Oh it worked out fine for me in the end, I’m making 6 figures for a government agency. It’s the adjuncts that got screwed the worst, they had no promise of consistent work and landed I think 3 grand per class per semester with no benefits.
I can directly verify this based on my career. I’m not really trying to dox myself, but at a large state university in Ohio (not OSU) PhD candidates in chemistry were paid 22k a year for their teaching positions. I was offered the academic lab manager position (I held the interim title a few times while finishing my PhD) which is a PhD wanted, masters minimum position at 29k. Nontenured teaching faculty started in the high 30s to mid 40s depending on experience. Fresh tenure track hires came in at 60k with little wiggle room. Because these are state schools, all of these salaries are released to the public. Pick a university and find a prof or admin you’d like to know about and plug them in here. https://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/data/higher_ed_salary
A big issue is that we’re still quite limited when it comes to analytical methods for quantifying and classifying microplastics. I’ve seen a method from ASTM from like 2020 referenced once or twice, but the most telling one is that EPA doesn’t have one for drinking water yet. I know PFAS for example seems like a recent hot topic, but Method 537 dates back to to 2009 and UCMR3 (even if Method 533 is much more recent). Until we get a consensus on what exactly microplastic is and isn’t and a consistent way to put a number on it, we’re not really generating high quality data.
I think it’s fair to say that basic science in general is underfunded and adding to that academic overhead is absurd.
That said, it’s useful to clarify some definitions in there. Basic science is anything but basic, it’s “pure research”, or projects that aim to better understand some principle and/or phenomenon (a relevant example would be the mechanisms behind superconductors).
That and the academic overhead I’m referencing is the cut that a university takes of grant awards. Most of the departments I’ve been around take 50% of the grant award, so if you need $100,000 to complete a project, you have to ask for 200 grand (or more if you want to be paid the whole year rather than just 9 months). Now a lot of this is driven by an outrageous number of administrators with insulting salaries for what they provide (does the vice president of insert some nebulous term here really provide 300 grand worth of contributions to a university, especially so when they set the salary of teaching faculty down around 40~50K and expect applicants with PhDs and years of experience).
So what ends up happening is that researchers tag buzzwords and trendy bells and whistles onto research projects that really don’t need them just to have a single digit percent chance at getting the finding to make them happen. Oh and if they don’t beat the odds, they are shown the door in 5 years. Academia really needs a shakeup.
I’d love to see the health outcomes of this sort of approach in general. One thing that has always irked me though is that we don’t directly test for cholesterol, we test for the expression of cholesterol carrier protein, and as far I know, don’t distinguish Apo versus Holo. Just presuming that expression scales linearly with cholesterol levels with no deviations for genetics (among other factors) just feels like an enormous leap of faith.