Have you ever thought about what happens after you earn a doctorate degree?
Many graduates go on to do ‘postdoc’ jobs, which are kind of like intense training sessions for a scientific career.
But researchers are saying these postdoc positions may not be as valuable as they seem.
Professor Donna Ginther from the University of Kansas, along with associate professor Shulamit Kahn from Boston University, has found that postdoc jobs don’t really help graduates in the job market.
In fact, these positions might even cost grads about three years’ worth of salary in their first 15 years of their careers. The reason? These jobs mainly prepare students for academic careers, which are extremely hard to get.
The researchers shared their findings in the journal Nature Biotechnology. They compared the careers of people who did postdoc work with those who went straight into the job market after getting their biomedical doctorate degrees.
They discovered that those who started in postdoc positions earned less money at the start of their careers. The median annual starting salary was $44,724 (adjusted to 2013 dollars), while those who skipped the postdoc jobs and went straight to work earned $73,662.
Even after 10 years, the people who started in a postdoc job still earned an average of $12,002 less than those who didn’t do postdoc jobs. This shows that starting your career in a postdoc job can lead to significant financial disadvantages.
The researchers hope their findings will help grads make more informed choices about their careers. They suggest considering the low chances of getting a permanent academic job versus the potential financial and personal costs of temporary postdoc positions.
They also hope that academic advisers will become more aware of non-academic jobs that don’t require a postdoc. Currently, postdoc training mostly benefits supervisors, institutions, and funding agencies by providing them with well-educated workers at a low cost.
Lastly, Ginther and Kahn suggest some solutions to make the system fairer. Universities could hire staff research scientists to assist professors instead of relying on postdocs. Postdocs could also be paid more to reduce the reliance on ‘cheap’ labor.
Putting a limit on how long someone can be in a postdoc position could encourage grads to start permanent jobs earlier and possibly follow their own creative research paths.
