{"id":47,"date":"2008-09-23T18:30:39","date_gmt":"2008-09-24T00:30:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/anthony.darrouzet-nardi.net\/scienceblog\/?p=47"},"modified":"2008-09-27T12:04:22","modified_gmt":"2008-09-27T18:04:22","slug":"being-a-professor-may-not-be-as-sweet-as-it-used-to-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/?p=47","title":{"rendered":"Being a professor may not be as sweet as it used to be"},"content":{"rendered":"

On her 27th birthday, one of the graduate students in my department was told by her adviser that when he<\/em> was 27, he got his first tenure-track job as an assistant professor at CU. She said, “Yeah, well, standards were lower back then.”<\/p>\n

And in fact, it is the rarest of circumstances these days when a tenure-track position in a science department at a research-one university is handed out to a fresh off the boat 27-year old Ph.D. Nowadays there are one or more postdoctoral positions that are necessary for most candidates like myself who are interested in an academic position.<\/p>\n

Being a professor is in many ways a totally sweet job, which is why it’s been my career goal for some time now. The tenure system affords unrivaled job security; the pay is more than adequate for the non-money-obsessed; the work is varied and interesting, including teaching, service, and research. Perhaps most appealing is the autonomy.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, there was an article in the New York Times<\/a> about the declining prestige of traditionally prestigious professions such as law and medicine. I agree that the decline in prestige is real, but not necessarily for the same reasons that the author suggests. In the article, it is argued that changing social constructs of “success” are what has led to the decline in prestige. Specifically, the author cites the rise of entrepreneurship as the new standard for success.<\/p>\n

That analysis may or may not be correct–there have always been successful business people to envy–but I also feel like the actual performance of these “prestigious” jobs is now more onerous than it used to be, which was discussed less in the article. People in these professions are expected to put in ridiculous amounts of time. This reduces prestige in two ways: first, as the amount of time increases, the job itself sucks more; and second, putting in ridiculous hours has, I think, become less socially acceptable. It’s pretty common these days to be accused of workaholism.<\/p>\n

So this brings me back to being a professor. Because of increased competition for federal grants, the amount of time that it takes to be a successful science professor at a research institution has gone up. Combine that with lower pay and prestige during the years as a postdoc and the job is less appealing than when you could get a tenure-track job at age 27.<\/p>\n

My hypothesis is that the institutions that employ these high-end professionals–universities, law firms, hospitals, etc.–are basically getting better at milking a talented and educated class of workers for all they’re worth. But there could well be other reasons driving this trend as well. I still think being a professor is a great job, but maybe just not as sweet as it used to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On her 27th birthday, one of the graduate students in my department was told by her adviser that when he was 27, he got his first tenure-track job as an assistant professor at CU. She said, “Yeah, well, standards were lower back then.” And in fact, it is the rarest of circumstances these days when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}