Education as a Complex System

It was a cold rainy day in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Navid was working in his office at E40, one of MIT’s oldest buildings. E40 used to be a factory in the 1930s and was now hosting a large number of students, researchers, visitors, and faculty members. As a postdoctoral researcher, Navid was sharing an office with another postdoc, a long-time friend. Like many other researchers in temporary positions, they were both looking for tenure-track academic jobs. Navid and his friend had different training and areas of interest, but they shared an opinion on the job outlook: it was not a seller’s market. Each job opening received hundreds of applications, and it was very difficult to compete. Standing near the window and sipping from his cup of coffee, Navid heard Professor Dick Larson knock on the door. Dick was Navid’s supervisor. As smiling and energetic as always, Dick said: ‘Professors are like mothers who give birth to new PhDs!’ Navid replied: ‘OK?!’...‘What do you think happens if each mother, on average, gives birth to two boys and two daughters?’ Dick asked. The answer was easy: ‘The population grows ... until there are enough resources.’ Navid replied. Dick returned back to the job market problem: ‘OK, if we consider faculty members as people who train PhD students, and eventually hood them as new PhDs, like a mom that brings a baby into a new world, they are bringing these new PhDs into the world. What happens if each faculty member, during the whole career, gives birth to two PhDs?’ It was easy to follow the logic. The population should grow—unless we have limited faculty slots. If faculty positions are kept constant, only one of the two can replace the adviser and the second person should search for a job outside academia. In simple words, if everyone graduates two PhDs during their whole career, only 50% of them can land tenure-track jobs. Faculty members train many more than two PhDs during their careers; in fact, Dick had graduated 20 or more PhD students! Data have shown that on average each engineering faculty member graduates 7.8 new PhD graduates during their career (Larson et al. 2014). That is, only 1 out every 7.8 graduates can find an academic job in the U.S. Many others take temporary positions in academia (such as postdoc positions) and consequently increase universities’ teaching and research capacity, advise students, help faculty members gain more course releases, and train even more students. Postdocs also write more papers, which raises the hiring standards of the job market. In the same way that businesses may engage in a price war, postdocs create a publication war. These are just examples; many more reinforcing loops exist that work as vicious cycles (Ghaffarzadegan et al 2015). Navid and his officemate were inside this complex system. *Correspondence to: Navid Ghaffarzadegan, Virginia Tech, Industrial and Systems Engineering, Blacksburg, VA, United States. E-mail: navidg@vt.edu