Postdoctoral researchers in the United States are often overworked, poorly paid, and stuck in jobs that don’t advance their careers. And efforts to improve the system have progressed slowly, in part because academics who supervise postdocs have little incentive to push for change.
Those are some of the sobering conclusions of a new report published by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. It says overhauling the postdoctoral experience is more critical than ever as the number of researchers in such positions continues to grow.
“There is this sense that we have serious problems that need to be addressed,” said Gregory A. Petsko, a professor of neurology and neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medical College and chair of the committee that wrote the report.
The 100-plus-page report, released on Wednesday, recommends ways postdoc positions could be improved, including better pay, improved career development, and supervisors with a commitment to training and mentoring researchers. The report also provides a piece of sage advice that the committee wants institutions to relay early and often to graduate students: A postdoctoral position is not an inevitable part of getting an education as a scientist.
“The knee-jerk reaction for a lot of people is to go get a postdoc,” Mr. Petsko said. “But the purpose of the postdoc should be for advanced training in research for those careers where advanced training in research is needed. There are plenty of scientific careers—science journalism, science policy, patent attorney—where you don’t need to do a postdoc.”
With the supply of postdoctoral researchers outstripping the number of tenure-track jobs, the report advises graduate students in the sciences to consider a wider variety of career paths and recommends that institutions and mentors help them do that, as early as their first year of study.
“Under no circumstances should people read this report and think that we’re training too many graduate students in science,” Mr. Petsko said. “There are countless jobs for which they are superbly qualified. The trick is how to get them to the next step in their careers.”
Familiar Recommendations
If some of the report’s recommendations sound familiar, it’s because they’ve been discussed before. In 2000 the National Academies released a report on the employment conditions of postdocs and called for reforms in the system. The new report, “The Postdoctoral Experience Revisited,” was produced to update that research and determine to what extent the report’s recommendations had been put in place.
Progress has been made in the past 14 years, but it is uneven and not across the board. The report cites a number of institutions—like the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Wake Forest University—that have created offices to support postdocs. And in 2003 postdoctoral researchers formed the National Postdoctoral Association, an organization that pushes to improve the postdoctoral experience.
Unions have also started at some institutions. In 2008 more than 6,000 postdocs on the University of California’s 10 campuses became part of the largest union of postdocs in North America.
Benjamin Schwessinger, a head steward in the California union, which is affiliated with the United Auto Workers, wrote in an email that, “over all, the direction of the report is good.” But still, he said, collective bargaining “is and will continue to be the engine for real and progressive change for postdocs” and the only way to make sure the kinds of improvements touted in the report stick.
The “precarious situations of postdocs” should be taken seriously by administrators and established scientists, Mr. Schwessinger, a postdoc in plant pathology at the University of California at Davis, wrote. “This is not a ‘fringe’ discussion but at the heart of the future of academia.”
Belinda L. Huang, executive director of the national association, said the new report calls for the kind of changes her organization supports. “This is consistent with the issues the postdoc community knows are challenging,” she said.
In an ideal world, the report says, the postdoc experience would be “a defined period of advanced training and mentoring in research” that should also be “the most enjoyable times of the postdoctoral researcher’s professional life.”
‘A Structural Problem’
Achieving that mix is difficult, Mr. Petsko said. The culture of science has shifted over the years—federal funding for research has shrunk, for one—and postdoctoral scholars have to clear higher bars to move up in their careers. And the professors who employ postdocs have a hard time seeing how changing the system would benefit them. Scientists who rely on grant money, Mr. Petsko said, see time spent training postdoctoral researchers as time when research isn’t getting done.
“We have a structural problem in the way science is run,” Mr. Petsko said. There’s a “perverse incentive” for principal investigators to “have a big group with lots of postdocs so they can crank out lots of results.”
Mr. Petsko said increasing postdoc pay to at least $50,000—as the report recommends—to better reflect the rigor and complexity of their work could make a difference. The thinking is that higher pay for postdocs would push scientists to better assess how many they really need to hire. The median postdoctoral pay for recent science, engineering, and health Ph.D.'s, the report says, is $43,000.
The committee also found that the population of postdoctoral researchers in the United States is growing steadily, with the number working across various fields estimated to be as high as 100,000, and it appears they remain in their positions longer.
In response, the report recommends that postdoc appointments should last no more than five years. In a push for transparency and accountability, host institutions should keep a record of how long postdocs stay and include that information in grant proposals, the report says.
Postdocs have spread to disciplines not traditionally associated with the extra training, such as engineering and the social sciences. Unfortunately lacking, however, are accurate data on just who is a part of the postdoctoral population and what kinds of jobs their training leads to. The committee calls for institutions to be diligent about collecting such information and making it public.
“The most basic data doesn’t exist at most institutions,” Mr. Petsko said.
Ms. Huang agreed that collecting that information is important, but she noted it would stretch already thin financial and staff resources at universities.
With the research community raising concerns about the postdoctoral-training system for decades now, what will it take for widespread reform to take place?
Along with adherence to the report’s recommendations, a little more patience, apparently, must be part of the plan.
“Reform never happens all at once,” said Mr. Petsko. “Maybe before people didn’t think there was much urgency, but we’re living in a different time now.”
Correction (12/11/2014, 11:40 a.m.): The photo caption originally referred to the picketers as graduate students. Because those who hold postdocs have finished graduate school, the caption has been changed.
