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The numbers make the problem clear. In 2007, the year before CERN first powered up the LHC, the lab produced 142 master's and Ph.D. theses, according to the lab
by Create 13y ago
The numbers make the problem clear. In 2007, the year before CERN first powered up the LHC, the lab produced 142 master's and Ph.D. theses, according to the lab's document server. Last year it produced 327. (Fermilab chipped in 54.) That abundance seems unlikely to vanish anytime soon, as last year ATLAS had 1000 grad students and CMS had 900.
In contrast, the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics, currently lists 124 postdocs worldwide in experimental high-energy physics, the sort of work LHC grads have trained for.
The situation is equally difficult for postdocs trying to make the jump to a junior faculty position or a permanent job at a national lab. The Snowmass Young Physicists survey received responses from 956 early-career researchers, including 343 postdocs. But INSPIRE currently lists just 152 "junior" positions, including 61 in North America. And the supply of jobs isn't likely to increase, says John Finley, an astrophysicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who is leading a search to replace two senior particle physicists.
- jpwagner 13y agoThe numbers make the problem clear Right, so the problem is that there are way too many students. Is the burden on the upcoming students to discontinue their track or on the universities (etc) to slow admissions and hiring postdocs?
- Create 13y agoEnsures too great a flexibility to the Organization and imposes too much precariousness and insecurity on the upcoming students. In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting. Let's not confuse students and fellows with missing staff. http://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2013/27/News%20Articles/1557868 http://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2013/27/News%20Artic...
- deong 13y agoThe problem facing universities is that if they slow the rate of new PhD students and postdocs, they will quite simply have to shutter the labs. The entire system is built on the backs of very cheap research labor. That superstar researcher you see on television talking about the big new breakthrough from his or her lab hasn't written a line of code or laid hands on a beaker in 20 years. His or her job is to get a grant, hire students and postdocs to do the work, and immediately start chasing the next grant. Universities run on the 40% cut they get from these grants, which is why there's so much pressure to get funding in the first place. Everyone knows we have too many PhD students, but no one can afford to be the person who doesn't hire more of them, since that would mean your lab has one person working, writing papers, and chasing funding, and the people you're competing with have an army doing the same things.
- jpwagner 13y agooffering phd programs and granting phds is ultimately the responsibility of the university/institute. although grad students get paid little, the total cost to a lab of a grad student is higher than a tech[nical assistant]. if there were less grad students, labs would hire more techs.
- deong 13y agoI imagine it depends a lot on the field. I'm in computer science, and while a few academic research programs need lots of programmers, mostly there aren't a lot of things that a relatively untrained tech can do. We need PhD students and postdocs to actively do novel research, publish papers, and chase grants. It's also really unlikely that we'd find anywhere near enough techs to make up the difference anyway. In CS, your options as a bright student are to go into research or go make a fortune for Facebook. We can compete with industry only because we're offering the promise of a career in research. If we had to staff the labs with people who had no desire to join academia, the costs would go up substantially.