Academia used to offer smart people the promise of tenure and interesting work. Now they offer eternal postdocs and publish or perish. Is it any wonder they can't retain good people?
This is talking mostly about perceived "stars" in academia, who already do have tenured or tenure-track positions (or offers of them), but leave for industry instead. So I think it's a different issue than the one you're talking about.
For those people, one thing that's changed is that academia, in STEM at least, has grown into having a big management component. You're expected to run a significantly sized lab, and to continually bring in enough grants to pay for it. Professors at top universities spend a large amount of their time writing grants, hiring people, and networking with potential funding sources, and it's no longer really optional. There is a certain style of researcher who actually excels in this kind of position, managing a medium-sized research enterprise, and advancing a field by putting together good teams, providing high-level direction, and mentorship. It's like running a startup in some ways (obv. different in other ways). But not every researcher is good at or interested in that, and some would rather opt out and find a job that lets them focus more on their individual research.
Another thing that's changed is pay. Academic salaries in CS have gone up significantly, to the point where $100k+ is common, and $150k+ for big names is also getting common, whereas professor jobs were traditionally more lower/mid-middle-class than upper-middle-class (more like "$75k+" than "$150k+"). But salaries at tech companies have gone up even faster. If a big name in deep learning gets offered $300k base plus a big stock package, the university's retention counteroffer isn't likely to come very close.
Also, specifically in AI (which this article focuses on), data access and engineering/infrastructure support are other lures of industry. If you do machine translation, for example, moving to Google will solve many of your dataset problems. If you need a distributed cluster, there's expert IT staff working on it; if you do autonomous vehicles, there's expert engineering staff supporting your "demo platform". In academia you rarely can afford that kind of infrastructure or engineering support, so there's a lot more of grad students cobbling together DIY demos, and the postdoc hired mainly for his/her mathematics knowledge also moonlighting as the cluster admin.
I think your numbers are off by about a factor of 2 (underestimating). You can see the salaries for the UoC system at https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/. Note that most of the professorial salaries are labeled AY which means they are probably making 30% more annually. Salaries at private schools are even higher. Silicon Valley is not going to lure a "big name" away from a tenured job for south of a half-million a year.
I think academia has a long way to go to reduce costs. I'm willing to cut services that universities offer if that means lower costs.
Remove the nice dorms, cafeteria, and fitness centers. Remove the community outreach programs that isn't really the job of a university. And yes increase the number of introductory level classes taught by graduate students and post docs.
I'm not worried about people moving from academia to industry. My hope is as we increase the rate at which people finish high school and go to college, we will have enough people for industry and academia. It is tempting to say we need to offer better wages and benefits for teachers but we can't digress. Cost containment should be our first priority.
I think it is possible if we understand and agree with the compromises we will need to make.
"Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase."
The administrators aren't really the problem per se, though. They're there to address mandates from various levels of government. Colleges won't reduce the number of administrators because they can't under the current bureaucratic regime.
How do we know that you are correct? Maybe universities do have bloated staffs. Salaries, benefits, retirement are going to be a lot more costly than nicer dorms and a fitness center.
People are offering solutions without following the money.
"The compliance problem is exacerbated by the sheer volume of mandates—approximately 2,000 pages of text—and the reality that the Department of Education issues official guidance to amend or clarify its rules at a rate of more than one document per work day. As a result, colleges and universities find themselves enmeshed in a jungle of red tape, facing rules that are often confusing and difficult to comply with."
You don't think colleges would rather have the money than all these extra paper pushers?
That depends on how the people at the top see themselves
- "We want all responsibilities, Minister, if they mean extra staff and bigger budgets. It's the breadth of our responsibilities that makes us important, makes YOU important, Minister. When you see vast buildings, huge staff and massive budgets, what do you conclude?"
- "Bureaucracy?"
- "No, Minister, you conclude that at the summit there are men of great stature and dignity who hold the world in their hands and tread the earth like princes."
Wow, you were not kidding at all. 148 people with pay over a million dollars. We need a much lower ceiling on pay when it comes to public institutions that are supposed to be not for profit.
My thought is a cap on the multiplier on the minimum wage (for example, a 50 times multiplier at a minimum wage of $15 per hour would mean an annual cap of $15 * 2000 * 50 or $1.5M). Similarly, a private corporation could declare that it will cap its pay at 100 times multiplier of the minimum wage.
I think this is something the Regents of the University of California system could easily impose if they had the will to do so. Would a pay policy like that be illegal? Would it be considered conspiring or "fixing" if it applies to everyone at the organization?
You misread the page. The table of top salaries contains separate rows for each year between 2004 and 2014. I can't figure out how to show only a single year, but it would be about 25 people making over $1M/yr (since most of those rows are since 2010).
I don't see what being not-for-profit has to do with salary caps. But the whole reason that the head coach is paid so much is that the football team is being run as a for-profit enterprise, which is a seemingly rational thing for the university to do, yet I think it makes sense to restrict universities from distracting themselves with that sort of enterprise related to their purpose.
Remove the nice dorms, cafeteria, and fitness centers.
You know the dorms and dining halls at these schools were pretty much the same 20 years ago (before tuition costs started mushrooming as insanely as they have) as they are now, right? So perhaps one should look elsewhere as to where the rising costs have been coming from.
(Fitness centers being an optional expense at many schools, and something from a different animal than the subject of basic operational + living expense costs).
This is certainly not true at some universities. For instance, at the University of Michigan dorms have been renovated on an annual cycle (around one building a year) at an expense of millions of dollars for small renovations and tens of millions of dollars for larger ones. These larger upgrades often include fancy dining halls with lots of options, along with well-appointed interiors. Furthermore, the number of new buildings and construction projects (about 10-12 currently) at any given time is insane in my opinion, though some are funded by donors for specific uses so can't be reallocated.
>My hope is as we increase the rate at which people finish high school and go to college
Woah, this is the logic that is getting us in trouble!
66% of people already go to college. Of those who go, only 50% graduate. So...
1) Does "college" matter or does learning a marketable skill mater? If we had 100% college enrollment and completion but everyone was getting a degree in native American studies, would we somehow be better off?
2) At what level of enrollment does it become more cost effective to simply extend high school 2-4 more years and just consolidate it?
College in its present form is in trouble because the lions share of college attendees are; white women, taking non STEM degrees, taking on federal loans, and having a lower workforce participation rate at the end of it.
College is about learning, not about what a huge chunk of it has become; safe spaces, community outreach, nice dorms, cafeterias, dating, fitness centers and generally taking a hiatus from life. We really need to redefine college in its present form, it is no longer what it was 50 or 100 years ago.
> We really need to redefine college in its present form, it is no longer what it was 50 or 100 years ago.
The norm in Australia is to "take a break from life" for 2 years, living on campus, and then to live like an adult, buying groceries and cooking food for the final two years.
This is important. Most probably, the sports is proving a big factor that is killing the education in USA [1]. Excessive indulgence of US educational institutes (schools, colleges and universities) in sports has been a very big mistake made by the US society.
The vast majority of colleges lose money on college sports. And when I say "money", I mean millions of dollars that come directly out of students' pockets in higher fees. Here are the numbers: http://www.al.com/sports/index.ssf/2014/08/ncaa_study_finds_...
"The frantic spending race is playing out differently across the country. Higher coaches salaries, while common, are just part of an array of expenses soaring at athletic departments that fail to profit.
At the University of California Berkeley, the mortgage on athletics buildings went from $0 to $23.4 million in a decade. At the University of Wisconsin, annual maintenance and spending on facilities went from $10.5 million to $38.2 million. At Florida State, pay for athletics staffers — not including coaches — went from $7.7 million to $15.7 million. At other schools, rising costs for travel, severance pay, recruiting and other items combine to keep athletics in the red."
I don't see why you can't have other extra-curricular profit centers in school. Why don't universities run application development, art, design, & business management together? Make some products to sell.
Is that true? I remember hearing that the University of Kentucky's basketball program ran a net profit, but also that it was pretty unusual in that respect.
Yes, this is also true for the University of Michigan athletics department, which in a recent year spent around $145 million and earned $158 million in revenue.
Of course, it's not enough for something to return a profit; it needs to return more profit than an alternative use of the funds. Perhaps it could have made more money investing in postgrad startups?
My understanding is that the UK basketball program is self-sustaining, and additionally turns a profit for the university. It's not taking university funding to begin with.
(Also, much as I'm disdainful of university athletics, declaring that only the most profitable programs have a place on campus seems like a really amazingly horrible idea.)
Postdocs aren't that common in computer science. They exist, for sure, but most of the recently hired CS professors I know came straight from their PhDs.
Most of the newly hired CS professors I know (at some legit schools - CMU, Waterloo, USC, UT Austin, etc) came from postdocs. Could be a sub-field of CS thing?
Definitely a subfield thing in part. Highly theoretical CS PhDs (complexity theory, algorithms, etc - the folks who are mathematicians in computer scientist's clothing) almost always require postdocs, both because they tend to be less heavily recruited by industry, and because the vast majority of departments are shying away from theory in favor of things that bring in more grant money and industry partnerships.
Departments aren't stupid, though. They realize that grabbing star grad students with highly marketable skills in industry as they are walking out of their dissertation defense is probably the only shot they'll have at getting them. They will often "try out" industry or take a job at Google or MSR on the advice of their PI, noting that it's just as good as a postdoc but pays four or five times as much. Problem is, they then have to walk away from their $180k/year to take a faculty position that might not pay half that and could very well dead-end in a few years if the department leadership changes (or any of a dozen other precipitating factors) and they don't get tenure.
All that said, I personally know of tenure-track professors at two of the schools you mentioned, plus ones at quite a few other top-flight CS departments (Cornell, Toronto, Washington, Cal), who were hired straight out of grad school.
I think you have a bias of looking at students from select top schools. A PhD student in almost any branch is going to have a really hard time getting a tenure track position unless they have an awesome research record (publications in top tier conferences/journals).
both can be true. super rough approximation for CS faculty job candidate consideration: Ph.D. outside of the U.S. followed by a postdoc in U.S. at School X ~ Ph.D. in the U.S. at School X
In other disciplines (e.g. mine - theoretical physics) it is not possible (whereas doing postdocs for 10 years or so is common).
And while it is harder to transit (learning basic computer skills, while way easier than quantum field theory, takes time and effort), the opportunity gap is way higher. And it may be not a surprise that many data scientists with PhDs are physicists.
Even if true (I know many professors who did postdocs), it's not clear what you think this proves. Faculty slots are very scarce and most newly graduated PhDs, even very smart ones, do not have "faculty job at a desirable institution" as an option immediately available to them. So they are left with the choice between postdocs and industry. Most choose industry, and it's not hard to understand why.
Postdocs especially multi-year postdocs are very rare in Computer Science. I have personally known several students get hired directly or after a one year post-docs. Multi-year postdocs are common in fields (Biology in particular) where job prospects offered by industry are comparable in salary and future opportunities to what postdocs offer.
that's actually absolutely correct :) academia is best at doing things that are not directly marketable in the capitalist economy. in the early 1900s, a group of weirdos working on theoretical quantum mechanics couldn't find marketable jobs in industry of the day, so they had to do their work in academia. thanks to them, you have your iPhone now.
That's actually the crux of the issue here. In the past AI research didn't have any commercial value, and now it does. So universities and departments are having to deal with new competition, and they'll have to adjust various forms of compensation as a result.
The article talks about "stars", which implies quality over quantity. They probably already crank out too many infinitesimal-delta-thesis guys who are smart but not brilliant.
