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Universities urged to improve conditions for postdoctoral fellows
TOO MANY POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS are "neglected, even exploited," and across-the-board reform of the postdoc experience is long overdue, according to a report released last week by the National Academies. The report proposes capping the length of fellowships at five years, raising salaries for postdocs, and strengthening the mentor system.
Ugly stories about postdoctoral exploitation have trickled out of academe for years-as have occasional reports denouncing the situation and calling for change. But none of the previous studies have included as much hard data as this one on "postdoc hell"-as people in the trenches often call it.
For the past year, the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy-a joint panel of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine-has been studying the employment conditions of the 52,000 postdocs in the United States. The committee didn't like a lot of what it saw.
"Many postdocs have stimulating, well-supervised, and productive research experiences," said Maxine F. Singer, the chairwoman of the committee and the president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, in a news conference last week. "However, we also heard from postdocs who are neglected, underpaid, and even exploited. We heard from postdocs who are poorly matched with their research setting, some who find little opportunity to grow toward independence, and some who do not benefit from adequate guidance by a mentor."
And the numbers are growing. From 1981 to 1998, the number of academic postdocs in science and engineering more than doubled, to 39,000 from 18,000, the report notes.
THE 'INVISIBLE UNIVERSITY'
The committee talked to 39 focus groups...