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Comment by roghummal | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions a leveling off and "even contract(ing) over the last decade" of federal funding. I take the statement at face value, someone else might substantiate it.

Your point is taken. As we're producing more of these PhDs, we should be taking advantage of them; Not solely as cheap labor but as the scientific minds they were trained to be.

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It's the price you pay for idiotic "privatize everything" policies. Without contracts and public works, there's no way for Ph D's to get exposure and contacts in industries where they can actually demonstrate their skills.

Australia right now is in the grips of horrifically bad government policy in this regard (the CSIRO pretty much fired 2000 post-docs, so the market is now completely glutted with people with more experience then anyone graduating recently).

And when you get right down to it, this is all a huge stupid waste. We sink the cost of educating these people, then proceed to toss them into menial jobs which don't use those skills at all, don't provide opportunities to maintain them or anything like that?

what does privatization have to do with this? One of the worst abuses of the system (in my opinion) is the IRTA program. This is uncynically called the "post-bac" program among the IRTAs of the NIH, to the cynic it's exactly what it sounds like - it's a postdoc, except even less paid - its unintended consequence is as a dumping ground for undergrads unsure of what they want to do and spending a few years in lab purgatory before committing to grad school, because they have sunk the sunk cost of a couple of years in 'academic' research. The lucky ones go to med school instead.

This program is run by the NIH (not privatized in any way), almost assuredly created with the best of intentions (let's give students a chance to try out science so they can learn to love it, choose it, and increase our national stature!).

I only recently learned about the Post-Bac program, and I wish I had known about it when I was just out of school- I went to a university that wasn't research oriented, and such a program would have been fantastic for picking up the research mindset before going to graduate school I ended up in a lab staff instead, and learned about real research in sort of a trial by fire manner that's been much more stressful than the postbac probably would have been. So it's got it's possible advantages- let alone working for the NIH looks pretty good on a CV.

I would argue that being a lab staff is better, because you know what you're getting into. You were probably paid better, too. "cushy" is not a good thing to "prepare you for grad school", especially not for students who are noncommital (not saying that you are, but a lot of IRTAs are). OTOH, I knew a postbac whose job was to counsel macaques that had pieces of their brains gouged out (and therefore wound up with severe behavioral problems). So her job was pretty stressful.

Upshot: You made the right "choice".

Privatization gets used as a cudgel to force through funding cuts for all sorts of things. What it actually does is cut the legs out of the very private industries which would hire science graduates, because they're usually involved with providing various public services to the government in the first place.

One does not exist without the other, and a steadfast refusal to actually stimulate public works means everyone suffers.

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