Black Man in the Lab!

[Toni]

Usually isn't always. Back when my husband was doing his PhD, he had a very modest stipend and we scraped by because I was working full time. Last I looked at stipends, they were still pretty modest but you could live on them--carefully.

Truth is that if I were to get a PhD tomorrow and take a tenure track position (assuming I could find one) I would most likely earn less than I do now. Which is why I haven't been able to talk a fairly brilliant coworker into doing just that. Too many years deferred income for not much pay off.

Usually as in essentially always. It's been my experience that being accepted into a PhD program without a tuition waiver and a stipend is tantamount to being rejected. Schools might occasionally send out acceptances without support as a sort of system of alternates, in their view it's a low investment for a decent gain once attrition among the supported grad students starts to take its toll...

Of course, no one goes into academics for the money, but that's besides the point. The standard advice is to only do a PhD if you can't imagine doing anything else. The income data is clear, even a supported PhD with no loans is a negative lifetime monetary investment - the loss of 5+ years of income with all of its assorted raises, compounded, is too much to overcome.

And you have just articulated the reason that there are very few young adults going into graduate school today. Look at groups which are typically under represented in Ph.D. programs and then multiply those reasons by a factor of at least 10. I see why people choose the secure career with money vs long years of delayed earnings and then very uncertain careers, often with positions tied to the ability to attract grant money and all of the strings attached.

We need to re-think this. Seriously.

 

[beero1000]

I am well aware. I consciously made that exact choice when I decided to turn down lucrative job offers to go to graduate school. After getting my PhD, I turned down more industry job offers to become a professor. I know many people who made the opposite choice, before, during, and after the PhD - it's a personal decision and the academic life is not for everyone. Personally, I wouldn't do anything else, money or no. I suspect that most of the people are successful in academia are the same way. I would even say (again) that getting a PhD is probably a mistake unless you are the same way. A master's degree is sufficient for pretty much everyone else.

The reason I posted was to say that I don't think the cost of a PhD is a key factor in under-representation of minorities. That cost has always been there, and it is arguably significantly lower in recent history than it was at any time in the past. At the same time, many of the best scientists have grown up poor. Similar statements can also be made for the under-representation of women, even rich women. The thing they have in common, in my opinion, is that they were supported in their curiosity and learning, especially in childhood. It takes a certain kind of self-worth, hubris even, to decide to be the first person in the world to understand something, to become an expert at the edge of human knowledge. How many subtle (or not-so-subtle) put-downs does it take before a reasonable person starts to doubt that they can do it? Then, of course, it's the thinking that makes it so.

 

[barbos]

Usually as in essentially always. It's been my experience that being accepted into a PhD program without a tuition waiver and a stipend is tantamount to being rejected. Schools might occasionally send out acceptances without support as a sort of system of alternates, in their view it's a low investment for a decent gain once attrition among the supported grad students starts to take its toll...

Of course, no one goes into academics for the money, but that's besides the point. The standard advice is to only do a PhD if you can't imagine doing anything else. The income data is clear, even a supported PhD with no loans is a negative lifetime monetary investment - the loss of 5+ years of income with all of its assorted raises, compounded, is too much to overcome.

And you have just articulated the reason that there are very few young adults going into graduate school today. Look at groups which are typically under represented in Ph.D. programs and then multiply those reasons by a factor of at least 10. I see why people choose the secure career with money vs long years of delayed earnings and then very uncertain careers, often with positions tied to the ability to attract grant money and all of the strings attached.

We need to re-think this. Seriously.

I agree, the system is messed up, but I myself can't see a solution.
Actually I thought a little and disagree with a few minor things.
There is no lack of young adults going to graduate school actually.
There is lack of opportunities for fresh PhDs, afterwards.
The way it currently works in US hard sciences at least is that grad students are needed to do the teaching. But once they are done with their PhDs they really are not needed anymore and very few and not necessarily best get decent position which allows them to do research.
Again I am talking hard sciences (math, physics, chemistry, biology).
Don't really know how the rest of fields doing.
So they produce way too many PhDs for the current job market. So they either have to slash their number or spend more money on research or both.

 

[Toni]

And you have just articulated the reason that there are very few young adults going into graduate school today. Look at groups which are typically under represented in Ph.D. programs and then multiply those reasons by a factor of at least 10. I see why people choose the secure career with money vs long years of delayed earnings and then very uncertain careers, often with positions tied to the ability to attract grant money and all of the strings attached.

We need to re-think this. Seriously.

I agree, the system is messed up, but I myself can't see a solution.
Actually I thought a little and disagree with a few minor things.
There is no lack of young adults going to graduate school actually.
There is lack of opportunities for fresh PhDs, afterwards.
The way it currently works in US hard sciences at least is that grad students are needed to do the teaching. But once they are done with their PhDs they really are not needed anymore and very few and not necessarily best get decent position which allows them to do research.
Again I am talking hard sciences (math, physics, chemistry, biology).
Don't really know how the rest of fields doing.
So they produce way too many PhDs for the current job market. So they either have to slash their number or spend more money on research or both.

In my husband's department, there are exactly 3 professors who are under 60. One of those is 58. When I attend university functions, I see similar trends, although for some departments, it would be small number of faculty under 50 instead of 60. Now, this isn't a big name university but it is one with steady enrollment that would increase if the school would increase its capacity.


I think it will soon be a big problem. Only locally if this trend is only local. I would be surprised if it were.

 

[barbos]

I agree, the system is messed up, but I myself can't see a solution.
Actually I thought a little and disagree with a few minor things.
There is no lack of young adults going to graduate school actually.
There is lack of opportunities for fresh PhDs, afterwards.
The way it currently works in US hard sciences at least is that grad students are needed to do the teaching. But once they are done with their PhDs they really are not needed anymore and very few and not necessarily best get decent position which allows them to do research.
Again I am talking hard sciences (math, physics, chemistry, biology).
Don't really know how the rest of fields doing.
So they produce way too many PhDs for the current job market. So they either have to slash their number or spend more money on research or both.

In my husband's department, there are exactly 3 professors who are under 60. One of those is 58. When I attend university functions, I see similar trends, although for some departments, it would be small number of faculty under 50 instead of 60. Now, this isn't a big name university but it is one with steady enrollment that would increase if the school would increase its capacity.


I think it will soon be a big problem. Only locally if this trend is only local. I would be surprised if it were.

I am pretty sure it's local and weird thing. For that to be the case they had to have no new (and young) people coming in for quite a while.
I usually see pretty normal distribution of people of different ages.
And to be honest 40 years old professor is really young.

 

[Toni]

In my husband's department, there are exactly 3 professors who are under 60. One of those is 58. When I attend university functions, I see similar trends, although for some departments, it would be small number of faculty under 50 instead of 60. Now, this isn't a big name university but it is one with steady enrollment that would increase if the school would increase its capacity.


I think it will soon be a big problem. Only locally if this trend is only local. I would be surprised if it were.

I am pretty sure it's local and weird thing. For that to be the case they had to have no new (and young) people coming in for quite a while.
I usually see pretty normal distribution of people of different ages.
And to be honest 40 years old professor is really young.

I don't think it's just local- current average age of full professor is 55. My husband began his career in a tenure track position before he was 30.

In recent years, younger faculty dont stay, often because of the lack of opportunities for spouses. This is likely less an issue at large universities or universities on large metropolitan areas but its a real issue at smaller schools in smaller cities.

 

[doubtingt]

To me it's more about familiarity with a profession. Yes, there may be an inheritable genetic component but in my experience kids tend to emulate their peers and parents more than anything else. It was inconceivable to me to become a doctor as a young person. I wanted a more normal job like working in a steel mill. Becoming an engineer or a computer scientist was also inconceivably difficult. But if my parents had been professionals I think the prospects would have been very different. Certain things would not have seemed so impossible.

I think you have a great point here. Even with my upper middle class privileged upbringing, even with math teachers who strongly encouraged me to pursue what was clearly a gift for a STEM track, it simply wasn't a part of my world so it just didn't seem like an option.

If I knew then what I know now, I would have loved to have gone into the sciences.

Very few people of any race have parents or family members with doctorates. Given the doctorates often marry other doctorates and usually have fewer than 2 kids, STEM doctorates are not even replacing themselves in the STEM fields, thus cannot account for the doubling in the number of STEM doctorates with each generation.
That means that even though having STEM doctorate parents makes getting a STEM doctorate much more likely, most of those who get STEM doctorates do not have such parents. Yet, the differential rates in having STEM parents would be a factor that slows any efforts to close that gap, even though most whites getting doctorates do not have those kind of parental role models either.