I would have expected a higher percentage. Few openings and a high bar for whatever there is. It was tough to get an assistant professor job 30 years ago and I can't imagine what it must be like now.
This. A 60% stay rate evokes scenarios of academic inbreeding and a total disconnect between the real world and the small bubble where research groups operate.
Why?
When academics move directly from being students to faculty without external experience, it creates an echo chamber. This isolation from practical applications and market forces risks turning academic pursuit into a self-referential game - where success is measured by metrics like publication count and citation numbers rather than actual contribution to human knowledge or societal progress.
This separation from real-world feedback mechanisms means we may be investing significant human capital into activities that optimize for academic metrics rather than meaningful outcomes. The challenge isn't just about individual careers, but about ensuring our research institutions remain connected to the practical problems they're meant to help solve.
Moving directly from being students to faculty is rare. It mostly happens in fields where the demand for PhDs is unusually high. Because universities can't compete with salaries, they have to offer positions people may not be ready for if they want to attract top candidates.
The norm is doing PhD, postdoc, and the first faculty position in different institutes – precisely to avoid the echo chamber effect. And unless you are from a particularly large country, you are expected to do at least one of them outside your home country.
Success measures are what they are for two reasons: competition and long-term focus. Academic research is fundamentally interesting, and there are far more competent people trying to do it than funding. And because people can't afford to wait for decades to measure the real-world impact, the academia must base career progression on something that can be determined quickly enough. If you are doing the kind of research where practical applications can be expected in a few years, the industry is a better place for you. They have a lot more resources for research than the academia.
I'm currently doing research on a topic I started working on ~15 years ago. In that time, the topic has progressed from something interesting and potentially valuable to a mainstream idea with plenty of research funding. If the work is successful, we may start seeing measurable real-world impact in 5-10 years.
The only papers I see that are routinely useful have half the authors having a .in or .cn email at the end with the rest having Indian and Chinese names in US institutions.
The only western papers which aren't extended advertisements for their company are from people who are making something for themselves.
For example the best paper on image classification I've ever seen was posted on a private discord and was about better labeling the parts of a vagina as part of a stable diffusion training pipeline.
I used the methods without change and got better than state of the art for document segmentation.
You can advance knowledge in ways that are aligned with the nation's strategic needs. That would imply the career path of researchers would be oriented towards industry instead of pie in the sky projects.
In the UK, the industrial and military research labs have been closed, there is nothing being done except in universities. The university projects are really specific and don't join up in any way. There is no equivalent of DARPA guiding research proposals to be useful but Governments still think that the universites will define the next generation of industrial products.
Source: my own area of trying to use computers for Materials Science.
You're posting that sort of message in a startup-oriented online forum.
There was a point in time where Google was lauded by it's success story as progress originating in investments in academia.