Postdocs—the Ph.D.s who do much of the labor of science—are notoriously underpaid. But the problem has intensified over the past year as postdocs struggle to get by amid soaring inflation and professors report problems recruiting Ph.D. graduates to fill positions. Several institutions and states have recently implemented policies to increase their pay. But these policies haven’t always come with an increase in funding, leaving lab leaders wondering how to cover rising staff costs and what the downstream effects will be. “I think a lot of faculty feel extremely trapped,” one professor says.
“This is much needed change; postdocs are simply not paid enough,” says Kelly Stevens, an associate professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. In that state, a law went into effect this month stipulating that organizations with 51 or more employees must pay salaried employees at least $65,478 per year; the National Institutes of Health (NIH) starting postdoc salary, which many institutions use as a baseline to set their postdoc pay, is $54,840. But the new mandate puts lab leaders in a tough position, Stevens adds, because federal research grants haven’t kept up with inflation and necessities such as lab supplies are also becoming pricier. “The money has to come from somewhere,” she says.
The push to raise pay is especially strong in high cost of living areas. In November 2022, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced that, starting this year, the minimum postdoc salary will be $65,000. In December, University of California (UC) postdocs won a new contract that will bring their minimum salary to $71,490 by October 2026. And last week, Princeton University announced it will raise its minimum postdoc salary to $65,000 in March.
These increased salaries are still a far cry from what Ph.D. graduates can make in many industry positions. But for those who want to stick with academia, the raises may help relieve some financial stress. “A postdoc has to earn a living wage,” says Benedict Borer, an environmental microbiologist and president of the MIT Postdoctoral Association. Before the recent raise at MIT, he adds, it had “become difficult for … postdocs, especially postdocs with family, to actually just get through the year.”
Professors contacted by Science agree. “The whole profession has to face up to, ‘Yeah, OK, we have all been collectively underpaying the postdocs,’” one says. “We have a selfish reason to want to pay them better,” another adds: “We want to be able to attract … the best talent.”
But many of those faculty members are also left worrying who will foot the bill. MIT and Princeton have allocated temporary supplementary funding to cover the salary increases. UC, however, hasn’t as of now provided additional funding. “Funding [for postdocs] is primarily provided by external grants from the federal government or private fellowships,” a university spokesperson wrote in an email to Science.
“Most people’s analysis is that we will just have to have smaller labs,” says Bassem Al-Sady, an associate professor of epigenetics at UC San Francisco. That’s fine for him personally—he likes the feel of a smaller lab and wants to pay his postdocs a wage that makes their lives “stress-free.” But he worries about what will happen down the line when faculty members in high cost of living areas go to renew their federal grant support and their application is compared with those from researchers who could afford to hire more lab members. “I wonder if it causes a disparity in competitiveness.”
NIH established a working group in November to come up with recommendations to better support and retain postdocs, which it will issue later this year. At a December Advisory Committee to the Director meeting, acting NIH director Lawrence Tabak expressed optimism that the working group would come up with tangible solutions. “The current system … is no longer sustainable,” he said. “It’s very, very important that we lay out what the potential options are.” But solutions will not come easy, he added. “It is a zero-sum game … so spending our way out of this, I think, is going to be complicated.”
Many of the professors Science spoke with hope Congress or state governments will commit additional funds to help address the problem. “To me, the answer is invest more money in [academic science], not shrink it,” a research institute executive and scientist told Science on the condition that she remain anonymous. She’s currently looking at her institution’s finances to determine how much it can afford to raise its postdoc salaries—and she hopes government agencies are doing the same. “What I would hope is that the government is feeling the urgency as much as we feel … to find money somewhere.”
“There’s only so much funding you can ask individual faculty to obtain given scarce federal support,” Al-Sady adds. In December, he wrote to his state representatives to ask that more funding be set aside for California’s universities. “Please, please help us!” he wrote. “There is no place I would rather be, but I cannot do it without some support.”
Source: Science Mag