Why the current system fails to retain bright scientific talent, and how we can fix it
Academia is mysterious. The inner workings of the world of scientific research are often inaccessible to the public. Its products, like journal articles and experimental data, are frequently met with bewilderment. Prior to the post-secondary level, the education system provides little insight into how academia functions or how people within academia view the field in which they work.
Research and scientific discovery are often challenging. It can be difficult for people to know what to look for if they don’t already fully understand it — a situation known as Meno’s paradox. The current difficulties of working in academic fields, however, are so insurmountable that they drive away masses of potential and established researchers alike. This often leads to early and mid-career scientists making the shift towards industry careers. Contributing factors include the lack of funding for reseach, increased workloads that have led to a mental health crisis, political hostility towards academic work in the sciences, and salaries that don’t keep up with the rising cost of living.
The Great Resignation, a phenomenon sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic that has permeated all industries, describes workers voluntarily quitting their jobs en masse due to wage stagnation, limited opportunities for career development, and toxic work environments, amongst other reasons. These underlying and unresolved issues in academia, combined with other effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, have led to the opinion that the Great Resignation has struck research, and that its long-term impacts will be profound. An article by Virginia Gewin in Nature, includes opinions from researchers who have left academia, all of whom deplore severe mismanagement of academic institutions, as well as recent shifts to for-profit models of university funding, as is the case in the United Kingdom. As the number of students enrolled in higher education increases, so too does the number of contract-based academic positions that signify less job security. The pandemic also exacerbated the struggle to fund research, with increased pressure and competition to obtain grants from funding agencies, amid little to no support from institutions. Academics also face pressure to publish as many journal articles as possible, in order to demonstrate their research productivity and eventually secure coveted tenure-track positions that usually lead to better job security and reliable pay.
Systematic biases often play a role in security in academia; minority groups such as women and people of colour can face inequitable barriers related to career advancement. University departments without explicit criteria for tenure and promotion evaluations implicitly disadvantage minority academics.
The skewed work-life balance typical to academic positions, with their longer and more uncertain work hours compared with their industry counterparts, has also led to a mental health crisis that is particularly dire amongst graduate students. Their stipends often teeter on the minimum wage, or below what is required for the cost of living, even though they do much of the labour within their workplaces. Amongst established academics, the added workload of administrative and increased teaching duties can lead to even more stress.
Though the current state of academia may seem bleak, many scholars are currently working towards changing institutional practices. An article written by Beronda L. Montgomery for Nature Microbiology highlights the necessity of pushing universities to make equitable hiring decisions to better include underrepresented groups.
Guillermo Campitelli also suggests reinventing how the scientific community evaluates research results and productivity amidst a replication crisis, particularly in psychology, where an alarming majority of published papers are proving to be irreplicable. This is due to the pressure on scientists to publish without checking the replicability of results, in addition to the pressure of publishing statistically significant findings. As such, Campitelli suggests retiring statistical significance as a threshold for results entirely.
Academia was originally a haven for discoveries to satisfy our never-ending curiosity and to make our world a better place. A long road of improvements lies ahead to restore the field to serve its original purpose.
