishing a few books and building up a YouTube audience into the bargain.
In short: it was a bit of a shock3.
Even more disturbing was the reaction. At last check there were approximately 30,000 comments. THIRTY THOUSAND! I didn't try to read through more than a tiny fraction of them, but every one I saw agreed with, or had a story to magnify, the “system is broken” narrative. There are clearly a lot of people who fervently believe this.
Am I here to debunk the whole thing? No — much of the criticism was fair4.
There are plenty of professors who run their groups and their departments like personal fiefdoms. There are research areas that should be dead, but shamble on, absorbing obscene amounts of money into hundreds or thousands of iterations of the grad-student/postdoc/professor/funding-mandarin life cycle. There are countless examples of bullying, harassment, exploitation; lives wasted on meaningless research problems and lives ruined by overwork, mental breakdown and suicide.
But.
But this story is unbalanced. It leaves out everyone else.
There are graduate students who work on fascinating problems, guided by perfectly reasonable supervisors. They are often frustrated that they are stuck — if you're doing research, you're almost always stuck — but they are not so desperate that they feel the need to rant on X-twitter or YouTube.
There are postdocs who also work on fascinating problems, and steadily build up a track record of research, leadership, and perhaps even funding, to get them a faculty job. They are haunted by the fear that they are not doing enough, or what they're doing is not good enough, or the jobs just won't be available, but they also know that that's the risk of aiming for a career in a demanding, competitive field where only a handful make it. They are also absent from social media rants.
There are people who quickly conclude that their youthful dream discovery — quantising gravity or producing room-temperature superconductors or (ahem) solving the mystery of consciousness — is a little out of reach. They are pleased to find that there are other mainstream topics to work on, which are worthwhile and fulfilling, and deciding to work on them does not compromise any principles and is not selling out. In fact, that's what the vast majority of science is, and should be.
Obviously, many people leave. We're talking on the order of 90%5. That's how it's supposed to work. You can't complain that an academic career should be available to everyone who wants one and complain that we should stop funding useless people. Most of the people who leave should leave. Yes, there are a lot of people whose departure made me very sad, but for plenty of others I did not shed a tear. Most of those who make the biggest stink about the cruel iniquities of the system are in the second category.
The bitterest of the departed may refuse to accept it, but a fair chunk of those who make it are not assholes or scoundrels or fraudsters, and plenty of those solid researchers are not miserable and overworked.
There are professors who navigate the teaching and the bureaucracy and the warped personalities, and are deeply fulfilled by the many tiny discoveries they've made, and the students they've taught, and collaborators they've worked with. Indeed, they actually enjoy the teaching, and they even enjoy some of the bureaucracy and the personalities, because really those are what are otherwise called organisation and leadership, and academia needs people fired up about those just as much as about teaching and research. The people who keep the system functioning, despite its frustrations and setbacks, are also rare in viral videos.
Finally, there are a few people who left for “industry”, but returned to academia. They report that the politics and the grubbiness and the stress can be even worse out in the real world. Some people are very happy in finance or tech companies or government, but it turns out that you have just as much risk of being stuck doing shitty work for a shitty boss. Gosh! Who would have guessed!?
Is academia fair? Of course it's not fair. There are fantastic people who leave disillusioned and broken. There are the worst kinds of assholes and morons who worm and fight their way to the highest levels of renown. A disaffected dreamer might say, “What I do is speculative and possibly even wrong, but there are people who do stuff that is even more speculative and undoubtedly completely wrong, and they get funded to start a research institute. WTF?” That's a legitimate complaint.
But there are also tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, probably millions of scientists doing solid, valid, honest work, which is the quiet power behind a vast swathe of the knowledge and technology of our civilisation. That is amazing work to be a part of.
Kids, if the world of science excites you, by all means take note of the complaints and add them to your survival arsenal, but also take heart that there are lots of amazing people doing glorious things, and it is possible to join them. It's not easy, but nothing worthwhile is.
My last piece made fun of academia. This one defended it. I have a terrible feeling that the logical next step is to provide advice. (Yes, apparently it is.) Uggh. In the mean time, feel free to use the comments to vent. That may not make you feel better, but one thing that I guarantee will make you feel great is to “like” this article, and to share it far and wide.
The one topic of intellectual debate that attracts the most extreme levels of public attention, engagement and vitriol is undoubtedly free will.
In the comments of her post I linked my own satirical contribution to the “academia dumpster fire” literature, the “dream of academia” piece I reposted last week. That was picked up by Peter Woit, and I suddenly had my most successful blog post, then or since. Yay!
In a comment on Peter Woit's blog she clarified that she has not entirely given up.
Some was not. The “most of academic research that your taxes pay for is almost certainly bullshit” line was nonsensical. I have no idea how you could possibly hope to meaningfully demonstrate this was true, or even under what horribly misanthropic delusions an experienced scientist might think it true. On the more specific allegations about particle physics, we have a third footnote appearance of Peter Woit's blog, where he has attempted to engage with her criticisms of the state of theoretical particle physics research. That's an interesting topic but I, for one, prefer not to comment on subjects outside my own expertise.
I don't know the exact statistics, but the specific number doesn't matter here. One of the two biggest killers of academic careers is being too obsessed over details. (The other is being too sloppy over details.)
I loved the life we had in graduate school.
I am going to dispute this bit: "Obviously, many people leave. We're talking on the order of 90%. That's how it's supposed to work." This is _not_ how it is supposed to work. The publication half life of astronomers who produced their first paper 35 years ago was 30 years, i.e. about 50% of those who completed a Ma/PhD were still in academia 30 years later. That same number today is 5 years. The figures are similar for other fields.
Nobody decided it was a good idea to filter out so many people. This is something that has happened in large part because of the funding environment and the financial stresses on universities. It's also a result of success. We now educate a lot more people to a high standard and many of them aspire to do research/academia. Yet, we have not catered for them.
The thing is, because the drop-out rate was so much lower in the past, academia is set-up so that most of the career rewards come at the end. Salaries are heavily skewed to senior academics. Your ability to supervise your own research students comes with a permanent position. As a senior academic you become more successful at winning grants (the Mathew Effect) and with that comes the ability to travel to conferences and do the kind of exciting work you want to. You also get have the kind of stability that lets your start a family. In later life emeritus status gives you the freedom to pursue the work you want to without other distractions.
To do any of that though, you have to get past the postdoc stage. In the past one postdoc was common. A friend of mine is on his sixth postdoc. Less than two before getting a tenure track job is now unusual. This is _not_ how it is supposed to work. This is the system not being updated for new realities.
You might be interested to know that the lifetime earning potential of a person with a bachelor's degree is greater than someone with a PhD. If you stick with an academic career rewards come in the form of travel and the things I indicated above. But if you drop out, for every year you stayed in your earning potential is lower. This is a cruel situation. It's also a waste; training a scientist takes a lot of state resources, if we're not using them for the work they are best suited that's suboptimal.
I liked much of your post. The truth is somewhere in the middle, the rewards are worth it for anyone who can make it through. I just want you to know that the system was not designed to be this way. The current situation is a recent development