Comment by TangoTrotFox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TangoTrotFox | Hacker News Reader

I think this article is looking at the effect rather than the cause. Why might it be that so much of science has started to edge away from well... science. Today nearly 1 in 8 people have a masters degree or higher. And in one in 33 have a doctorate or professional degree. [1] And these numbers seem to be increasing. That's really insane if you think about it. We now have more people with postgraduate degrees than had any degree in 1970, and postgraduate education generally implies a necessity to publish. But discovering genuinely new and novel information is not easy. So what do people publish instead? Enter the current state of science and academia. I think the most informative paragraph in this article was:

"Or look at Brian Wansink, the Cornell Professor with the bottomless soup bowl experiment. He recently drew unwanted attention to himself with a blogpost in which he advised a student to try harder getting results out of data because it “cost us a lot of time and our own money to collect.” Had Wansink been aware that massaging data until it delivers is not sound statistical procedure, he’d probably not have blogged about it."

Physics is one of the least susceptible to this issue, but no field is immune. The issue is that 'science' has become more about publishing than actual discovery. The two should be synonymous, but they are not.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

The statistics about masters and professional degrees are mostly irrelevant; those aren't research degrees and, although there are some exceptions, people with those degrees don't publish science.

1.77% of the 25+ population has a doctorate degree. Even among those, a huge amount are not PhDs and are not really research-focused. E.g., go read the CV of the typical University of Phoenix doctorate holder.

Furthermore, it's worth noting that the world got a lot more complex since the mid-20th century. The entire field of Computer Science happened, for example.

Definitely great points. On the other hand, even when you really lowball the numbers - I do think the point remains. 1.77% is 3.5 million people with doctorates in the USA alone. Perhaps we can see this issue manifest is something more directly quantifiable. Postdoctoral researchers tend to be some of the most highly educated and ostensibly skilled individuals in our population. Yet an average postdoc [1] will tend to earn [much] less than a mailman [2]. It seems difficult to explain this outside of a severe oversupply. And should the rate of people pursuing doctorates be increasing, which seems to be the case, I think we can expect things to get even more silly both in terms of compensation as well as output quality.

[1] - https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-15-0...

[2] - https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes435052.htm

First, I'm generally skeptical that "the market" is accurately pricing the value of work produced by either postdocs or federal mail carriers.

Second, a postdoc is still a training position. Medical residents are also not paid much better than mail carriers either.

Third, postdocs select for two types of people: those who want R1 professorships and those who need a position to stay in the country. Both of those groups drive down wages. I.e., it's sort of meaningless to compare a group of people who are working for the money to a group of people who are working for a shot at a seat in the upper tier of a tournament-style profession.

Fourth, both annual and lifetime earnings of PhD holders (at least in STEM) continue to outperform high school graduates (including mail carriers).

There's an oversupply of people interested in R1 faculty positions, but that doesn't mean there's a oversupply of phds per se. The labor market seems to absorb these people quite readily and at apparently high salaries as soon as they decide to quit academia.

The market is not created by some third party. It simply represents the meeting point between what people are willing to buy for and what people are willing to sell for. That postdocs are willing to work for scraps relative to their skill level is indicative that supply has gone way beyond demand. For instance software developers also face similar issues of what you're mentioning with lower wage foreign workers willing to accept much less thus driving wages down, yet nonetheless high demand keeps wages high.

This is not particularly controversial and some have even suggested that starting to increasingly restrict the number of graduate students admitted could be the right path forward, as mentioned in this article [1] from John Hopkins: These and other suggestions for career preparation make one implicit assumption: that the nation needs the current number of biomedical scientists. A radically different approach to balancing the biomedical workforce equation would be to simply reduce the “supply” — that is, admit fewer students into science graduate programs. The article ends on what was apparently supposed to be an up beat note suggesting that instead of such draconian measures, perhaps we can look to people who are doing things like aiming to go teach high school science, with a doctorate.

And on the other hand you see things like https://cra.org/articles-addressing-shortage-of-cs-professor...

Just like there's a glut of wordpress plugin authors and a shortage of ML experts, different fields of academia have different levels of supply/demand.

Also, USPS really is not a prototypical example of free labor market: those salaries/pensions/benefits will be a lot smaller if/when usps privatizes...

I never understand why there's this thinking that more education "should" lead to a higher salary. It's not borne out by either theory or practice. I've heard several PhD's complain that they don't earn as much as someone with not degree at all. Is it something that PhD candidates tell themselves to get through the misery?

It comes down to supply versus demand. If what somebody learns in increasingly advanced education has any practical benefit then it would imply that they would have a practical skill that few other people would have.

Of course this is premised on the rarity of supply, which is no longer really true with millions of phds and growing out there. And it's also premised on the existence of a practical and meaningfully valuable skillset gained in the process of obtaining the doctorate which is I think reasonable, but still certainly debatable -- and at the minimum going to be contingent on what/where somebody studies.

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