The Perfect Storm: The Workforce Crunch and the Academic Laboratory

Most of the world is moving into a new phase in the COVID-19 pandemic. At least in the United States and Europe, academic research institutions are normalizing operations, lifting density restrictions, bringing most staff back to work on-site, and allowing travel to scientific and medical meetings. Academic faculty jobs are again being posted and offered. Many of us experienced the joy of a return toward normal last December at the ASH annual meeting in Atlanta.

As current trainees finally finish those last experiments needed to complete their degrees or papers and move on to the next step on the career ladder, many principal investigators (PIs) in academia are becoming painfully aware of a decrease in the number of scientists interested in becoming postdoctoral fellows in their laboratories. Professional society job boards, including ASH's, are packed with advertisements soliciting postdocs, and daily Twitter messages beg for postdoc applicants, with some even originating from laboratories led by well-established scientists who never had to “market” open postdoc positions in the past. There is a high degree of dependence on postdocs by research groups given their scientific maturity, skills, and the absence of formal teaching and other time-consuming responsibilities. Reliance is especially pronounced at institutions without graduate schools such as government laboratories, medical centers, or free-standing research institutes. As long ago as 1969, the National Research Council referred to postdoctoral fellows as the “invisible” workforce, serving as a primary engine driving scientific productivity, while being uniquely vulnerable to exploitation since they are neither students nor faculty.¹ 

Understanding the current state of this workforce is challenging given the variability in the ways institutions, governments, and other funding organizations characterize, count, and track scientists serving in these positions, in contrast to more uniform data collection from PhD and clinical training programs. Our sense of an impending crisis is thus not yet supported by much objective data. However, even prior to the pandemic, postdoc surveys revealed an erosion in interest in academic careers during training.²  Several surveys performed during the pandemic found the situation worsening with financial, mental health, and family stressors making academic jobs even less attractive.³  A perfect storm that will drive a worsening postdoc shortage is looming; even superficial scanning of graduate student and postdoc chat boards and social media shows similar trends that will likely impact hematology research in profound ways and require a rethinking of how research careers are developed and supported.

Several factors are central to this looming loss of academic postdocs. First, most postdocs in the United States are foreign nationals on temporary visas. Approximately two-thirds of postdocs in some areas of medical and biological research have temporary visas, and even more have green cards after converting their visas during or after graduate school.⁴  Additionally, many of our postdocs come from graduate schools in the United States, yet PhD programs experienced the largest drop in applications on record between 2020 and 2021, primarily due to a loss of international students. There was partial recovery between 2021 and 2022; however, many of these students had deferred from the previous year, and the number of new applicants fell sharply. One in three international graduate students in the United States came from China prior to the pandemic, one in five from India, and one in 25 from South Korea — the top three countries sending students for STEM training/education to the United States.^4–6  Even before the pandemic, the Trump administration's imposition of travel bans and the fallout from targeted programs, such as the China Initiative, decreased interest in coming to the United States for scientific training, especially from many countries in the Middle East and Asia. The pandemic made international travel almost impossible; students already in the United States or Europe were often placed in expensive and unproductive quarantine if they did travel home, and were then stuck overseas for prolonged periods, unable to return to their labs. Visa offices overseas were first completely closed, and upon reopening, were plagued with an enormous backlog of cases, resulting in extended and unpredictable waits for visa issuance or renewal, processes already far too protracted even before the pandemic. Adding in the fear and uncertainty resulting from the war in Ukraine, it is not surprising that international students and postdocs may choose to stay closer to home, feeling unwelcome, unsafe, or uncertain about leaving home for a prolonged training experience in the U.S. or other common scientific destinations.

Second, postdoc salaries are insufficient. Even prior to pandemic-related rapid inflation, housing shortages and childcare shortfalls that show no signs of abating added pressure to postdocs with inadequate salaries. The most recent salary data found a median PhD postdoc's starting salary to be only $47,500. Potential postdocs are highly trained professionals in their 30s that have spent years toiling on graduate student stipends and are now in peak years for starting families, putting down roots, and building savings for retirement or to purchase a home. Cost-of-living increases often do not apply to stipends supporting postdocs, such as those coming from private disease foundations (many also struggling to survive financially during the pandemic). Attempts to remedy this in the United States have been hampered by a lack of adjustment of modular budgets in National Institutes of Health grants and the perception that study sections frown upon nonmodular R01 submissions, at least from new PIs. Any adjustments for inflation may lag by several years. The absence of sufficient support for housing, medical care/benefits, and childcare continues to worsen and makes postdoctoral training inaccessible and unsustainable for many with an interest in scientific inquiry, particularly in comparison to other options (see point three in the next paragraph).

Third, scientists coming out of graduate school or a first postdoc with training and skills in many areas of biomedicine relevant to hematology often find a welcoming job market outside academia. There are currently plenty of positions in industry with small startups, big pharma, or device/technology companies, often not requiring a prior postdoc. Consulting and venture capital firms also need technical knowledge and expertise to navigate the rapidly developing targeted therapies landscape and are another path many recent graduates from both PhD programs and medical school are taking. Scientists with computational skills are even more sought after by these industry sectors, as well as data and information companies such as Google and Amazon. Salaries for newly minted PhDs in the private sector are commonly two to three times what academic labs are offering. Additionally, many companies provide immigration lawyers to assist with at least some of the issues raised earlier.

Is it any wonder that our trainees look at the landscape and decide they have little interest in academia? Even before the pandemic, only 13 percent of postdocs in the United States went on to find a tenure track position.⁷  A recent economic analysis of chemistry scientists found that spending time as a postdoc actually decreased lifetime earnings due to losses related to each additional year at a postdoc salary, versus going into industry or other more lucrative positions sooner.⁸  A group of researchers at the University of Chicago surveyed more than 7,000 postdocs in 2019 and repeated the survey for 1,900 participants in late 2020. More than one-third reported having trouble meeting basic needs such as housing, food, and childcare. One-third had changed career plans, most moving away from any plans to remain in academia. In a major shift from the past, the very best graduate students are competing for jobs in consulting and biotech, often starting their own companies before they even complete their PhD, with an academic postdoc considered a backup plan if they can't find a better paying and more desirable job.

What can hematology investigators and ASH do to mitigate these threats to the academic workforce, and therefore basic discovery science? As a start, advocating for institutions and funders to improve postdoc salaries, benefits, continuing education, and immigration assistance is essential. But in reality, unless the job market in the private sector crashes and the fraught political situation surrounding international students in the United States resolves, it is unlikely that the U.S. postdoc pipeline will improve. A large survey recently published in Nature revealed higher job satisfaction and better work-life balance and pay in industry, as well as acceleration in these trends compared to a prior survey in 2016.⁹  Funders will need to consider how to best replace postdoc-dependent productivity, particularly focusing on vulnerable new PIs who are least likely to be able to attract postdocs in a competitive market. Grants may need to increase to cover higher salaries of more senior staff scientists, although even slightly increased salaries are still unlikely to match those in the private sector or to support the outsourcing of more wet lab work to contractors and core facilities.

Retaining connections to those trainees that move out of academia is also critical: Their knowledge and experience in hematology research needs to be recognized and their continuing interest and involvement encouraged. Anecdotally, bidirectional movement between industry and academia is becoming more common, as are ongoing collaborations spurred by universities encouraging commercialization of their PIs' discoveries. Professional medical societies such as ASH need to strategize how best to keep promising young hematology scientists engaged, even when they choose an initial career path outside of “conventional” academic medicine, and then be ready to support and encourage later re-entry into academia. Too often, once investigators leave academia, they receive signals, both direct and more subtle, that they have “sold out” and their involvement in noncommercial projects or organizations is no longer valued or allowed. Continuing medical education (CME) restrictions in the past have prevented nonacademic investigators from serving on ASH committees or being featured as invited speakers at the annual meeting. Paradoxically, recent changes in regulations that now restrict CME content to a smaller fraction of the ASH annual meeting (primarily the Education Sessions) may allow more substantive involvement of nonacademic investigators as members of scientific committees or as platform speakers. Managing conflicts of interest will be important, but with foresight and planning, ASH can continue to foster the productivity and engagement of hematologists and hematology scientists wherever they are working.