Toshiyuki Kobayashi was offered his first faculty position at the age of 24. He hadn't published a single paper, and was yet to earn his PhD. "I didn't feel pressure to find a job, because there were not many students with a PhD," says the University of Tokyo mathematics professor. "That meant that I could concentrate on a very difficult problem, and I had time to study areas not related to my research field. It was very good for my research in the long run."
That was 1987. Now Kobayashi has four PhD students and two postdocs of his own. The academic market has changed dramatically, he says. He has seen postdocs struggle to find their next job, and he worries that the pressure on young mathematicians to publish is so acute that some tackle only small problems. "Their papers are often not very deep," says Kobayashi.
KIMIMASA MAYAMA/EPA/CORBIS
In 1995, the Japanese government launched a programme intended to more than triple the ranks of Japanese postdocs by 2000. Japan reached its goal — 10,000 postdocs — by 1999, and the numbers continued to climb. By 2005, there were more than 15,000 postdocs, 61% of them in science and engineering. But academic job openings failed to keep up.
This has left the system scrambling to find career options for researchers. "The changes occurred in the mid-1990s and still our students can't leave the system," says Kobayashi. "I feel that when the government started this, it didn't think seriously about the future."
YUKIKO SHINYA
Managing the postdoc glut: Hitoshi Kikumoto (top) and Ken-ichi Arai.
Postdocs are a relatively new addition to the Japanese scientific scene. In the traditional Japanese system, people with PhDs were typically hired as assistant professors and continued working in the lab where they did their thesis. These were stable positions, but carried little independence. "In Japan, the culture used to be one of conformity," says Kiyoshi Kurokawa, science adviser to Japan's former prime minister Shinzo Abe and a professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo. "You were not really being tested to be someone independent, you were still working as a subordinate of your preceptor." In 2004, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science said that more than half of Japanese researchers had worked at only one institution during their scientific career.
Aiming for flexibility
The 10,000-postdoc programme was designed to make the position commonplace, allow young researchers to work independently and to aid flexibility so that they could switch labs. Another motive was that the number of PhDs awarded in Japan more than doubled from 1980 to 2002, leaving the system with more researchers than it could absorb. The postdoc programme just postponed the struggle for employment, say critics.
"Opportunities for getting a faculty position at universities or national institutions are not increasing," says Yoshinori Kumazawa, a materials scientist at Nagoya University. He says staff at other institutions have told him that budget cuts have left them unable to fill empty positions, much less take on new ones.
That doesn't mean the programme was a failure, says Ken-ichi Arai, professor emeritus of biochemistry at the University of Tokyo. But he is concerned that research funding continues to focus on 'big science' projects headed by established scientists; few initiatives create positions and funding for young researchers. "I'm generally positive about the past ten years of academic and industrial reforms in Japan," he says, citing recent increases in the numbers of women and foreign scientists. But a fundamental problem remains, he says: too many postdocs and too few positions.
Japan's postdocs are not alone in facing uncertain employment. A recent study by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology noted that, although the number of US PhDs awarded in biology has increased from about 4,000 to more than 7,000 since 1981, the proportion of US biomedical science PhDs holding tenure or tenure-track positions 5–6 years after earning their PhDs fell from nearly 35% in 1981 to just over 20% in 2003. But there is a key difference: in the United States, the number of biomedical PhDs who take industrial jobs has also risen, and now encompasses 30% of the PhD pool. In Japan, only 0.2% of postdocs worked for private corporations in 2005. That amounted to 32 people.
Company reluctance
Japanese companies don't traditionally hire PhDs, preferring younger, less specialized researchers who are perceived as being more malleable, says Kurokawa. Raymond Price, now a manager at the biotech firm Acucela in Bothell, Washington, says that the Japanese drug firm he worked for in Osaka had only two other PhDs in a neuroscience research group of 20 scientists. And those two had earned their doctorates while working for the company, through the 'paper PhD' system, which allows industry scientists to submit their company research as their thesis — almost unheard of in the West. Of the entire staff of 120 researchers, fewer than five had joined the company with a PhD, Price says. Such hiring patterns have effectively closed off industry to those with an advanced degree (see pie chart). "Once you do a PhD and a postdoc, you don't really have a choice but to go to an academic institution," says Kurokawa.
SOURCE: NATL INST. SCI. TECHNOL. POLICY
Yet policy-makers are now looking to industry to provide jobs for postdocs. One option, says Hitoshi Kikumoto of the University of Tsukuba's Industrial Liaison and Cooperative Research Center, is to reshape graduate school curricula to prepare PhDs for work in industry. Japan's education ministry has established a programme to promote the diversification of science and technology career paths. It has provided funding to nine universities, two public research institutes and an academic society to come up with options for postdocs. Shinichi Kobayashi, who chairs such a committee at the University of Tsukuba, says that most programmes have focused on encouraging postdocs to find jobs in industry. But, he notes, the programmes are "very modest" and unlikely to find real solutions.
UNIV. TOKYO
LOMBROSO
Raymond Price (below) notes that Japanese PhDs nearly always end up in academia —such as at the University of Tokyo (above).
Overcoming company doubts will be an important first step, says Arai. "The structure of traditional Japanese industry is also vertical and hierarchical," he says, "and it has been difficult to employ someone with a PhD already in the middle stage of their career." The emerging biotech industry may provide opportunities, he says, but is still young and unpredictable. Kurokawa has been lobbying the companies themselves, arguing that their refusal to hire PhDs stifles innovation by limiting the influx of outside ideas. Yet it will take more time before the commercial sector adopts that sense of flexibility, he says. In the meantime, postdocs will have to wait. "It was a bit premature to rapidly increase this postdoc pool," says Kurokawa. "So they tend to suffer."
A survey of 83 Osaka University science and technology postdocs found that 85% of them were insecure about their careers and 60% no longer wanted to be postdocs (see Nature 447, 1028; 2007). Short-term appointments leave postdocs little reprieve from job hunting, and the age limitations sometimes placed on postdoc positions add to the stress, notes Shoji Satoru, a nanotechnology postdoc at Osaka University. "I have to start job hunting again after a couple of years," he says. Meanwhile, he worries about what will happen when he reaches the age of 35 and loses eligibility for some postdoc positions.
Still, Satoru and others say they embarked on their scientific careers with their eyes open, having decided that the benefits of research outweigh the trade-offs of insecure employment. "All my colleagues are worried about it, but everyone still remains in this field," says Kyouhei Arita, a postdoc in a biochemistry lab at Kyoto University. Arita says that if he one day has postdocs of his own, he will advise them to think hard about their career decisions. "It is very hard to work as a postdoctoral scientist," he says.
Yet Kumazawa says postdoc concerns are reminiscent of those that scientists had when he was a graduate student: some felt that academic jobs were scarce then, too, he says. The problem was called 'the overdoctor issue'. "We occasionally had discussions about this issue, but no good remedy of our own," says Kumazawa. Scientists simply accepted it, he says. "They chose this career. They were happy and proud of being a scientist, even though they were unstable and poor."