06 October 2014

Cognitive dissonance, science careers edition


On the one hand...

HESTEC is starting on my campus this week. I had honestly forgotten, which is an indication of how much the event is run from administration at the top instead of being orgazed more by faculty at the grass roots. The Twitter #HESTEC2014 hashtag is filled with “We must get more and more and more students in STEM!”

On the other hand...

Also in my Twitter feed this morning is this article from The Boston Globe: “Glut of postdoc researchers stirs quiet crisis in science.” (Incidentally, for those of us in the business, it hasn’t been that quiet.)

(U)niversities have expanded the number of PhD students they train — there were about 30,000 biomedical graduate students in 1979 and 56,800 in 2009. That has had the effect of flooding the system with trainees and drawing out the training period.

I doubt you’ll hear a single politician at HESTEC (and there’s quiet a few here) mention this issue.

External links

Glut of postdoc researchers stirs quiet crisis in science

Photo from here.

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