It’s taken the private sector only six months to give me something that 20+ years in academia didn’t provide: a permanent position.

It’s something that seemingly every other walk of life takes for granted. You get offered a job, you do your probation, and at the end you get a permanent position. There’s no fanfare, no announcements, and sometimes the event itself passes without overt recognition. Your employer pays your salary, and continues to do so for the duration of your time at that institution.

It sounds so simple. Welcome to the rest of your working life here. Welcome to the team. But it’s something so improbable in academia that it’s become fetishised.

PhD studentships are 4-5 years on average. Tenured professors have permanent positions, but in between there’s very little, and the biggest change to the academic sector in the last 20-30 years is the way that “in between” has gone from being 2-4 years (the reason why all those postdoctoral Fellowships are for 2 years!) to an indeterminate period that can easily consume 25% or more of your working life. 

Even early-career researchers on tenure-track positions will still have a “probation” period that lasts several years, and that’s if they’re lucky enough to have landed a tenure-track position in the first place. Technicians are likewise usually on short-term contracts. Besides tenured professors, only those exotic birds known as staff scientists enjoy the kind of paycheck security that most other careers take as a given.

The truly shocking thing about this arrangement, and which looms larger and larger once you step back and view things from a distance, is the extent to which academia depends on this underclass of people, all on fixed-term contracts, in order to function. Both teaching and research are constitutionally dependent on their contributions.

PhD students will help out in teaching classes, they will tutor undergraduates, and quite frequently mentor undergraduates in the lab. Technicians – the unsung heroes of academia – will prepare and effectively run practical classes, as well as assist and often mentor students at the bench. Postdocs and non-tenured faculty will give lectures, run practical classes, and contribute to the smooth running of their departments. 

In research terns, these same people are the engine room of the whole operation. They will do virtually all of the benchwork, most of the writing, and carry most of the supervision and often also the mentoring load. And they do this, often happily accepting the privations implicit in the role, because they love what they do and are committed to some kind of abstract notion of how this career is still supposed to be. None of them will have a contract running for more than 4 years, in all likelihood, and many (most?) will eventually be compelled to depart academia.

It is nothing less than an indictment that a career which enjoys such high public esteem, which attracts such ardent devotion from its adherents, should have so little money (or genuine leadership) that it is incapable of truly supporting a professional class. Because this is what’s happened: academia has become professionalised in the sense that it’s a viable career choice, but not in the sense that it’s created a genuine professional class of workers. Instead, there’s a quagmire of short-term positions that people hang around in until they’re pushed out or voluntarily leave. Permanent positions, known simply as “jobs” in most other employment sectors, exist only for a tiny minority.

Of course, the lack of permanent positions in academia arguably has a simpler explanation – people are actually not supposed to stay. After all, only 1% of PhDs become tenured professors; that’s…better odds than a sperm cell.

What’s unconscionable is how dependent academia has become on people just hanging around, becoming part of that hopeful mass of fanatically driven, hard-working, and beatifically idealistic souls. It is also unconscionable how PhDs are actually encouraged to see an academic career as the only respectable professional goal despite everything in the system being geared to get them to move on, but that’s usually because the people they’re looking to for career advice have no experience of any other employment sector. 

Of course, an industry position might be permanent but it’s still not safe. Markets have downturns, companies get taken over or have layoffs or go bust, but you’re not looking over your shoulder in the way that academics on three-year contracts do, where in the first year you can relax, in the second year start you have to start prepping for renewal, and in the third year everything is full-blown panic. It’s worth noting too that even the supposed security of tenure is often accompanied by a crushing administrative load and by no means relieves the pressure in terms of maintaining research output.

What’s important too is that there are plenty of openings in industry. People can and do change their jobs at high frequency (taking the zig-zag route to the top), and there are openings everywhere once you’re established. Short-term contracts weren’t a problem in academia when there were plenty of openings, but now every opening is oversubscribed, giving applicants much less agency and reducing individual value.

As noted before, academia can be a wonderful place and if you’re lucky enough to be in such an environment, then thank your lucky stars for your good fortune. But if that’s not the case, then perhaps we should be changing the question that we ask ourselves: instead of “why leave?”, perhaps it should be “why stay?”