Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion college acceptance rates

Really you think everyone iin H.S. is challeged? What gives you that idea? H.S. performance, grades and challenge are three different things that don't necessary correlate. My DS goes to a top rated H.S. and there are many kids who are not really challenged for one reason or another. This year my son was just dropped from the "gifted" class because of grades. (It's complex looks like we have a 2E situation.) He is certainly not going to be challenged this year. I know of kids who don't like the pressure and intensity of the AP classes and stress for top grades and give up trying. It's complicated.

Yeah-- I have to say, "challenge" is a relative term there. My DD certainly experienced very little in the way of academic challenges in high school. Organizational and executive challenge? Definitely.

I should stop posting while at work as I don't fully collect my thoughts there. All I meant to say is that at our high school, everyone at the top puts in significant effort (i.e. nobody coasts and stays at the top). The classes are reasonably hard even for the PG kids, and there is a good deal of homework. Other schools will of course vary.

Why, thank you! They're an especially good deal if you collect them at the post-doc level, as you can acquire quality post-docs for right around federal poverty level wages, and then keep them on a trial basis as non-tenured faculty or research associates until they do something patentable.

Was this different in the past? In other words, are PhD students interested in academia knowingly entering a lottery system with well understood low odds in the hopes of eventually getting tenure? Or has the situation dramatically changed in the last 5-10 years?

Yes, it's changed in the last decade or so. Getting a permanent position as a Ph.D.-level scientist has been tough for a while, but it's much harder now for different reasons. First, the colleges and universities have moved to the adjunct model. They hire part-timers who get no benefits, and they save money. So this means there are fewer tenure-track positions available.

Second, complicating things is that the current tenure-track model evaluates two primary metrics: how much grant money you bring in, and how many publications you have in high-profile/elite journals. Funding levels are at historical lows (<20% of received applications) in most departments at the NIH and NSF. Some are way below that level, as in, below 10%. In the 1970s and 80s, success rates were around a third or more. These days, the average age for getting your first R01 from the NIH (their most important grant) is 42,and the average age of all R01 holders is 51. Compare to 35 for first-timers in 1980, and probably younger than that before then. There's a nascent backlash against the elite journals forming these days. The argument is that they encourage irresponsible behavior and sensationalism.

A third problem is that we're turning out too many people with doctorates --- we tell them that there are lots of STEM jobs out there. Well --- there are if you want to be a technician. Not so many if you want to run a research group.

All this means that scientists get stuck on a postdoc treadmill. They work for low wages for many years (~$55K is the maximum NIH postdoc salary; $42K is the minimum) and have slim chances of getting a meaningful academic job. If they're lucky, they get a job in industry for decent pay. A lot of them end up doing technical writing or working in areas that don't truly require the level of education they have.

But the situation in science is better than the humanities, where there is effectively almost no chance of getting an academic job. At least technical writing at a biotech company is in your field. Humanities grads with doctorates often end up doing jobs that don't require their level of education. Some of them keep their doctorate off their resumes to avoid being labelled as overqualified for a job. Yet the schools encourage humanities undergrads to pursue doctorates, and they mislead them about job prospects. This is something of a scandal right now.

Thanks Val for the detailed explanation. I understand much better now.

Note to self: If kids want to enter academia, suggest they have a backup plan or two.

Exactly. Mostly, "academia" doesn't mean authentic employment right now. I suspect that eventually, this will morph again once it becomes clearer what it means to turn higher ed over to an army of adjuncts living as gypsy nomads moving from one ivory tower to another... but in my DD's generation, a career as a professor is a non-starter. I'm so incredibly sad for her over that. She'd be a natural-- and probably GREAT at every aspect of that job. But it's probably not to be.

That's another good point about adjuncts. Their schedules look something like this: teach class at school at from 9-11 MW. Drive 20 miles to college B to teach class from 12:30 to 1:30 MW and teach lab from 2-5 TTh. Drive 15 miles east to college to teach evening class from 6-9 TTh and try to survive on vending machine food until 10 on those nights. . We're destroying education in this country is a myriad of ways.

I had a good friend who was a history professor when I was a grad student in the very early 90s. He used to talk about how good he had it in academia: he got to do research, publish papers on ideas that he found interesting, and discuss his field at conferences. He would write/grade questions for the A-levels, and his questions always asked the students to think. It was the same when he taught. He told me recently that a lot of that has changed. In particular, industrial metrics are taking over in many areas.

This sounds like an opportunity to differentiate themselves: Come to college ABC where you will be taught by full professors rather than adjuncts.

Or would students ignore that and be enticed by shiny new dorms and gyms instead?