Academia’s “endless trainee” syndrome

Research positions for young researchers are almost invariably “training positions”; hence, they are paid badly and are poorly recognized outside academia. Let’s see how it usually works. 

After a science bachelor's and/or master's, you can (try to) enter grad school. The duration of grad school varies a lot in different disciplines and is quite different across the US and Europe. Nonetheless, in fields like biology and neuroscience, it is very common to have 6+ years of PhD, usually with ridiculous salaries (if at all). You’ll probably be in your mid-20s to early 30s and still be penniless (according to academiainsider.com, the average age for a Ph.D. recipient is 31.5 years old.). After that, people usually look for a post-doctoral (postdoc) position; salaries are slightly better but hardly enough to sustain a family or do other things that people do, say, buy a house. Postdocs length varies, but it can be anywhere from 2 to 10 years. Most institutes and universities postdocs are deemed trainees, justifying low salaries and low self-esteem. 

After that, you enter the “job market” for group leaders (in research institutes) or professorships (in universities). It is generally hard to land a position: people must apply to dozens of institutes, and it takes at least 1 or 2 years and more if you are picky about geographic location. 

If you’re lucky to get a position, you’re hired as an assistant professor. At that point, you are 35~40 years old (and that is your first “real” job?! You’ve got to be kidding me. Sadly - it’s what people in academia are used to). And it doesn’t stop there: assistant professors need to go through a tenure track, which is some form of sadistically long (5~7 years) probation period where you need to prove to the other professors that you are “good enough”. I haven’t found any statistics on how many people get tenured (or at least a simple Google search didn’t yield great results), but it’s not obvious that you’ll get a permanent position. It depends greatly on the institute, the country, and the scientific output of those 5~7 years. So yeah, sometimes, between the ages of 40 and 50, you might have your first stable job, hopefully, with a salary comparable to a 25-year-old engineer or a 30-year-old lawyer. 

Do you know if training is done at that point? Probably not. The beauty of science lies in the fact that one always continues learning. You often hear experienced researchers who claim they learned so much from a paper, a project, a book, or their students and postdocs. We should embrace this fact, accept it, and stop regarding students and postdocs as trainees and start thinking of them as valuable, albeit inexperienced, young researchers. And change their names and raise their salaries too!