I'm one of 90 000 postdocs in the US

This draft copy of an article was published today on Scientific American's website. It addresses the myth that there is a dearth of scientific talent coming out of the US university system. I think that this is my favourite section, in part, because it adds to the recent back and forth between PLT and myself.

"Through decisions made haphazardly 60 years ago, “we chose as a country to staff our labs primarily with graduate students and postdocs and a few non-tenured staff people, while other countries have permanent ways of staffing their labs,” often with PhD staff scientists in career positions, says Georgia State University economist Paula Stephan, an authority on the academic labor force. Under some of those other systems, research institutions employ many scientists as long-term, career staff members who have professional-level salaries and clear career paths potentially leading to greater responsibility and leadership.

The American approach of temporarily funded labs staffed largely with student and postdoc labor...produces superb science, but it has several serious drawbacks from the standpoint of recruiting and retaining scientists. First, it makes the funding of any particular lab inherently unstable and dependent on winning repeated grants and renewals, which places individual careers at the mercy of annual competitions. In times of very tight federal budgets, such as the present, this means that many labs, and even many well-established scientific careers, do not survive. Second, it produces not only educational opportunities and research results, but also a constant stream of newly fledged young researchers who need opportunities to start their own careers. “The way that U.S. staffs its labs puts so much pressure on the system to absorb the continual new cohort. And we haven’t had much luck in absorbing it,” says Georgia State’s Stephan.

That’s largely because a scientist can’t compete for a federal grant—the sine qua non of professional recognition as an established investigator—without the backing of a university or other non-profit institution, and universities generally back only researchers who hold faculty positions, and sometimes only those on the tenure track. Scientists write the grant proposals and do the research, but the grant, which often also provides at least part of the professor’s salary, is technically awarded to the university, which administers it and provides the facilities needed to do the research in return for overhead payments. The limiting factor on young scientists’ abilities to start academic research careers is thus the number of available faculty positions, which over recent decades has fallen farther and farther behind the number of scientists the system is producing.

Despite a longstanding dismal job market in academic science, however, departments continue to recruit graduate students and postdocs because they need skilled and inexpensive labor to do the work promised in professors’ grant proposals. Doctoral-level researchers must receive the “trainee” wages paid to postdocs—generally about $40,000 a year for 60 to 80 hours a week with no job security or promotion opportunities. But paying postdocs a true professional wage would mean many fewer highly skilled hands, fewer publications and less chance of winning a grant renewal."

Although some of it may remain contentious, it still makes some really good points about the supply and demand of newly minted PhDs. Here's a response by Marc Bousquet from the Chronicle on that same article.