Did we fund too many "pathway to PhD/postdoc" programs?
So prior to this anti-science administration that has completely gutted all forms of trainee funding, especially diversity oriented funding -- we have historically seen relatively strong funding being applied towards "trainees". Including diversity initiatives. This happened under Obama, Trump1 (since they were not even aware the NIH or NSF existed during this time and left it largely untouched), and Biden. As a minority student myself, starting back in the early 2010s as an undergraduate, I was almost blown away by how much funding was being poured into pre-PhD diversity and non diversity programs and this held true through my first postdoc. As an undergraduate I got $40k in funds just for doing research through an NIH pre-PhD diversity initiative. I did two NSF REUs that both paid me $6k each summer to do research and receive further training. I got 2 different fully funded postdoc fellowships, one NSF and one NIH (again both diversity-oriented). While it was harder for non-minority students to land these types of fellowships/training programs etc. there still was a ton of these programs for all types of students -- at least "a ton" being relative to the funding there was for faculty positions. My point is not to brag here but rather that this really sent me and a lot of my colleagues a message that there was MONEY for us in academia. And while during my PhD a lot of career development programs warned us about the whole "1 in 10 phds actually land faculty" stat, the overall message was still very much leaning towards academia (ie all of the fellowships you apply for as a PhD student very much want to hear about your goals to "pursue a faculty position"). Come to late-stage postdoc era, and you quickly realize how much LESS money there is for "transition" awards that can help you land a faculty position. The NIH K99 is ruthlessly competitive and there really isn't an NSF equivalent for it. Instead faculty positions are dependent on the whims of departmental demographics/logistics and spots opening up and 99% of the time there will not be a spot opening up for your niche. So basically my question is, why fund all these training programs but not fund the expanding of our faculty pool in this country to meet the number of graduates we produce? Did we overfund academic trainee programs over the last two decades? Another way to put it, is that we could have removed all of these training programs and the faculty and industry job market for PhDs would still be ruthlessly competitive. So it seems like these training programs (while amazing for democratizing PhDs to those who are less fortunate) are just creating a bigger problem down the line anyways. Curious with what people with more experience think about all this.
1 Answer
Evaluating whether there were too many pathway programs requires analyzing the structural gap between training and permanent employment. While funding for pre-PhD and postdoctoral initiatives increases the number of qualified candidates, it does not automatically expand the number of tenured faculty positions. This creates a bottleneck where the supply of highly trained researchers exceeds the available professional roles. One perspective is that these programs successfully lower barriers to entry, allowing a more diverse pool of scientists to acquire essential skills. From this view, the investment is a success because it democratizes access to high-level research. The lack of faculty positions is seen as a systemic failure of university hiring and funding models rather than a failure of the training programs themselves. Conversely, an argument can be made that over-funding the training phase without a corresponding increase in career-track positions creates a false signal. When students are incentivized to enter a pipeline that leads to a saturated market, they may spend years in precarious fellowships only to find that the professional ceiling has not moved. This can lead to underemployment or a forced exit from the field, potentially causing burnout among the very populations the programs intended to support. To address this, a shift in funding strategy could involve bridging the gap between the postdoc and faculty stages. Instead of focusing solely on the entry points, institutions could invest in "bridge" grants or permanent staff scientist roles. These positions would allow researchers to maintain their productivity and independence without relying on the limited number of tenure-track openings. Balancing the pipeline requires ensuring that the exit capacity of the academic system matches the input capacity created by these funding initiatives.
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