Finally: historical data about US PhD chemists from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients

Via a tweet from Derek Lowe, this very interesting paper by Dr. Stephanie Cheng (a PhD economist), summarizing and extrapolating data from both the Survey of Doctorate Recipients and the Survey of Earned Doctorates. The Survey of Doctorate Recipients is the NSF's routine survey tool to look into the lifetime of doctoral graduates. 

Her paper discusses three results: 

It's taking longer to get out of grad school: "Over the past fifty years, mean time spent in graduate school has steadily increased by 2.2 years, from 5.8 years (s.d. = 2.1) among 1960-1980 STEM Ph.Ds. to 8.0 years (s.d. = 4.1) among 2000-2013 cohorts... Figure 5 demonstrates that fewer individuals are completing Ph.Ds. in fewer than four years and more individuals are completing Ph.Ds. in more than eight years over time."

Fewer people are getting tenure-track positions: "As doctoral training has lengthened and more STEM Ph.Ds. have pursued postdoctoral training, the probability of obtaining an academic tenure-track position has nearly halved over the past fifty years. Only 25.2% of 2000-2013 STEM Ph.D. graduating cohorts are ever observed in a tenure-track position, compared to 42.8% of 1960-1980 cohorts." 

Postdocs cost PhDs lifetime earnings: "To quantify the impact of postdoctoral experience on salary at each career stage, Figure 19 gives salary regression coefficients on years of postdoctoral experience for each of the first thirty years post-Ph.D. graduation, as calculated in Equation 1. The first few years show a large negative relationship due to the salary gap between postdoctoral appointments and permanent positions. This gap closes as postdoctoral researchers move into permanent positions, but the additional training does not improve their salaries enough to overcome this early loss. As given in Equation 2, the average of these yearly coefficients can be interpreted as the postdoctoral deduction in mean lifetime earnings. Rather than provide an education premium, each additional year of postdoctoral experience reduces average lifetime earnings by $3,730."

All three of these results are not new to this discussion, almost to the point that you have to ask yourself "is this news?" And my response is a confident "yes." First, it's documented quite clearly by her analysis of SDR cohorts, and it appears that not many people have decided to do this. Second, she chose chemistry specifically as one of the PhD fields to be analyzed, and so Appendix B has some really nice data to summarize her findings. Of these, I'll choose a few of note: 

• Between the 1960s and 2013, the mean years in graduate school for chemists had moved from slightly less than than 5 to slightly less than 7. 
• The number of PhD chemists who took 4 years or less dropped from 40% in the 1960s to less than 10%. Meanwhile, the number who took 6 years rose from 10% to 30%. 
• The percentage of PhD chemists since the 1980s who did a postdoc within 2 years of graduating has never been lower than 40%. 
• The percentage of chemistry postdocs who did a 1-2 year postdoc fell around the time of the Great Recession from 30% to 20%, while those who did a 3-4 year postdoc rose from 10% to 30%. 
• The percentage of PhD chemist cohorts that had a tenure-track position at anytime went from 36% in the 1960s to 10% in 2013. 
• Since 1972, the modal outcome for a PhD in chemistry 10 years after graduate was a position in industry, from a high of ~60% to a low of ~42%. 

I will end on a tiny bit of a triumphalist note. I have been banging on for a number of years about how we have a paucity of data about both the past and present of the chemistry jobs market. Dr. Cheng has done us a huge favor by providing some of it. Instead of arguments about what is and is not "traditional", Figure B.9 provides us data and tells us what was traditional from 1970 until 2010, and what I strongly suspect is still traditional today: most PhD chemists end up in industry (~40%), some have a tenure-track academic position (~20%), some work in other academic functions not on the tenure-track (~19%) and some work in non-profit or governmental settings (~19%). 

I think this paper confirms my biases is likely to be right, and the only way to figure it out is to find data to either back it up, or contradict it. Dr. Cheng has gotten us started, and we'll have to do the rest ourselves. Let's get to it. 

Professor Erick Carreira issues a statement of regret for the Guido Koch letter

Erick Carreira has been appointed the new editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Here's the news summary from C&EN, with the inclusion of a short paragraph about a letter to a certain Guido:

News of Carriera's appointment reignited debate over a letter he wrote in 1996 describing the long working hours he expected of those in his research group at the time. In a statement released Sept. 5 Carriera said "I regret writing this letter, as it in no way reflects my leadership approach today. . . . Whether I am leading a lab or leading a journal, I am committed to promoting a sustainable and positive cultural shift in our industry."

The full text of Professor Carreira's tweets follows:

A statement from Prof. Erick Carreira: 

“I regret writing this letter, as it in no way reflects my leadership approach today. I have made peace with those impacted by the letter. (1/3) 

In the decades since it was written, I’ve grown as a teacher, as a mentor, as a researcher and as a person. I am proud of the way I work with my colleagues and students and believe that a healthy work-life balance is now more important than ever. (2/3) 

Whether I am leading a lab or leading a journal, I am committed to promoting a sustainable and positive cultural shift in our industry.” - Erick Carreira (3/3)

It has literally been 10 years since this letter was first posted in the chemistry blogosphere, and I don't wish to replow this particular bit of thorny ground. I felt these statements from former students are relevant in terms of testifying to life in and around the Carreira lab, and that this letter seems at least a bit of an anomaly.

I do think it is very likely that senior academics and administrators who select editors-in-chief of major publications were not aware of this letter's impact among chemists in the 2000s and beyond, who are far more plugged into life online than those who were trained in other times. This is not the only letter of its genre, but I think it's the emblem of a certain culture and a certain attitude within organic chemistry. I think that the letter took on a life and a meaning of its own on the internet beyond an interaction between a specific professor and a specific postdoctoral fellow, and it's bluntly clear that The Powers that Be were unaware of that.

As I noted this weekend, it would have been better if this letter were to have been repudiated openly and repeatedly by the broad chemistry community for the last 24 years. That we have a statement of regret from Professor Carreira now is a start. 

National Academies calls for more data on graduate student outcome

Another report! (article in C&EN by Andrea Widener):

The U.S. biomedical research enterprise is gradually crumbling under the weight of thousands of trained scientists who cannot get jobs in academia, a new report from the National Academies of Sciences says. If the situation does not change soon it will undercut biomedical science’s “vitality, promise, and productivity” and, eventually, its critical role in the biomedical industry... 

...Lack of data about the outcomes of graduate students and postdocs is a particular problem, the report says. It recommends NIH force universities to collect that information by tying data reporting to grant funding. NSF should also collect more data by linking its existing data with the U.S. Census Bureau.

I don't love forcing these sorts of mandates on universities, but I think that we desperately need good data on past graduates and their career outcomes. Good news, if this is implemented. (that's a big 'if') 

Ask CJ: how to get industry internships?

From the inbox, a good question: 

Hi Chemjobber, 

I am a [redacted] year graduate student working towards a PhD in [redacted chemistry field]. [redacted] I was pondering the idea of doing summer internships during grad school to get experience and hopefully make connections. My PI is fully supportive. Do you have any feedback/recommendations/or any general input? 

Thanks,
PD

My response:

Dear PD:  

Thanks for your message - it's a good question. Before you begin, make sure to have a resume and a cover letter and an introductory e-mail/phone message. 

• Network your way into a summer internship through your PI/your institutions' connections.
• Find summer internships through online postings, either through general websites (such as C&EN Jobs) or through the companies themselves. 

Both are difficult, but #1 may prove to be somewhat more fruitful. Cheers, CJ

Readers, did you do an industrial internship during graduate school? How did you apply? Let's hear it.  

A counter-intuitive result: median time to degree has been getting shorter?

I think you could have won $50 of me on this one. (from the Survey of Earned Doctorates).

(I wonder if people have been spending more time in postdocs? I don't think we have that data.) 

Fewer F31 grants for chemistry graduate students

Also from this week's C&EN, an article by Andrea Widener: 

The U.S. National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) announced last month that it will no longer fund a predoctoral fellowship program that supported select chemistry students. NIGMS decided instead to put all of its predoctoral funding toward training grants, which support departments to provide funding and mentorship to large groups of students. The Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Individual Predoctoral Fellowship, or F31, was one of few grants that chemistry students could apply for once they had already started their graduate research. 

Most other grants, including NSF predoctoral fellowships, go to students before they enter graduate school. Marilyn Mackiewicz, now a research assistant professor at Portland State University, says she hadn’t known about the NSF fellowships when she applied to graduate school at Texas A&M University. “It’s kind of sad they are deciding to stop funding the grant,” she says. NIGMS started supporting F31 fellowships in 2015. It awarded around 85 fellowships each year; less than 20% went to chemists.

Actually not that consequential to the total number of Ph.D. chemists (~2600 a year.) Still... 

The costs of academic science workers

This is a very enjoyable summary of a recent speech by minor-deity-of-the-blog Paula Stephan, written by Ken Chiacchia. It's a continuation of the themes she has written about in her book "How Economics Shapes Science." I think the comparison of the cost of graduate students, postdocs and staff scientists is interesting: 

The issue is stark in the decision of whether to employ graduate students, postdoctoral fellows or staff scientists to conduct lab research. Nationally, graduate students average a stipend of about $26,000 annually; in addition, they represent approximately an additional $16,000 or more for tuition and other student costs. Their hourly “pay rate,” then, can be between $19.50 and $27.50. 

Postdoctoral fellows are paid more. But they also have no tuition costs and at most universities have few additional benefits. Assuming a university follows the NIH benchmark of $43,692 for a first-year postdoc, their hourly rate comes to around $17 to $18, depending on the field. 

Staff scientists start at about $60,000 to $75,000, coming out to an hourly rate of about $30.00. But that doesn’t reflect their full cost, which includes much more extensive benefits than students or postdocs. 

Given this incentive structure, Stephan explained, it isn’t hard to understand the relative scarcity of staff scientists. Her own study found that at least 72 percent of academic research papers had postdocs or grad students as their first author. In the NSF’s annual survey, life science PhD graduates with definite job commitments have fallen from a peak of 70% in 1994 to 58% in 2014—and most of those are going to postdoc positions, not permanent jobs.

Stephan really believes in the ameliorative power of staff scientists, but that's because she believes that the best way to deal with the problem of "too many Ph.D.s" is to raise their price. She's an economist, so that's the tool for creating scarcity. (Makes sense, I gotta say.)

I am very curious, though, what the differences in output are between institutions that are student/postdoc heavy and those that are staffed by staff scientists. In addition, I am curious as to if the nature of the output changes, i.e. if the science gets more or less interesting, or more or less innovative. I have no idea what the outcome might be - readers?  

Does your department allow graduate students to have outside employment?

An old tweet/poll from this summer: 

PIs, does your department have rules on outside part-time employment for your graduate students?

Explicit rule against: 40%
Implicit rule against: 15%
Up to the PI: 17%
No rule against: 28%  

242 votes

Not talking about secondments to industry, etc. I'm talking about grad students moonlighting driving pizzas, etc. 

It seems pretty reasonable to me for schools to discourage outside employment (pizza delivery at night, etc.), but perhaps I have a limited imagination. If I were a PI, someone would have screwed up -- but if I were a PI, I'd be pretty unhappy if you had a swing shift at McDonald's down the way. That said, maybe PIs don't care?

Anyone have a strong feeling one way or another? Curious if folks have stories around this. 

Conversations with Cramer: How should you talk to undergraduates about graduate school?

A frequent reader was prompted by Professor Cramer's recent advice on applying to graduate school to ask the following question to him: 

In my professional capacity, I frequently work with undergraduate students who are considering graduate school in chemistry. For some of them, that choice reflects a love of chemistry and a genuine intellectual desire to do research and/or pursue a career in science. Many of these undergraduates have read widely and forged relationships with faculty. They make their decision to postpone their career for half a decade or more with eyes wide open. 

Others, however, bright and successful though they may be, are not so well-informed. They may easily gain admission to programs, but their reasons for wanting to go to graduate school do not arise from a genuine interest in chemistry. Rather, they demonstrate an unwillingness to make an immediate career decision and cite a need to procrastinate in their job search. I have even heard reasons like “because my [boyfriend/girlfriend/significant other] is going to graduate school and I want to go with them.” (This makes me want to cringe, but who am I to tell someone how to live their life?) In short, they seem to be choosing graduate school because they feel like they have nothing better to do. 

I never want to discourage anyone from following their heart and I refuse to think (despite or because of my own experiences in graduate school and career) that I know better than anyone who is making this very personal decision. When they ask for my advice, I hesitate to say anything other than “are you sure you have thought this through?” and then I send them in the direction of CJ’s blog.  

I would appreciate hearing someone else’s take on how to handle this with tact and concern. How do you stress to students that graduate school undertaken for misguided reasons may result in anguish and that the rewards are not guaranteed?

Professor Cramer responds:

To be honest, I think we have to salute this questioner for having achieved what seems, to me, to be pretty much the optimal combination of compassion and self-restraint. By contrast, many people confronted with situations like this, while admirably motivated by concern, nevertheless engage in a bit of hubris in assuming that they know better what an individual should do with their life than does the individual. Relying on my own experience as a faculty advisor, and also as a Director of Graduate Studies, I have seen students excel who I never thought would make it, and I’ve seen seeming superstars crash and burn as disconnects between expectations and reality set in. And usually that process takes two to three years — as that’s about 10-15% of the life span of a person that age, one can be forgiven for doing poorly with predictions made based on antecedent circumstances. 

I see at least a couple of factors here. First, people have to be allowed to make mistakes — we learn from them — they build resilience. That said, it is CERTAINLY appropriate to have a conversation that focuses on questions like, “Why do you want to go to graduate school?”, “What do you want to do afterwards that makes graduate school the right choice for you?”, and “Do you feel like you’ve done enough research on what to expect that you understand what graduate school is going to be like?” Sharing information and experience surely cannot hurt, and may moreover be useful in guiding an individual’s choice of programs, assuming grad school continues to be thought to be the preferred option. 

Second, one should not discount the enormous potential influence of both a program and of an advisor. Trying to align desired outcomes with the right programs and people can be decisive in fostering success. Impressing upon ANY student (whether you think they’re burning to be a Ph.D. or not) that they should address those questions during program visits and talks with prospective advisors is noble work. We programs and advisors are supposed to do our best NOT to have a lot of crashing and burning going on! (Mind you, it is simply unrealistic to think that every admitted student will be successful, but that’s a topic for another time.) 

I’ll say again that I like very much how the questioner put it: one should structure one’s response around “tact and concern” while recognizing the fundamental agency of the individual. 

Readers, what do you think? What's the best advice to someone who is waffling a bit about graduate school? How do you inform while respecting their agency?  

Cramer's Corner: admissions/the application process for professorships

Friend of the blog Chris Cramer (professor at the University of Minnesota, computational/theoretical chemist, former director of graduate studies for the University of Minnesota's department of chemistry) has a number of great contributions to the chemblogotweetosphere. 

First, a series of tweets from Chris about how to think about applying to graduate school.

Second, a longer comment from him about the process in hiring a new professor. It's longer, so I'm putting it below the jump:

Who are the top 10 Ph.D. programs in chemistry?

It's sweeps month at Chemjobber (this is a joke.)

I keep seeing references to "top 10" schools in chemistry, or "top 50" or "top 5" schools. I sure would like to know what this list of "top" schools is, so here we go.

I would like to know what subjective/objective rankings of worldwide or US-wide Ph.D. programs in chemistry (broadly defined) exist, or if you can make up your own. Readers? 

Was Peak Chemistry Postdoc in 2011?

Busy day, but I want to follow up on a very old post. This morning, Monya Baker of Nature's news group reports that the number of biomedical postdocs is beginning to fall: 

A decades-long surge in the numbers of US biomedical postdocs may finally have ended. 

From 1979 to 2010 the number of US postdocs in the biomedical sciences has risen steadily, from just over 10,000 to more than 40,000. But in the past three years, the tide has turned, according to official statistics. 

The population of US biomedical postdocs fell 5.5% between 2010 and 2013, to just under 38,000, with losses getting bigger each year, notes a study published on 6 October — although the number of new graduates with science PhDs continues to rise...

From the same NSF survey that the paper is based on (the NSF's Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates), here's the data for chemistry postdocs. I'll try to modify this over today to get something better up:

2001: 3,854
2002: 3,973
2003: 4,135
2004: 4,330
2005: 4,190
2006: 4,045
2007*: 3,952
2008: 3,943
2009: 4,219
2010: 4,179
2011: 4,005
2012: 4,016
2013: 3,850

Looks to me that there has been a steeper drop for chemistry postdocs between 2010 and 2013, with an 8% from between the two years.

It looks like I pseudo-predicted that Peak Chemistry Postdoc would be 2011 (that post was from 2012), but it looks like it was more like 2009. (In this sense, were new chemistry PhDs going to postdocs a leading indicator of problems in the #chemjobs market? I doubt it? Employment tends to be a lagging indicator of issues, although I could be wrong.)

I sincerely hope that the number of postdocs continues to fall, for the right reasons, i.e. only universities who sincerely want TT-level assistant professors to have them will be wanting them. Everyone else who wants their new entry-level PhD hires to have an extra 2 years of experience will should be required to pay for it. It seems to me that the "right" number of postdocs is in the 500-1000 range, but that's a personal preference, really.

* For this number, I chose the "2007 'new'" number. From the NSF: "In 2007, GSS-eligible fields were reclassified, newly eligible fields were added, and survey was redesigned to improve coverage and coding of GSS-eligible units. "2007new" presents data as collected in 2007; "2007old" reflects data as they would have been collected under 2006 methodology. Science fields "communication" and "family and consumer sciences/human sciences" are newly eligible. Data for these two fields are only in 2007new. Science field "multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary studies" is also newly eligible; these data may have been reported under other fields before 2007. "Neuroscience" is reported as a separate field of science in 2007new; these data were reported under health field "neurology" in 2007old and previous years. "Architecture" is reported as a separate field of engineering in 2007new; these data were reported under "civil engineering" in 2007old and previous years. See appendix A, "Technical Notes," for more detail."

Oklahoma changes graduate program in response to ACS graduate education report

Also in this week's C&EN, a report by Celia Henry Arnaud on the University of Oklahoma's changing of their graduate program in responding to the Shakhashiri report: 

The 28 students who entered the University of Oklahoma’s chemistry graduate program this fall are “newbies” in more ways than one: Not only are they beginners at the school, but they’re also the first to experience a completely revamped curriculum. That curriculum—more than a decade in the making—was inspired by the chemistry department’s participation in the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate and by the American Chemical Society’s 2012 report “Advancing Graduate Education in the Chemical Sciences,” two efforts to modernize Ph.D. education and training. 

Over the years, “we had experimented piecemeal with changing our curriculum, but it was basically putting Band-Aids on what we already had,” says Michael T. Ashby, the professor who spearheaded the revamp. “Last year, we decided basically to burn everything to the ground and start from scratch.” 

As part of the overhaul, the department switched to a so-called modular approach composed of shorter, more focused classes and eliminated chemistry divisions—such as organic or physical—at the graduate level. (It still has divisions at the undergraduate level to help organize the curriculum and manage teaching loads.) 

“The chemical sciences have become very interdisciplinary,” says Ashby, who studies the mechanisms and kinetics of inorganic antimicrobials and antioxidants. “Although I’m in the inorganic division, half my group are microbiologists and half are chemists. My actual research doesn’t have much inorganic chemistry at all. That’s part of the issue with having formal divisions at the graduate level. It doesn’t make a lot of sense anymore.” 

Because the chemistry department has such a biological bent, some students entering the grad program have gaps in their chemistry backgrounds. The new curriculum has the flexibility to bridge those gaps up front. For example, during the first five weeks of this semester, seven students took an accelerated program in physical chemistry to bring them up to speed to join their fellow students when regular introductory graduate classes began in the sixth week....

It seems to me that we won't know anything until 2 years and 5 years from now. Still, good to see that schools are facing the time-to-degree problem.

UPDATE: As promised, I'm back for a tiny bit more commentary. Here's the quote I think is interesting:

The ultimate hope is that the new program will help students graduate faster. “The key is to ramp up the students’ ability to do original research,” Ashby says. “That means getting out of the classroom. This curriculum allows us to do that.”

Is there any indication that the overall increase in the length of time-to-degree (2013 median time-to-doctorate for chemistry of 6.5 years (from B.S. degree), 5.7 years from the start of graduate school (PDF)) is due to lengthening classroom time? 

Missouri cuts health care subsidies for graduate students with less than 24 hours notice

A very interesting little story coming out of the University of Missouri. Here's a snippet from the Columbia Daily Tribune (article by Megan Favignano): 

Graduate students employed by the University of Missouri will have a harder time paying for health insurance after MU told students Friday it is taking away subsidies that help with premium costs. 

MU Associate Vice Chancellor for Graduate Studies Leona Rubin said the change is the result of a recent IRS interpretation of a section of the Affordable Care Act. The law, which requires adults to have health insurance or face tax penalties, “prohibits businesses from providing employees subsidies specifically for the purpose of purchasing health insurance from individual market plans,” the university said in a letter sent to students Friday. 

The IRS, Rubin said, considers the university’s student health insurance plan from Aetna an “individual market plan.” Because of the IRS classification, the university cannot give graduate students with assistantships a subsidy to help with health insurance costs, Rubin said. 

If the university continued to do so, Rubin said it could be fined $36,000. 

“We’re trying to comply with the interpretation of federal law,” Rubin said. “We’re not trying to hurt” students. 

MU is using the $3.1 million it had budgeted for graduate student employee health insurance subsidies to create one-time fellowships for those employees. All graduate students with qualifying titles — a group that includes teaching assistantships, research assistantships and fellowships — will be eligible for the one-time fellowship this fall.
“We wanted to make sure the students who needed insurance had the money ... in the fall,” Rubin said. 

In the spring, those students will have to pay completely out of pocket for health insurance....

I am told that the graduate students were given less than 24 hours notice of this change.

Suffice it to say this is an interesting and probably not desired outcome of the Affordable Care Act and one of the reasons that I am, in general, pretty skeptical of most federal legislative efforts. It's rare that anyone can accurately predict second- or third-order effects and it always seems like there will be small (or big) groups of people who are negatively affected by these massive legal and regulatory shifts.

I can't imagine that Mizzou chemistry grad students make much; I suspect this won't help their recruiting for the following year. (I suspect that they will be planning to increase their stipends for the following year?) Best wishes to the affected Mizzou students.

Below the jump, the text of the actual e-mail sent from Professor Rubin (formatting, etc. removed):

Offer acceptance rates for new graduate school classes up or down?

A weird question: has anyone said anything about the incoming class of graduate students for fall 2015 and their relative acceptance rates for your institution?

I have heard some rumblings about relatively poor offer acceptance rates for incoming graduate students in a major chemistry program; curious if that's just an anomaly, or a sign of an improving economy for B.S. or M.S. new graduates.

Thoughts? 

What happens when a PI leaves for industry?

An interesting question from the Chemistry Reddit:

Hey! 

So, I was wondering if any of you can give me some solid advice as to how I should proceed with my current situation. 

Basically, my research advisor is leaving this July for a full time job in industry leaving his entire lab to fend for themselves. 

I am currently working on a project that I was going to use for my undergrad thesis defense this Fall, but I'm not sure if I can finish my project before this July. 

So, should I go to another lab this Fall and finish this s--t show of a project or just start completely new and defend in the Spring, new project and all? Thanks!

This is an interesting and rather unusual question. Most of the time, advisors leave research institutions, and the choice that graduate students face is: do I stay or do I go?

In this case, the advisor is taking no one with them -- now, then, what should happen? One hopes (just as in the case of more tragic circumstances), the department usually steps in and takes care of the students. Undergraduates are probably less looked after than graduate students, but I don't know.

Readers, any experience with these situations? 

There Are Not Too Many Astronauts

A few weeks ago, a Future of Research symposium was held in Boston - this is a gathering of graduate students and postdocs who are concerned about scientific workforce issues. They had Boston University's Greg Petsko as a speaker; a good choice, I think, because Professor Petsko has been very prominent talking about postdoc issues.

A good summary of his current position is that graduate school in the sciences is great job training for other fields, but that the number of postdocs should be sharply limited. Here's how he presented it at the recent conference:

There Are Not Too Many Graduate Students

• We are not training too many graduate students in STEM subjects. A Ph.D. in the sciences is superb training for dozens of different fields, including journalism, public policy, law, business and consulting, many (perhaps most) of which do not require postdoctoral research training. 

Suffice it to say that I found this statement rather surprising. @kmcld99 on Twitter pointed out:

Ridiculous. Astronauts have tons of transferable skills; doesn't mean we need to train more astronauts.

So, thanks to @kmcld99, I now present my version of Professor Petsko's slide. I plan to apply for astronaut selection myself - I hear it's a growth field.

Ask CJ: Should I write a letter about my former advisor to the department?

From the inbox, an interesting question from "JGN" (this comment has been redacted for privacy and edited for clarity): 

I'm an [chemistry] graduate student working for a [prominent chemist]. Due to many [administrative problems] and me not seeing eye-to-eye with my advisor for a myriad of reasons, I've been fortunate enough to "leave with a Masters" and to gain entrance into another PhD program elsewhere. 

My question to you is this: 

Is it wise or a good idea for me to send a grievance to HR, [the university administration], and the chemistry department faculty a list of transgressions my advisor has committed after I have left? My advisor is toxic, corrosive and vindictive. I would have done this sooner, but I had heard stories of people attempting this in the past and no justice was served. 

This letter I doubt would help me in any way (in fact it may hurt), but I feel as though this man is getting away with years of abuse and no one is willing to do anything about it.

My thought process is that a letter addressed to other faculty in the department wouldn't do much to harm Professor Z's standing at your department or your university. This is exactly the sort of thing that professors have been great at ignoring (and let's be frank, it's not like this would get dealt with significantly better in industrial settings.) I think that it is best for you to move on and let your silence speak.

But my advice leans towards the exceedingly small-c conservative.

Readers, can you think of an instance where a graduate student has been truly wronged, they've publicly complained and then gotten a desired outcome (whether it's restoration for them, or a rebuke for the professor)? The last time we talked about this, there didn't seem to be a lot of examples. Any more?

UPDATE: As I hoped, chemistry professor (and associate dean) Chris Cramer has some good thoughts. 

The most brutally honest sentence I read today

I've been reading Daniel Drezner (professor of international political economy at Tufts) for a very long time. This was a very interesting statement on his part:

The first is that if your goal is to become a professor and you are not accepted with a scholarship into a top-20 political science program, I would not in good conscience recommend that you get a PhD.

Most of the professoriate in international relations comes from the elite schools. Whether this is because these schools function as a prestige cartel or not is immaterial: the reason will not change the current realities. The academic job market is brutal; getting an academic job without a degree from a top-20 institution is even more brutal.

I applaud him for his honesty.

(The whole article is good, and a reflection of what I should be doing here more often.) 

Kazakhstan needs to catch up to the Western world

Via @fxcoudert, can you believe these people out on the steppes of Central Asia?!?:

Whitby has made progress in other areas: writing a PhD programme in materials science and engineering, which has recruited students, and developing a master’s course too. Yet without the necessary research tools, life is far from straightforward. ‘It’s a case of how do we deliver the research projects,’ he says. ‘They don’t even understand the concept of post-docs here,’ he adds. Instead students tend to enter industry straight after a master’s or PhD. ‘As an ex-pat faculty this is what we’re trying to overcome,’ he continues.

 For shame! They need to get themselves a STEM glut and fast!