“you cannot guess where the important discoveries come from and they might not all come from the same guy.”
I don’t think we’re in disagreement, here. This was the point I was making in using the Fourier Transform as an example. The long tail is going to give some good results. But it’s also going to give a lot of crap. As I said in the previous post to this one, 90% of what is outside the box, is outside because it’s junk. And I do not see our scientific leadership taking on the difficult task of prioritizing projects. A low priority doesn’t mean zero funding, however, it just means that we don’t want to funnel a lot of resources (and hence create a lot of Ph.D.s) in those areas. That was the point of the questions in the last paragraph that I want the AAAS to address: post-docs are at the prime of their sceintific powers, and they are basically indentured servants to established profs. Should we switch some funding priorities to younger profs? The AAAS does not want to ask those questions – it is controlled by the long-tenured.
I think that we are coming at this problem from different angles because the mental models we have about funding are shaped by our fields. My advisor had over $2 million per year in grant monies. That’s probably quite exorbitant in CS and Math circles. Also a lot of the total US R&D budget is taken up in the nearly $30 billion NIH budget, a lot of which is chewed up by the cost of human testing. I’m not convinved that private industry should not take on some of that, but reasonable people can disagree. My advisor was on a couple of funding committees at various agencies, and I saw some of the stuff that crossed his desk. There is a lot of dreck out there.
I don’t think you can switch the funding away from post-docs into tenure track positions because those don’t depend on research funding alone.
The best strategy would be to reallocate the funding for students altogether so that you train fewer Ph.D.s, but possibly more M.Sc.s
What I advocate is very simply: train fewer researchers, but fund them better.
Johnsays:
Ah, yes. I think that we need to hire technicians at Universities to run experiments. Quit using Ph.D. students as hired hands. This turns the graduate experience into a pnzi scheme ,but the profs need warm bodies in the lab in order to keep those grant dollars flowing.
Make research assistant jobs permanent positions at living wages. Then figure out the rational number of Ph.D.s is. I still think that younger profs get the shaft, though.
Younger profs have a hard time, and they’ll keep on having a hard time as long as we keep training too many Ph.D.s
It is simply a market issue. If universities had a really hard time recruiting, say they got 5 candidates for each job instead of 150… then they would release the pressure on the young professors. The students would be better off too since instead of having professors who are freaked out by their next grant proposal, they might actually get rewarded for their teaching skills [in a less competitive market].
“you cannot guess where the important discoveries come from and they might not all come from the same guy.”
I don’t think we’re in disagreement, here. This was the point I was making in using the Fourier Transform as an example. The long tail is going to give some good results. But it’s also going to give a lot of crap. As I said in the previous post to this one, 90% of what is outside the box, is outside because it’s junk. And I do not see our scientific leadership taking on the difficult task of prioritizing projects. A low priority doesn’t mean zero funding, however, it just means that we don’t want to funnel a lot of resources (and hence create a lot of Ph.D.s) in those areas. That was the point of the questions in the last paragraph that I want the AAAS to address: post-docs are at the prime of their sceintific powers, and they are basically indentured servants to established profs. Should we switch some funding priorities to younger profs? The AAAS does not want to ask those questions – it is controlled by the long-tenured.
I think that we are coming at this problem from different angles because the mental models we have about funding are shaped by our fields. My advisor had over $2 million per year in grant monies. That’s probably quite exorbitant in CS and Math circles. Also a lot of the total US R&D budget is taken up in the nearly $30 billion NIH budget, a lot of which is chewed up by the cost of human testing. I’m not convinved that private industry should not take on some of that, but reasonable people can disagree. My advisor was on a couple of funding committees at various agencies, and I saw some of the stuff that crossed his desk. There is a lot of dreck out there.
Right.
I don’t think you can switch the funding away from post-docs into tenure track positions because those don’t depend on research funding alone.
The best strategy would be to reallocate the funding for students altogether so that you train fewer Ph.D.s, but possibly more M.Sc.s
What I advocate is very simply: train fewer researchers, but fund them better.
Ah, yes. I think that we need to hire technicians at Universities to run experiments. Quit using Ph.D. students as hired hands. This turns the graduate experience into a pnzi scheme ,but the profs need warm bodies in the lab in order to keep those grant dollars flowing.
Make research assistant jobs permanent positions at living wages. Then figure out the rational number of Ph.D.s is. I still think that younger profs get the shaft, though.
Younger profs have a hard time, and they’ll keep on having a hard time as long as we keep training too many Ph.D.s
It is simply a market issue. If universities had a really hard time recruiting, say they got 5 candidates for each job instead of 150… then they would release the pressure on the young professors. The students would be better off too since instead of having professors who are freaked out by their next grant proposal, they might actually get rewarded for their teaching skills [in a less competitive market].