Sadly this stems from a structural problem in biology and medicine, and is far from exclusive to the field of Alzheimer's. Some reforms are urgent, otherwise progress is going to be incredibly slow. The same pattern is repeated again and again. Someone publishes something that looks novel, but is either an exaggeration or a downright lie.
This person begins to attract funding, grant reviews and article reviews. Funding is used to expand beyond reasonable size and co-author as many articles as possible. Reviews mean this person now has the power to block funding and/or publication of competing hypotheses. The wheel spins faster and faster. And then, we know what the outcome is.
The solution is to make sure reviews are truly independent plus limitations on funding, group size and competing interests. I think that tenured researchers that receive public funding should have no stock options nor receive "consulting" fees from private companies. If they want to collaborate with industry, that's absolutely fine, but it should be done pro bono.
Furthermore, if you are a professor who publishes 2 articles per week and is simultaneously "supervising" 15 postdocs and 20 PhD students at 2 different institutions then, except in very few cases, you are no longer a professor but a rent seeker that has no clue what is going on. You just have a very well oiled machine to stamp your name into as many articles as possible.
I'm not a fan of many of the practices you complain about here, but I will say this: We get paid too little for what we do for way too long....6 years of grad school (24k/yr) 6 year post-doc (42k/yr) in California, when I was in those positions anyway. Today, at UC Davis, assistant professors in the UC system start at $90,700 [1, for salary scale], which is often around 12 years after their undergraduate degree. That's in California, where a mortgage costs you $3,000 a month, minimum.
Why do employees keep voluntarily accepting that type of abuse? Low wages aren't a secret and the employees doing that work aren't idiots so they must know what they're getting into. Are they doing it out of some sort of moral duty, or as immigrants seeking permanent resident status, or is there some other reason? Presumably if people stopped accepting those wages then the wages would have to rise.
Those numbers aren’t accurate anymore they’re out of date and now much higher. Also, I voluntarily pay my students and postdocs 2-3x those numbers currently.
But ultimately (1) those are seen as training positions that lead to a tenured faculty position, which pays fairly well, and has a lot of job security and freedom; (2) certain granting agencies limit what you can spend on students and postdocs, to levels that are too low for HCOL areas.
I'll add in that it's a buyer's market. There are plenty of post docs with no work (who want to work in the academic space) so if you don't want the post there are plenty in line who do.
There's no post-doc-research union to set and enforce reasonable pay scales, but equally a union would have difficulty adjusting rates to local cost of living.
Put another way - supply and demand baby, supply and demand.
Says $60,000 for University of Arkansas or 2/3rd of what was listed for California.
I'm not an academic nor do I live in California (or Arkansas) but $90,000/year after 6 years working below minimum wage and 6 years barely above doesn't sound that great in <economic terms>. Hopefully people are getting benefits from teaching or research.
Except that is where the majority of research is done, where the prestigious schools and students are, and where those people want to live. Plenty of good research gets done in Arkansas, and Texas, and North Carolina, but not in the cheap parts. It happens in Research Triangle, or Austin, or Fayetteville. It doesn't happen at Oachita Baptist College in Arkadelphia.
The somewhat good news is that people get into science and medicine because they believe in them, and they're often willing to work for peanuts so that big pharma can take their work and charge Medicare $80k/yr for a new drug that might work.
There's huge problems in academia and it's incentive structure, but I don't think they're related to be being in urban vs rural America (they exist just as badly in Europe, China, and India)
It's a very small world for various reasons and sometimes, there's a good combination between a PI and a hosting institution. Sometimes there's not. If the guy who's doing what you want to do has his lab at UAB, you go to UAB. That being said, once you get your K23 or R01, because of NIH matching funds, you have more of a choice of where you go.
Those places you list have gone up painfully in a relative sense (like everywhere lately) but are nothing like the absurdity of California. You don't need two highly-paid professional incomes to afford a house with a long commute. There's also Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, central Florida, many others.
Looking at some random assistant professors in relevant departments, I see:
One who earns $113K
Another who earns $94K
Another who earns $96K.
These are regular departments, (biochemistry, biology, etc). Not medical departments. I'm sure those ones get paid more (e.g. one I personally knew in Houston got $180K in a public university in Dallas).
So mid $90's would be my guess.
Then note that these are 9 month salaries, and the typical deal is they get up to a third more from grants (their "summer" salary). So total compensation for assistant professors would be about $120K.
Faculty salaries are not that bad, as a rule. What's really bad is the number of years they spend trying to get a postdoc.
for biomedical, it is what your grant stipulates. I.e. I think way back when, K23's paid $98k for 75% time (or maybe 70%) and your institution agreed to pay the rest. Sometimes, they would actually pay you more to try and get close to fair market value, but that is if the department is generous. For famous institutions, like UCLA, or Brigham and Women's, the law of supply and demand is not on your side bc if you don't like the low salary, there's a giant line of wannabes waiting to take your spot.
Published historical pay will be 12 month salaries. Most non tenured professors will refuse the optional summer salary and work all summer for free, because they have to pay for it from their own grants- it means hiring one less student, and less chance of getting tenure.
Fairly certain. It's also in line with salaries I know from other departments. This is the "fixed" amount of the salary. The grant portion is variable, and also not paid by the state, so it's usually not required by the law to disclose.
That one state is where the apex of the system is. It's where a lot of, maybe most, research happens, it's where perhaps most tech development happens, it's even where a lot of our popular culture is determined. It's where ~everyone is aiming for, even if only a fraction of them will make it there, so it affects the whole system.
All that given, most people still live on the East coast, as in 80% past Nevada. Culture is arguable.
For Americans, there is a clear difference between what behavior might be normal in the bay area/silicon valley all the way to LA than it is for NY, Boston, Houston, Miami, Detroit, etc.
I'd even assert "most tech development" is just plain wrong. It's certainly where many companies are HQ'd, but those same companies have offices all over the states, and each one offers/specializes in different products.
It also depends on what you mean by "tech development" of course. R&D projects and new developments, maybe there's an edge. I have a much stronger feeling that more research is performed in the Boston -> DC metropolis than the equivalent (as in distance) metropolis spanning from LA -> Silicon Valley.
I was contextualizing my response because cost of living is higher in California, and some of those numbers may seem more reasonable if it were in Arkansas, for example.
The NIH already has total funding limits for grant eligibility, and the issue of competitors blocking your publications is pretty much eliminated by asking them to be excluded as reviewers, because we almost always already know who is going to do that. A competent editor will also see right through that.
I did my postdoc in a very well funded lab that was larger than even your examples- and they legitimately could do big projects nobody else could do, plus postdocs and grad students had a lot more autonomy, which helped them become better scientists. The PI worked at a distant/high level, but he was a good scientist and a skilled leader doing honest and valuable research, and had economies of scale that let him do more with the same research dollars. It was the least toxic and most creative and productive lab I’ve ever seen. Banning that type of lab would be to the massive detriment of scientific progress in my opinion.
I also disagree about banning consulting and startups for PIs- that is arguably where research ends up having the highest impact, because it gets translated to real world use. It also allows scientists to survive in HCOL areas with much less government funding. Frankly, I could make 4x the salary in industry, and if I were banned from even consulting on the side it would be much harder to justify staying an academic while raising a family in a HCOL area.
I am also very upset about academic fraud and have seen it first hand- but I think your proposed solutions would be harmful and ineffective. I’m not sure what the solution is, but usually students, postdocs, and technicians know if their PI is a fraud and would report if it were safe for them to do so, but they don’t have enough power to do so. Fixing that would likely solve this. Even for a junior PI, reporting on a more senior colleague would usually be career ending for them, but not who they are reporting on.
I agree with you that OPs ideas don't work. But I don't agree with you either. Let me point to a far more fundamental problem which is that even your well meaning lab is still a ponzi scheme that survives only because it gets cheap labor in the name of more trainees when there's no evidence that the academic system can handle MORE people. Even if we have the funding, the peer review systems we are dependent on are clearly becoming less effective just because of pure volume and breadth.
I have other issues with the system but in the end this is the most important problem I see to be solved first.
We're talking here specifically about how to solve the problem of academic fraud- not how to solve the problem of treating trainees more fairly. That's an important problem also, but not what my comments were addressing. Still, I'll share my thoughts on that also.
In my lab I voluntarily pay competitive industry level salaries- I pay solid 6 figures to postdocs, usually about 2x what other labs pay. I often pay my trainees more than I make myself, and I often only hire one person on a grant that most people would fund a whole lab on.
It's a gamble, but it seems I get more skilled people that stay longer, and can actually afford to live, which works better than having a few more people that are all super stressed and looking for a better job. So far, it's payed off for me, and I would recommend it to other academics.
Second, very few of my postdocs and grad students actually want low paying academic jobs. Most want to join the biotech startup scene, where they'll make a lot more than what they'd make as an academic, and the demand for people with their skills far exceeds the supply. I am giving them the training they need to actually get those jobs, and succeed at them while paying very well in the process. I talk with them about what they actually want- and I make sure it happens for them to the best of my abilities.
When I was a grad student/postdoc, I really wanted to become a PI, and was worried it was a ponzi scheme because so few people ended up doing so. But when I was actually a postdoc, I realized most of my fellow postdocs were highly competitive for faculty positions, but still choosing not to do them by choice. Many were even receiving academic offers and turning them down for industry offers with much higher salaries. I was even co-recruited to a tenure track position, along with a respected colleague I was really hoping to work together with for decades- his co-acceptance of the offers was a big reason I chose this institution. About a week into his academic job, he got an 'offer you cannot refuse' from a startup and left on the spot.
But overall, my situation is someone unusual- mostly because my field is currently in extremely high industry demand. There are indeed a lot of grad students and postdocs making pennies, and with no real job prospects beyond a tiny shot at a faculty job.
This person begins to attract funding, grant reviews and article reviews. Funding is used to expand beyond reasonable size and co-author as many articles as possible. Reviews mean this person now has the power to block funding and/or publication of competing hypotheses. The wheel spins faster and faster. And then, we know what the outcome is.
The solution is to make sure reviews are truly independent plus limitations on funding, group size and competing interests. I think that tenured researchers that receive public funding should have no stock options nor receive "consulting" fees from private companies. If they want to collaborate with industry, that's absolutely fine, but it should be done pro bono.
Furthermore, if you are a professor who publishes 2 articles per week and is simultaneously "supervising" 15 postdocs and 20 PhD students at 2 different institutions then, except in very few cases, you are no longer a professor but a rent seeker that has no clue what is going on. You just have a very well oiled machine to stamp your name into as many articles as possible.