The Least Stressful Job for 2013? A Real Look at Being a Professor in the US

The article, without being wrong exactly, is responding to a non-point while missing what I consider to be a deeper problem (disclosure: was very briefly a professor, now founding a startup, which is much more stressful for me ;-).<p>CNBC: "Being a professor is the least stressful job."<p>Article: "The first 7 years until tenure are hard."<p>Overlooked Fact: For the remaining 30+ years of your career, you have unbeatable job security, summers without any externally imposed obligations, sabbaticals, and the option to "take a slow year with your research" should you decide to have children, or have a family/personal emergency, or just want to, you know, live life and see the world.<p>Additional Speculation: The majority of people have a very tenuous understanding tenure to begin with, and CNBC may have elided "tenured" in their article for simplicity; it was, after all, a fluff piece designed to generate ten page views to deliver ten paragraphs of text :-).<p>In any case, the much bigger problem faced by aspiring professors is not the tenure process itself; it's that normal labor market mechanisms are strained-to-broken for several structural reasons:<p>1) Regional oligopolies of reputable schools almost everywhere outside of Boston (and Boston, while having several reputable schools, is still much more full of, say, reputable law firms). This means that it's hard to have a lot of negotiating power if you're not willing to uproot your life and move to another city.<p>2) Another large switching cost arises from having your research program embedded at a particular school (students, lab equipment, grants, participation in "centers", that are all hard to move).<p>3) Universities don't directly capture value from professors' work, with the important exception of collecting grant overhead. This exacerbates 1, because as a candidate your argument is "I'm great" and not "You will benefit"<p>4) Because of 3, hiring is bottlenecked by "slots" in a department, rather than by being able to find people who have net-positive ROI.<p>5) Because of 3 and 4, it's quite possible that highly qualified candidates will float around the labor market as post-docs until a "slot" opens up at a suitable school. I have directly seen colleagues choose to delay their Ph.D. defense for a year because they knew that there were a lot of highly impressive post-docs already competing for the few slots in their field that year, and they wanted to wait for a more opportune time.<p>6) Again because of 3 and 4, the already existing time-scale imbalance between institutions and individuals is exaggerated. "Not quite sure if a candidate is a good fit? Just wait another year. No big loss. We only have the one slot after all."<p>7) Highly discontinuous payoff curves: the present value of switching from untenured to tenured is hard to estimate, but I'd put it at upwards of $1M (see my calculation [1] in case this sounds implausible). There's no obvious way to hand out fractional tenure, and once you have it most of the university's negotiating power is gone, so universities have (rationally) evolved mechanisms to maximize the value they extract until then.<p>[1] My calculation:<p>1) assume your market consulting rate is $150/hr<p>2) model tenure as the option to "slack" by only teaching ~10hrs/week for full salary and doing no other work<p>3) assume $100k/yr salary<p>4) so tenure allows you to work 10 hrs/week for $100k, rather than the $75k you'd make consulting<p>5) ergo, tenure can be made to simulate a risk-free $25k/year income stream<p>6) it's hard to get $25k/year risk-free without investing something like $1M, but obviously this depends on interest rates

I'm related to a few professors, and they largely carry massive chips on their shoulder about this. For example:<p><i>And for those of us whose research directly translates to the real world (e.g., in my case — persuasion, crisis communication, strategic communication), the so-called professionals look down their overpriced noses at us. That means that even if we did want to move back to the ‘real world’ — we have to basically apologize for our PhD, our time spent training them (Where do they think new professionals come from? Are they hatched?), and kiss their asses for handouts. So, basically until we write our book and ‘become’ a pundit or consultant later in our careers we’re stuck because Americans are scared of smart people.</i><p>is a great example of the genre. There's huge amounts of rank jealousy directed at classmates who took a look at the (readily available) evidence of what a PhD's career track looked like and decided against it.<p>(Amazingly, despite hearing terrible complaining about the stresses of tenure-track professors every time I meet my family, they always ask "So when are you going to grad school?")

I was never in academia, but I was a researcher (at NASA) so I played the publishing game. And if you look at my record, I was relatively good at it. Not only was my publications list fairly long, but my work was also pretty widely referenced. But since my career no longer depends on it, I am now free to say that I credit my success almost entirely to gaming the system. This is not to say that I didn't do good work (I think I did), but there was virtually no correlation between what I thought was quality work and what I actually got rewarded for. The vast majority of my publications were minor tweaks on previous work that were specifically engineered to get past the program committees of key conferences. My best work (by my own quality metric) either went unnoticed, or could not get accepted for publication at all. When it got to the point where I was faced with a very stark choice between continuing to produce bullshit and get rewarded for it, or to do what I thought was good work and eventually get fired, I quit.

<i>"loads of us finish our Ph.D.’s (which is what you have to have to be a ‘regular’ professor) with between $75,000 and $160,000 in debt"</i><p>The link/citation for this statement never mentions 75,000 or 160,000. In fact it says:<p><i>"According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), individuals earning research doctorates in academic year 2009-10 did so owing over $20,400 on average in education-related debt, of which about $14,100 on average was graduate debt and about $6,400 on average was undergraduate debt"</i><p>Granted this NSF data is limited to research doctorates but it certainly does not support the statement that "loads of us" have 75k to 160k of debt. Moreover the NSF data says that 52% of the research doctorate population graduated with no debt.

Pre-tenure, it all boils down to just being above average on 3 numbers:<p>* how many journal articles have you published<p>* how much grant money are you bringing in<p>* what is the average rating you get from students<p>Interestingly, there does not appear to be much validity behind those numbers. Higher student ratings, for example, actually negatively correlate with student learning: <a href="http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/profqual2.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/profqual2.pdf</a> <a href="http://listserv.aera.net/scripts/wa.exe?A2=AERA-L;6767f510.1105" rel="nofollow">http://listserv.aera.net/scripts/wa.exe?A2=AERA-L;6767f510.1...</a><p>And the 'impact' of journal articles has been criticized more ways than I can count: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor#Criticisms" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor#Criticisms</a> I've seen blog posts with more impact than average journal articles.<p>Lastly research grant money - I don't know the research on the impact of grant money - but in many fields, when you have an original, new idea, you usually get a smaller grant, maybe even just a seed grant at first (just like how little money startups usually get), or you do it on your own in grad school. The large grants are for large scale collaborations and scaling up of well-trodden ideas. 55% of the grant money doesn't even go to the research project - it goes to the university's administrative overhead.

I just woke up from an all-nighter of correcting exam papers for my professor here. I'm being paid $15 an hour to grade all the homework assignments and the exams. I'm a regular teaching assistant at my university, I can usually handle the load of correcting assignments in time but correcting exams is actually the worst thing in the world. Depending on how the exam is made of course. If you care about being fair to everyone, you will usually have to backtrack through your first copies (when you were more severe) to add points. Any professors who grade their exams here? Do you use any heuristics (if you know what I mean) to correct faster? That being said, as you can see, professors in Canada can "offshore" the job of correcting to students. After that, you are left with the best part of the job. Preparing the course material, preparing the presentations and giving it every week. It's a high paying public sector job with 3 months of vacation and you can take a year off every 3 years with 80% salary.<p>I'm in Canada though, I don't know how professors are treated in the US. I know that for students it's shit! Graduating with mountains of debt, I don't know if I could celebrate that.

Doubtless this poll is capturing the essence of something interesting, but when I look at that list of professions, a host of statistical moderators come to mind. I claim this list isn't measuring what they think it is measuring.<p>I think the reason "professor" ranks first is that the compensation seems to be proportional to the responsibility, whereas most other jobs appear to under-compensate. People are sensitive to this, but they misattribute it as "lower stress."<p>Well, the job itself (professor) is really hard, but the lifestyle (everything outside work) is really great. It's a great damn job. That's different from being "stressful."<p>Where does the stress come from? Well, I bet the HN community knows professors better than most, but between publication and grant writing, there's a ton of professional evaluation that directly impacts your quality of life. Your personal and private lives will blend much more than in other professions, and being rejected professionally (i.e. being denied a major grant) will mess with your personal life as well.<p>There's no free lunch here.

A slightly tangential observation: I've had the good fortune to meet and work with people in all walks of life. Oddly, I've found the amount of stress they feel at work is hugely related to the type of personality they have.<p>I'm not discounting external factors: surely those bomb disposal guys have it tough. But some folks just seem naturally sunny and light-spirited, while others seem to be on the verge of a monstrous breakdown. I've seen people who were stressed who were moved from a stressful situation to a much less stressful situation stay just as stressed as before. Perhaps, like weight, there is a "set point" for the amount of discomfort you feel in your job, and over time you can train yourself to become more and more stressed, regardless of the externalities?<p>Beats me. Interesting subject, though. Definitely falls in the nature versus nurture arena.

Academia's the biggest fucking scam there is. Look at the prize. Around age 35-40, if you work 80-hour weeks and don't make any mistakes, the prize is <i>getting a job that you can't be fired from</i>. Meanwhile, the same kind of exertion (and political luck) in finance or software will have you able to retire: not in luxury, but at a middle-class standard of living that could be described as "making your own tenure". Also, you get to live where you want, instead of rolling the dice on where in the country you will end up living.<p>It's billed as "the life of the mind", but the reality is that a lot of the work is mindnumbingly boring: writing grant applications, grading papers, attending committees. Every industry has some boring work and vicious politics, but most industries are honest about it. In software, having been fired once because of political bullshit is par for the course. Yep, that happens. In academia, getting shot down for tenure is this huge mark of shame.<p>Finally, the academic industry has a <i>huge</i> underclass of people who spend lots of time between adjunct gigs on teaching work that is viewed as a commodity and paid extremely poorly.<p>I'm sorry, but this industry has sold out a generation and a half, while tuitions have shot toward the moon, and that's fucking inexcusable. University leadership: stop building fucking ziggurats and colossuses and get fund some goddamn research and teaching. In other words, do your job.

My adviser is rather lucky: he commutes to Technion via carpool, which puts a strong limit on the amount of time he <i>can</i> spend in the physical office everyday. Of course, he works plenty from home, but physical office-time limits things like committee drag and teaching load. And we get TA's here.

Plus you have to add the 8-10 hours a week of complaining about all the sacrifices you're making to be a professor. That can really add up.