An End to the Endless Postdoc?
With only six months of funding left on his postdoc at the Johns Hopkins University, Jorge Morales was dreading the possibility that he might have to uproot his family to start another temporary asssignment with no guarantee that it would lead to a tenure-track job.
The postdoc slog is notoriously long, with some scientists spending up to a decade in career limbo after earning their Ph.D.s. Postdocs, who work under a principal investigator, often on cutting-edge research, are neither students nor faculty members; the hours tend to be long, the pay low (typically below $60,000 per year). More than once, Morales had asked himself whether the postdoc was worth it.
Then he got a call from Northeastern University, inviting him to apply for a new program that offers tenure-track positions to scholars right after they finish their Ph.D.s, or early in their postdoc training. An optional fellowship offers one to two years of funded postdoc experience with a mentor. With three years of postdoc experience under his belt — low compared with most tenure-track candidates — he was hired directly into a tenure-track position at Northeastern and is now an assistant professor with joint appointments in psychology and philosophy.
The accelerated career path and the chance to do interdisciplinary work were “game changers” for Morales, one of 10 early-career scholars hired so far under the program. “It was a very exciting offer in a prime research location, and the fact that the duration of my postdoc wasn’t going to be a big deal was appealing,” he said.
Northeastern’s Invest program eliminates requirements that can be particularly burdensome for low-income and other disadvantaged students, who disproportionately drop out of the academic pipeline during the postdoc process.
In 2020, Black or African American candidates made up 4 percent of doctoral graduate students but only about 1.5 percent of postdocs, according to a survey by the National Science Foundation. Hispanic or Latino students made up around 7 percent of doctoral graduate students but only about 3 percent of postdocs. Women experience a similar falloff, from just under 50 percent of those receiving doctorates to 39 percent of postdocs.
Spending years in what feels like a holding pattern can be frustrating for any postdoc. More than half of those responding to a 2020 survey by Nature said they’d considered leaving science because of the impact of long hours, stress, and uncertainty on their mental health.
But first-generation students, or those who’ve struggled financially in the past, may be especially unwilling to wait so long for a secure, well-paying job, said Hazel Sive, dean of the College of Science at Northeastern. She’s the chief architect of the Invest program, which received about 800 applications in its most recent hiring cycle.
Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies and other industries hungry for talent are luring doctoral recipients away with high-paying jobs that offer opportunities to advance. The trend seems to be reflected in the trouble among many principal investigators in finding postdocs to fill vacant positions, an investigation by Science found.
‘Let’s Short-Circuit That’
Sive’s own postdoc lasted five years, but for some of her trainees, the period has extended to a decade as they strung together assignments. “The norm has become you embrace this cloud of uncertainty and prove yourself again and again,” Sive said. “I thought, Let’s short-circuit that. Let’s find Ph.D. students who’ve done really well and are enthusiastic about an academic career and may have done a short postdoc.”
A major goal is to make the academic track more reflective of society, but Sive doesn’t consider it a form of diversity hiring. “As soon as you draw attention to the demographic of someone, you diminish their importance,” said Sive, who’s equally put off when someone calls attention to her accomplishments as a female scientist rather than simply as a scientist.
The numbers of minority faculty members do matter, though, to college leaders and some job applicants. Some colleges have hired groups of people from the same demographic to create a supportive network. But Sive said relying on cluster hiring is unrealistic “because we’re dealing with a pool of prospective faculty that does not cover the demographics of society very well.”
The problem isn’t so much at the doctoral level, where the number of minority candidates has been inching up. But after that, “a bunch of them leave an academic track very soon because the timeline of becoming a professor is really daunting.”
Stevie K. Eberle, executive director of bioscience careers at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, is chair of the National Postdoctoral Association. “I’m excited to see where it goes,” Eberle said of the Northeastern program. For first-generation and other less-privileged scholars who are supporting families or paying back loans, “you’re already starting behind the starting line. How much longer do you want to wait to catch up?”
Morales, who grew up in Mexico City, comes from a middle-class background. But like others whose families are unfamiliar with the inner workings of academe in the United States, he’s struggled to explain to his parents why, after so many years of study, and with so many high-paying jobs available, he would continue to stick it out in a low-paying, temporary postdoc.
Another postdoc would probably have meant asking his partner to restart her career again somewhere else, and uprooting their young daughter. “There’s only so many times you can ask that,” he said, “and so many times you can move.” —Katherine Mangan
