Academia’s postdoc system is teetering, imperiling efforts to diversify life sciences

For young life scientists hoping to land a prestigious faculty job in academia, postdoctoral research is practically a requirement. But it’s not a path equally open to everyone.

Freshly minted life science Ph.D. graduates who have started families or have big loans, or are Black or female, say they plan to pursue postdoc positions at lower rates than their peers, according to a STAT analysis that includes previously unreported data from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.

For instance, in 2021, roughly 42% of Ph.D. graduates with children planned to do a postdoc compared to 64% of non-parents. And graduates’ chances of continuing on to a postdoc steadily drop from 61% to 39% as their level of debt increases.

Prospective postdocs also tend to be younger and are less likely to be Black or female. While 59% of all life science Ph.D. graduates in 2021 said they’d pursue a postdoc, that drops to 44% among Black graduates. Similarly, 62% of male Ph.D.s that year planned to continue on to a postdoc compared to 56% of female graduates.

These findings, which come from an in-depth look at an annual survey of new Ph.D. grads, were consistent between 2017 and 2021, the years for which data were available. They put hard numbers to inequities on the road to the ivory tower that many observers have flagged for years, and highlight challenges facing universities as they attempt to diversify their science faculties.

“I’m deeply concerned that academia is dying,” said Sofie Kleppner, associate dean of postdoctoral affairs at Stanford University. “If the academic world is not warm and welcoming and diverse, it is going to die.”

For decades, postdoc positions were seen as a way to get additional scientific training and as a reliable route into a faculty job, akin to a residency for a medical school graduate. The low pay and demanding hours were rewarded in the end. But for many, a postdoc is now a dead end.

There are increasing signs that academic science has lost its allure for many talented researchers. More life scientists than ever are leaving academia, with Ph.D. graduates skipping postdocs to jump into lucrative positions in private industry. The number of biomedical postdocs, which had risen for decades, has flatlined and now has begun to decline. Individual faculty and entire research institutes are having a harder time hiring postdocs, and those who do join academia are demanding better working conditions, at times putting down pipettes to grab picket signs and protest alongside graduate students.

Those concerns led the National Institutes of Health to launch a working group focused on re-envisioning postdoctoral training, which is scheduled to share updates Friday and release a final report at the end of this year. The NIH is facing its own internal pressures from thousands of postdocs, graduate students, and other temporary researchers who just last week filed a petition to unionize, citing inadequate pay and benefits and excessive workloads.

To grasp the depth and urgency of the problem, STAT spoke with members of the committee as well as postdocs, heads of postdoctoral affairs offices, and academic leaders. Many decried the current system as inequitable, while others worried that fewer postdocs could mean fewer basic science breakthroughs. All agreed that the status quo is unsustainable.

“What’s at stake here is, I think, nothing short of national leadership in the areas of science and research,” said Thomas Kimbis, president of the National Postdoctoral Association and a member of the committee.

The problems boiling over today underscore how little postdoctoral research has changed over the past half century — and how much the world around postdocs has shifted.

In 1969, the National Academies released the first major report on postdoctoral education, prompted by a sharp rise after World War II in the number of Ph.D. graduates who were spending additional time in university labs working under senior scientists. There were already rumblings of discontent. Some postdocs lamented that their advisers treated them as glorified graduate students and sources of cheap labor. And the committee was surprised by how quickly and quietly the postdoc system had grown, a view reflected in the report’s title: “The Invisible University.”

“For almost a decade, university presidents have been concerned about the ever increasing number of postdoctoral appointments on campus,” the report’s authors wrote. “Neither student nor faculty, the postdoctoral appointees have been virtually invisible to anyone outside their departments.”

But overall, the report described this system as useful and healthy. Postdoctoral training supported the work of faculty, and it gave young scientists an opportunity to explore new research areas before launching their own academic careers.

Those careers are now few and far between. About 60% of life scientists who earned a Ph.D. in 1963-64 secured tenure within 10 years. But by 2021, only 3.5% of biology Ph.D.s working at universities had been tenured within a decade of graduating, according to a National Science Foundation survey. It showed that nearly a quarter of postdocs had worked in that role for at least six years — meaning some are spending more time as postdocs than they did earning their Ph.D.

Meanwhile, postdocs and those who advocate for them say they remain invisible. No one knows exactly how many biomedical postdocs there are in the U.S. A 2018 National Academies report said estimates range from 30,000 to 80,000. That’s in part because postdocs’ titles vary widely depending on where they work and how they’re funded, from research scholar to postdoctoral fellow to postdoctoral trainee, among other labels.

At many universities, postdoctoral affairs offices — which help with onboarding, ensuring researchers receive benefits, and mediating disagreements with advisers — are staffed by only one to two individuals. In other cases, these offices don’t exist, leaving postdocs at the mercy of their advisers. Even attending a career development lunch can draw the ire of some faculty, a postdoctoral affairs coordinator at Iowa State University told STAT.

This lack of structure and support can be profoundly isolating. Evan Boyle, now a fourth-year postdoc at UC San Diego who works in a cell biology lab, still remembers the sobering advice a veteran postdoc offered him coming in: The loneliness eases after six months.

“When you’re a grad student, you come together, you have your friends, you’re going through an experience together. When I started, I was the only postdoc who had started within six months, either before or after,” he said. Finding community on campus as a gay man was particularly difficult, he added, because LGBTQ+ groups were tailored to undergraduates.

Making ends meet has been another long-standing problem. Many institutions peg postdoc stipends to the amount of a fellowship paid by the NIH called the National Research Service Award. While the award for first-year postdocs grew from nearly $27,000 to roughly $56,500 between 2000 and 2023, it just kept pace with inflation.

That has made things especially difficult for postdocs in regions with a high cost of living, which are often the places most likely to produce future faculty. A 2022 Nature study found just five doctorate-training institutes — UC Berkeley, Harvard, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Stanford — train an eighth of the nation’s faculty.

For Mayank Chugh, a third-year systems biology postdoc at Harvard, getting by means getting creative, especially since he’s trying to save money to support his parents in India. He’ll often rely on seminars and lab meetings to score a free lunch and will squirrel away leftovers for his next meal or two. He’s not alone; his lab uses a shared calendar to track free food opportunities.

“I’m 31, but I’m still behaving like I’m 23 living that student, thrifty life,” Chugh said. “The furniture in my place, everything from dishes to cutlery, is all thrifted for free from local Facebook groups.” He said he plans to leave academia to pursue a career in science or health-equity policy.

For many postdocs like Chugh, these years of labor in the lab and frugal living don’t pay off. In 2017, Donna Ginther, a labor economist at the University of Kansas, compared the salaries of biomedical Ph.D. recipients who went on to do a postdoc with those who hadn’t. She found that it took researchers who’d done a postdoc about 15 years to catch up in salary to those who hadn’t, and that they earned between $128,000 and $240,000 less in total pay during this period.

“We were hoping to find that this was time well spent, but we didn’t,” said Ginther, who is a member of the NIH working group. “It starts to look a little bit more like indentured servitude rather than actual human capital investment.”

Given the rise of well-paying jobs in biotech over the past decade, it’s no surprise to Ginther that the number of postdocs has flatlined and may be declining. That’s a reversal of a long-standing trend. Between 1979 and 2010, the number of bioscience postdocs at U.S. academic institutions steadily grew from roughly 6,900 to 21,700, according to an annual survey by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. (This estimate doesn’t include industry postdocs or those at non-degree-granting institutions.)

That total has mostly held steady since 2010, but data released in January show the number of life science postdocs dipped from roughly 21,900 in 2020 to 20,245 in 2021, the largest year-to-year decrease in the survey’s history. This happened even as the number of biological master’s and doctoral students reached all-time highs.

This exodus is putting pressure on places like Sanford Burnham Prebys, a nonprofit research institute based in San Diego. Earlier this year, the organization received $70 million from a donor to recruit 20 big-name faculty to boost the institute’s research profile.

But those professors will need to hire researchers to do the painstaking work that leads to biomedical breakthroughs. And David Brenner, the institute’s CEO, knows that hiring and keeping postdocs can be tricky in a town with a booming biotech industry, including several companies within walking distance (the average San Diego biotech worker makes about $130,000).

“If they see something that they don’t like, they can just go over the hill and get a job today,” he said. “It does sometimes leave you flat-footed and [make it] hard to get a project going again and pass it on to someone else.”

These are among the many concerns Ginther, Kimbis, and others on the NIH working group are now grappling with. There’s no shortage of opinions. The committee has already been inundated with almost 3,300 comments and suggestions from the public on issues ranging from the length and purpose of a postdoc to wages and benefits and the concerns of international postdocs.

“I’m very concerned about academic research in our country. I fear for what that is going to look like if we can’t work on this problem and make it successful,” said Shelley Berger, an epigenetics researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the group’s co-chairs. “The next CRISPR, the next vaccine RNA technology, the real fundamental technologies [start] as basic scientific research.”

Many of the early ideas the group’s members have discussed center around money, respect, and better mentoring. Berger said that one of the central concerns is ensuring that postdoctoral training isn’t only feasible for the well-to-do. Speakers invited to participate in the group’s public listening have urged NIH to double child care benefits, and others stressed that discussions about diversity need to include international researchers, who are especially vulnerable to the power imbalance between postdocs and lab directors because of their precarious immigration status.

“Another part of the story is not just that we’re losing [people], it’s who we’re losing. Now more than ever, diverse perspectives in science are imperative. To lose those is really bad,” said Stevie Eberle, director of BioSci Careers, Stanford medical school’s career center.

“Who can afford to stay?” Eberle added. “If I have parents I can fall back on, if I have a partner I can fall back on, I can stay. If I see people who look like me who are doing it and who are making it work, I can stay.”

The committee has also discussed tying faculty research grants — the main funding source for postdocs, especially international scientists — to expectations that advisers have regular, structured conversations with postdocs about their career goals. As it is, postdoc mentoring varies drastically among institutions and advisers.

The group is also planning to bust common misconceptions about postdoctoral training, said Tara Schwetz, the NIH’s acting principal deputy director and the working group’s other co-chair. One of those is that institutions must match their postdoc stipend to NRSA levels, which in reality are meant to be minimum salaries.

The NIH did something similar in late April, when it issued a notice clarifying that NRSA-funded postdocs can be hired as employees by academic institutions and receive benefits that come with that status, such as health insurance and a retirement plan. A survey released by the National Postdoctoral Association in 2021 shows that this often doesn’t happen, which critics argue paradoxically punishes postdocs who win prestigious NIH fellowships.

“Right now you have postdocs basically standing next to each other in the lab. One can go use the gym; the other one can’t. One gets a retirement plan; the other one doesn’t,” Kimbis said. “What does that do to morale?”

Some places aren’t waiting to implement changes. At the start of this year, MIT increased its minimum postdoc salary to $65,000, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., raised starting pay to $70,000. In February, Chugh, who is president of the Harvard Medical Postdoc Association, which represents about 5,000 postdocs, co-published a piece in Nature Biotechnology arguing that postdocs in the Boston area should be paid $75,000 to start, and that salaries more broadly should be adjusted for inflation and local cost of living.

But where will that money come from? NIH grants and the agency’s overall budget haven’t increased much in past years, and the new debt ceiling deal could result in cuts to NIH spending in the next two years. One possibility would be to have fewer postdocs in total, and to only encourage researchers with serious academic aspirations to pursue this path.

“Given that most people will end up working in industry, it makes sense to start there sooner rather than later,” Ginther said. “We need to find a way to support the scientific enterprise without making people make large sacrifices.”

Instead, she would like to see labs rely more on staff scientists, who would have solid salaries, competitive benefits, and, unlike postdocs, a permanent position rather than a short-term appointment. The role would give young scientists keen on staying in academia another way to do so, she argues, and would stabilize labs with researchers who’d be there long-term.

The National Cancer Center offers some funding specifically for staff scientists, and Brenner said that Sanford Burnham Prebys has already added staff researchers to offset difficulty hiring postdocs. But Ginther acknowledged that significantly increasing the number of staff scientists could become costly for funding agencies.

Berger said it’s an idea the working group is considering, but that funding is just one hurdle. The other challenge is figuring out a way for young researchers to see staff positions as desirable rather than a consolation prize for those who’d hoped to become faculty.

It’s not a new discussion. In 2012, a different NIH working group issued a report recommending that the agency shift toward supporting more staff scientists and fewer postdocs. The report also called for higher salaries and consistent benefits for NIH-supported postdocs, regardless of whether they were funded through a fellowship, training grant, or research grant.

Those are old ideas, too, called for — repeatedly — in hundreds of pages of National Academies reports released in 1998, 2000, and 2014. That has prompted many who’ve tuned into the current working group’s listening sessions to bluntly ask what’s going to be different this time.

The answer, according to Ginther, is simple.

“You can’t repeal market forces,” she said. “Never look past a crisis for causing institutional change.”