We have an oversupply of researchers, not academics

John B. Holbein, an Assistant Professor at Brigham Young University (soon to move to the University of Virginia), a perennially lovely tweeter, asked this recently of his followers:

“If there was one thing you would change about the academy, what would it be?”

I suggested breaking the teaching to research cross-subsidy. It would bring down the cost of degrees tremendously (teaching is cheap!) and potentially rebalance us away from the colossal amounts of mostly pointless research that is currently done (see my recent post: stop doing boring research). 

A lot of people in the thread were saying something similar, but opposite: something along the lines of “create more jobs”. They claimed that there was an oversupply of talented graduate students who couldn’t find academic jobs where they could, presumably, make their best contribution to humanity.

I completely disagree. 

Hot tip: if you think reading a book like this will make you professor material,
you are not professor material.

I do not deny at all that there are a lot of very talented researchers finishing up graduate programs at good universities and struggling to find academic work. But being a researcher is different to an academic. The key difference is that academics ask the big questions that push the needle of fundamental knowledge, and have the peculiar intellect required to conceptualise and execute a research agenda that answers such questions. Researchers, speaking simplistically, have the skills but not the questions. The most skillful and, critically, pedantic of them get academic jobs nonetheless and work in the base of the pyramid of science performing replications and keeping everyone tight through the peer review process. But most researchers would make a much more significant contribution elsewhere. 

Researchers need to go and work for government, or the 3^rd sector, or the private sector. They need to go and work for an organisation that has questions and consequently has demand for their skills.

The academy doesn’t have demand for researchers, only academics. 

This would produce way more utility for all parties concerned that having all these researchers employed in universities. Did you know that 40% of jobs for statisticians go unfilled in Australia? Think of all those economics PhDs graduating with dissertation titles like “essays in the causal identification of something we already knew” who could do causal analysis of something we know absolutely nothing about for the non-academic organisations?

Every day I come across someone demonstrating a high level of skill in technical dressage (the sport of showing off one’s research skills) in a paper with a question of close-to-zero interest, like whether envy is good or bad for your life satisfaction (how could it possibly be good?). The standard response to this is that we don’t have good empirical evidence, or replication is always helpful, or things don’t need to be novel. At the dissertation level perhaps, but this is certainly not true at the academic level. Replications of hard or novel findings are critical. But replication for its own sake is a training tool, not valuable academic output.

The oversupply argument is specious. Where is the market failure? Where is the distortion? Salaries keep rising, so demand for academics must simply not be met. This isn’t to say that these researchers aren’t as smart as academics, simply that they have a different kind of intellect. Academic intellect is obsessive, pedantic, and neurotic. I am inclined to call it a curse. The academic intellect is not suited to research work outside of universities because it is interested in fundamental questions (“what is the nature of reality”) that are useless to other organisations. And because it is sent into deep depressions when it can’t work on such questions incessantly, with mad passion. People who just want to do causal inference, on the other hand, are immensely useful to other organisation and don’t mind the work at all. We have hear a matching problem with an easy fix. 

Let’s stop this conflation of academics and researchers. There is such an enormous demand for quantitively literate people in the world. Go and meet it instead of holding the begging bowl outside universities.