No, really.
This post over at EcoEvoEvoEco, which stated “Anyone with a decent record can get a faculty position”, made the rounds on Twitter last night. In it, Andrew Hendry posits that, based on his experience (in 2001), if one is not picky (i.e., has minimal selection criteria), and ’sticks with it’, one will end up a tenured professor somewhere, and voila, problem solved.
Unsurprisingly, this elicited a rather fierce reaction by some readers. The academic job market has changed since 2001. ’Not being picky’ amounts to moving anywhere regardless of family, or other constraints. And what I think is perhaps the most germane (here, and in many of these advice posts to academic job seekers): this is the experience of one individual in one set of circumstances in a process that, as someone described it, has high variance and and multiple confounding covariates.
Now, instead of throwing gas on the fire of this perennial topic, I want you, dear reader, to consider the albatross.
An albatross (of the Atlantic Yellow-nosed variety). Consider it, please.
Because ultimately, this whole discussion is one of demographics, and if there’s one thing I now a bit about (aside from tea, improv, puns, and naan bread), it’s demography. It’s a significant part of my research, and I think the whole ’I can academic job AND SO CAN YOU!!1!’ can learn something from it. But first, some basics.
Albatross lay a single egg each year (or every 2 or 3 years in some cases). Chicks fledge (usually about 70% of the time), and spend the next 5-18 years at sea before returning to land to breed for the first time, and recruit into the breeding population. They then breed (at some interval) for many, many years, and then perish. Albatross’s annual survival can be grouped, broadly, into 4 categories:
- S1 – the survival of chicks in the first year
- S2 – the survival of immature birds at sea
- S3 – the survival of birds recruited into the breeding population
- S4 – the survival of old birds nearing the end of their natural lives
S1 and S2 are always lower than S3. Those years at sea are tough. Birds have to find enough food, figure out migration, avoid getting caught in fishing gear, learn that eating plastic is bad, and make it to breeding age, court and find a mate.
Breeding adults tend to have high survival. They know what they’re doing, know how to find food for them, and for their chicks, and are pretty adept at avoiding longlines. But as they get older (in some cases, 40, 50, 60+ years old), their reproductive success can drop, and so does survival, and they disappear.
How do we know this?
Scientists have, collectively, put millions of small metal rings/bands on birds, and looked for these individuals year after year, or had bands from dead birds sent in from fishing vessels. And we know that these survival rates, S1 through S4, depend on a plethora of covariates: species, site, year, climate, individual quality, introduced predators, fishing effort, sea temperatures, food availability, … We also have to consider those albatross for whom we don’t know the ultimate fate… they simply didn’t show up in year x, but may show up again in the future.
Consider the case of Wisdom, a Laysan Albatross on Midway Atoll. At 64, she’s the oldest bird of known age, and is showing no signs of stopping. But also consider the case of the much lesser-known J22503. J22503 was a Tristan Albatross chick that our team banded on Gough Island in September 2014. S/he was found dead 2 months later, the victim of predation, mice, starvation, or some other factor.
Now, let’s swap ’albatross’ for ’academic’ (leaving aside, for the moment, that this also applies to some non-academic scientists, too).
Academics can apply to many jobs in a year, but the survival rate of those applications is low (at the population level; S2). After enough years of zero job application survival, the academic perishes (stops looking for academic work). And there are many factors that influence academic survival during this ’immature’ phase, while ’at sea’: gender, location, field, sub-field, individual quality, … And some proportion of academics survive this period (find a job), and thereafter have high annual survival (S3) until they approach retirement (S4).
Any scientist worth their salt would tell you it’s pointless to extrapolate from Wisdom, or J22503, to all albatross worldwide. Or even all Laysan (or Tristan) Albatross. Or even all albatross of the same species in the same site in the same year. We simply need a bigger sample. The same is true of academics. A good mark-recapture (or demographic) study needs a minimum of 200 ’marked individuals’ to estimate annual survival (and that applies to each strata we want to potentially consider!). Extrapolating from 1, or 2, or even 10 isn’t sound.
In 2013, I solicited some data on the number of job applications & interviews, and got a decent response. But even this is far too low a sample size (n = 63) to be of much use. What we need is, ultimately, a study that follows the job applications of quite literally thousands of hopeful academics from graduation to their exit from the job market (for whatever reason), along with all the covariates that we know influence job application success. I certainly lack the time (and IRB approval) for such a study. But in the meantime, remember that ’your mileage may vary’, and extrapolating from one person’s (or even 10 people’s) experience is perilous.
—
Note that I’ve also not said anything about density dependence and carrying capacity of the academic population. Or about how both of those parameters change over time (and have likely changed since 2001). Or about luck and stochasticity. You get this idea.
Yes, there are things one can do to try and improve the probability of a successful job application, but these are by no means a guarantee, and criteria vary by field, location, institution, department, moon phase, …
And I get that these posts are trying to be helpful in some way – showing that success is indeed possible. But they often gloss over many of the finer details (much like How To Draw An Owl).
UPDATE: Katie Burke pointed out on Twitter that a better analogy would be one where leaving the academic job search is a transition to another state, or permanent emigration, rather than death. I, myself, have done such a transition. The model then becomes a multi-state mark-recapture, with all the joys that entails.
The Lab and Field 
Alex – nice analysis, and the data you’re thinking of are out there at least in some forms – I’m sure someone will point to the French career data that were ricocheting around Twitter a few months back.
As so often happens online, people will overinterpret both Andrew’s post and yours. On Andrew’s side, I would read his post as suggesting ways one can improve (not guarantee) one’s odds of landing a faculty job. On yours, I take your point about extrapolation, although that’s really only a telling criticism if you decide to read Andrew’s post as providing a guarantee rather than an (unquantified) improvement in odds.
I think it’s really important that you point out the many perfectly sensible reasons that people might choose NOT to follow Andrew’s suggested “unpicky” strategy. Family, time, etc. constraints are real things and may well mean that an individual candidate simply can’t (or simply chooses not to) cast a net as widely as Andrew suggests. Of course, it’s true and has always been true, in every human career, that people make such choices or are under such constraints, and this affects their odds of landing their desired job. So in one sense this is no insight at all… However, and importantly, we need to be aware that the average level of constraint is rising as academic (and other) careers diversify. We now have more job seekers with partners also seeking work, more job seekers already with children, etc. etc. than we did 25 years ago when I was first on the market. You can model this in your demographic framework, of course!
Maybe the most important thing of all is this: in ANY career, people can sacrifice a lot for their dream job or can “settle” for something more accessible. Neither should be thought of as failure. And in ANY career path, there are lots of options, and there’s no shame whatsoever in deciding to take a different kind of job (non-university, non-academic) rather than fixate on the professorship as the only meritorious thing to do with a PhD.
It seems to me that a fundamental presumption for this whole discussion is the idea that the only successful outcome for someone with a Ph.D. is to get a faculty job, anything else equates to falling short. This view is pervasive throughout academia, which is not surprising given that this is the path that all of the mentors (i.e. professors) followed. Its a little bit of a circular rationalization too: I became a professor, and as an aspiring academic all my mentors were professors too, so becoming a professor must be the ultimate and final measure of success.
I know you don’t think this Alex (at least presume it given that you seem to be enjoying great success working for an NGO), but I think there is room for a broader view of what equates to a successful career for a scientist. In many fields there are great jobs with NGOs, government, and in the private sector, and these may be much better suited to an individual’s goals and life choices. This was certainty my experience – as post-doc who wanted to make a meaningful contribution to conservation I was skeptical that academia was the best fit. To paraphrase, I wanted to do conservation, not write papers about how other people should do conservation. With that in mind I chose a career working for a land management agency, which was the best “academic” move of my career. And wouldn’t you know that after leaving academia it was easy to get an appointment as adjunct faculty so I still get to dabble in academia on my own terms and to the extent that I consider it relevant.
Anyway maybe this is a minor point, but I have had a number of graduate students who are also chafing against the pressure to pursue a career as a prof, and they have appreciated and been empowered by hearing a different perspective. Ultimately I think the best advice for early career scientists is to think about what they want their contribution to society to be and then to tailor their career choices based on this (and of course on work-life balance!).
Great point, Darroch. Indeed, This is predicated on PhD –> postdoc –> faculty, which isn’t the path I’ve taken. The model tends to break down here, as numbers on non-academic PhDs doing science are harder to quantify. But then again, so are most of the other parameters!
I’ve written more about non-academic science in general, and my path in particular (to add some more anecdata…)
Do albatrosses get “help” surviving from their “mentors”? My experience, first as a graduate student and postdoc then as a professor, is that my own success (in finding tenure-line faculty positions) and that of my graduate students was hugely helped by actions of my/their mentor(s). (Indeed, my timely early retirement opened up my position which was subsequently filled by my former – – from 10 years earlier – – and very deserving Ph.D. student.)
Having written the original post that got some folks upset and having seen this one, I at first thought a clever point was being made about demography, which I respond to below. Re-reading, however, it seems that the key point is merely that my sample size is small and out-dated, which I do not think is an effective criticism. While I might be albatross J22503 and had my job success in 2001, I happen to know many other albatrosses since. Some of those albatrosses are my own students and postdocs, some of whom have gone on to faculty positions and some of whom have not. Most, however, are the students and postdocs supervised by my friends, collaborators, and colleagues. So, in fact, I have personal experience with a large community (certainly on the order of 200 or more) of albatrosses, all of whom have been on the job market post 2001 – and most post 2008, for that matter. My post, which has thus gestated for 15 years through the accumulation of “data” based on marked individuals, was based not just on my experience but on the experiences of many of my colleagues, students, and friends.
Now let me turn to the other point that might be made about albatrosses – most die before successfully reproducing, which might have been an argument against my thesis that “everyone can get a job if they aren’t picky and stick it out.” It is certainly true that the number of applications for any given job is high, meaning that the success rate (hiring rate) is very low.However, if there are 100 applicants for any given job (typical and my university – I realize it is higher many places – and lower many others) and you apply for 50 jobs in each of 5 years, then your chances go way up. Moreover, the key point is that many folks give up or get jobs along the way, meaning that you aren’t competing with the same pool every year – or even every job. In fact, the best people in the pool every year are removed from the pool every year because they get jobs.
So, what happens is that attrition, especially of the “best” people, from the job pool increases the chances of the folks that remain and “stick it out” will be successful. And these chances increase dramatically if one applies to “undesirable” universities where the “best” people do not apply.
Of course, my post should be read as an optimistic and motivational piece for those who have a career in academia as their primary goal. Importantly, however, I never said that this SHOULD be the goal. There are all sorts of reasons to not stay in the game – family, spouses, locations, stress, money, etc. For many, perhaps most, people, academia will not be place you want to be. If, however, it is your overwhelming objective, then following the advice in my post will (almost) guarantee success.
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