For decades, politicians, policy makers, and industry leaders have told a disturbing narrative: An inferior educational system, this account goes, prevents many young Americans from entering STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields, weakening the nation’s innovation and scientific enterprise. The resulting talent shortage, it reasons, can only be overcome by admitting larger numbers of foreign nationals who have the required skills.
But this narrative misrepresents what actually drives large numbers of capable, ambitious, well-educated Americans away from STEM fields and toward careers in business, law, medicine, and other nonacademic endeavors: a university labor system that exploits would-be scientists.
For a long time now, American academic research has relied on the cheap, skilled labor of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Both groups receive education and training ostensibly in preparation for academic-research careers of their own. They work for faculty members and other senior researchers who compete for research grants from funding agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense. Perhaps 20 percent of applicants win funding. They then recruit aspiring scientists in insecure, temporary positions to do the needed work.
Many of those aspiring scientists, postdocs, are often barely able to scrape by financially. That includes those at elite institutions. As a 2023 report by the Stanford University Postdoctoral Association put it, “prestige does not prevent poverty.” Many postdocs earn the NIH-specified wage, which tops out after four or five years at about $60,000 a year. Beyond that, they generally put in long daytime and evening hours in the pressured atmosphere of competitive research.
Decades ago, postdoctoral appointments only went to a small number of exceptionally accomplished and promising young scientists, providing advanced training under leading researchers in preparation for especially distinguished careers. Then senior researchers began taking a less symbiotic approach, hiring postdocs simply because they needed workers and because postdocs were cheaper than graduate students and staff scientists — the former because of tuition costs, the latter because of higher pay.
As the number of postdoc hires increased, several years as a postdoc became a de facto expectation of applicants for faculty jobs. Because senior researchers hire postdocs according to their projects’ need for labor, rather than the number of faculty openings awaiting the trainees, postdocs now vastly outnumber available faculty positions. The result: We have transformed a competition based on skills and talent into a lottery where few can win.
Decades ago, postdoctoral appointments only went to a small number of exceptionally accomplished and promising young scientists.
It is no surprise, then, that fewer and fewer young Americans are opting to pursue research in the STEM fields.
But there is a logical remedy: making science once again a good career, as it was in the decades following World War II. That will mostly happen by aspiring researchers pushing back against the current system. Fortunately that is beginning to happen. More and more young lab workers are now refusing to accept the economic and workplace policies that have long defined academic “traineeships.” Their resistance, both organizational and individual, has the potential to topple the current rickety arrangement. After decades of exploitation, penury, and disappointment, academic workers have begun to organize, unionize, and win moderate wage increases. Recently, for example, a strike unprecedented in the 250-year history of Rutgers University ended with the combined faculty, graduate-student, and postdoc unions winning a settlement slated to provide graduate-student teachers and research workers upwards of $39,000 a year in wages and support for their studies, and postdocs a minimum income of $52,500 now, rising to $64,000 in 2026.
Rutgers is only one of several universities, both public and private, that are boosting graduate student and postdoc pay, some on the initiative of the universities and some as the result of strikes and union drives. Among public institutions, the University of California has announced raises of between 55 percent and 80 percent for academic employees, including postdocs, and 25-percent and 80-percent increases for graduate students over a three year contract. Postdocs at the University of Washington will receive more than $68,000 in 2024. Among well-endowed private universities, the University of Pennsylvania increased postdoc wages 19 percent last July, joining counterparts such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University in raising pay. While impressive, these gains for Ph.D. scientists, often in their early to mid-30s when working as postdocs, only bring wages out of the poverty range and into the lower reaches of the middle class.
What higher lab pay portends for the future of the scientific enterprise is potentially transformative. We estimate that Rutgers-sized increases, when combined with the increases in fringe benefits, employment taxes, and grant overhead charges that the new pay scale will produce, raise the cost of hiring a postdoc by an estimated 50 percent. With postdoc and graduate-student labor often comprising research projects’ largest cost, it is difficult to know how senior researchers and funders will respond. Senior researchers will need either much larger grants to maintain their teams’ size or, if grants do not grow, to reduce their staff by approximately a third.
And how will other universities respond? Will they also raise postdoc and graduate-student pay to compete for high-quality candidates? Will their grant proposals also ask for larger budgets? And if so, how will funding agencies react? Will they increase the size of the grants they award? Or will they insist that senior researchers make do on the budgets of the past?
If grant sizes grow, funding agencies might have to reduce the total number of grants available. That would make competition for grants even fiercer than it already is unless Congress gives granting agencies significantly larger budgets, which seems highly unlikely at present. But if grant sizes stay the same and senior researchers have to substantially cut their teams, the number of graduate students and, likely, postdocs will also have to drop.
Cutting staffing would have an unintended benefit to the system, if not to individual universities, because it would also cut the number of excess Ph.D.s that universities have long produced. With a decline, the faculty job market would become less brutally competitive, with fewer applicants, which would boost the percentages of graduate students and postdocs still in the system who eventually can land faculty jobs.
If, on the other hand, some universities opt to keep pay low and senior researchers don’t cut their teams, it could be increasingly difficult to find good-quality candidates. At universities where pay and the opportunity to attain a faculty career increase, talented Americans might once again see academic science careers as attractive and attainable. This would reduce the dependence on foreign students and guest workers.
It’s hard to picture the research enterprise continuing in the old way under the new circumstances.
It’s hard to picture the research enterprise continuing in the old way under the new circumstances. Faculty and students organizing and pressuring recalcitrant administrations into change, as occurred at Rutgers and other universities, will be accompanied by a few foresighted universities that proactively change their research enterprises. The higher pay and better working conditions will make reliance on graduate students and postdocs for exploitative labor less effective.
One way universities could adapt is by expanding the number of decently paid professional staff scientists in permanent career positions. This could provide better, more dependable, and more expert staffing for research labs. Though these scientists would cost more, they could provide higher quality work without costly turnover and constant training, and hiring them could end the practices that guarantee the destructive and wasteful oversupply of Ph.D.s.
Various European countries follow this model. Adequately compensated staff scientists on stable nonfaculty career tracks at research institutions can solve another problem afflicting academic science: the severe work-life imbalance that discriminates against anyone with serious family or caregiving responsibilities. Scientists who love and want to do research but don’t want the exploitative working conditions and lifestyle that the current system imposes will find such jobs very attractive. But as also occurs in other industries, some universities will hold on to their current systems, persisting in their “low road” work-force practices and pay, even as they lose research grants and quality graduate students.
Whatever path a university follows through this restructuring of American science, it will cause turmoil and pain for many in the system. Creating new incentives and opportunities will require crafting new employment and funding arrangements, which in turn takes concerted, collaborative efforts to repair a system near collapse. Those funders, universities, and senior researchers who can muster the courage and creativity to fashion new answers to the coming changes will set the course for the new, emerging “American system” of science.