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How important is outreach for applying to tenure track professor position?
I often see outreach listed in the CVs of professors, which makes me believe that doing outreach is beneficial to advancing a professors career. What I'm wondering though is if this is only import for going from assistant professor to associate professor or if outreach can also be beneficial to securing a tenure-track professor position. I find this is especially important to know since most universities limit the page numbers of a CV submitted during the application process, so I'm not sure if an outreach section is beneficial or detrimental (since it would mean removing another part of the CV).
What is the overall thought across different fields (I'm in Physics but curious if the same thoughts are held in Chemistry, Mathematics, Computer Science, etc.) on the importance of outreach when applying for tenure-track professor position?

What do you mean by "outreach" exactly? The way the tag defines it or something else?

Note that I just added some things to [tag:outreach].

At what kind of university?  What is the department hiring for?

Hey @Buffy, I mean outreach with the general public (and typically kids/teens). For my field in particular it is all about trying to spark interest in Physics with young kids/teens.

Hey @AlexanderWoo, I'm think mostly about research universities (none in particular, just in general). In terms of hiring, it would be for tenure-track professor position.

This seems difficult to answer when we don’t know what you will be taking out of your CV to include the outreach section. There are things that are more important than outreach, and there are other things that are less important. Also different places would care about different things. So I would hate to speculate about what I think is the “correct” order of importance and potentially mislead you into thinking that’s some kind of objective truth.

@Cavenfish  I am not familiar with page limits on CVs in applications.  Just how short is the typical limit?

Pertinent to academia, I think of outreach as activities that bring academic subject matter and/or expertise to a community audience, often an audience that is under-served.  Activities might include lectures or presentations to community audiences presented in laymen’s terms about subjects that are esoteric but interesting; interacting with elementary students to make a topic (like programming) more understandable or to engage them in the scientific process; mentoring high school students doing a science fair project.  There are others.
The degree to which describing involvement in outreach might help an application for a tenure-track position may depend on factors specific to the institution and its values; the teaching responsibilities of the assistant professor position; and the degree of prior involvement in outreach.  For example, a university that has a stated commitment to the community in which it resides might place high value on prior involvement in outreach because outreach aligns with the values of the institution.  If the specific department has an outreach program (e.g., it holds regular coding camps or has a formal affiliation with an elementary school) prior involvement in outreach might strengthen the application because it demonstrates experience relevant to the department.  Outreach that has involved interactions with students at any level may be more important when the Assistant Professor position will involve teaching undergraduates because it provides some evidence of prior experience in teaching/interacting (hopefully) positively with young people.  But the outreach should be clearly and unambiguously meaningful.  “I spent 1 week as a counselor at a math camp” probably doesn’t help and may hurt.
Finally, in a space-constrained CV, description of outreach should not displace documentation of specific requirements of the position (e.g., education, research experience, involvement in professional societies, publications/presentations.)
The goal of the CV should be to “market” yourself for the position.  If you’ve documented what needs to be documented and documenting outreach might help your application, include it.

Outreach is not the same as teaching experience.

"space-constrained CV"  Tenure track positions do not have a CV length limit.

@Anonymous Physicist  Yes, I was surprised that the OP indicated that there was a page limit on the CV as I have not encountered this. Your answer clarifies that this is not something to expect at most universities.

At most universities, outreach is not part of the formal hiring criteria.  Even when it is part of the criteria, it is not one of the important criteria.
However, you might be asked during a job interview, "How do you engage with the community?" or "How will you participate in recruiting students?"   You should have outreach experience you can use as an example to answer that question.
Scientists should do outreach because it benefits the public.  Do not expect a reward.

most universities limit the page numbers of a CV submitted during the application process

This is not true for tenure track positions.

Your application should present the clearest possible brief picture of who you are and why you are a fit for the job you seek.
Some schools will value a professor's interest in connecting to a larger community than their professional specialty, both for new hires and for promotion. I suspect few would think it negative.
Your question suggests that outreach is a part of how you see yourself professionally, so you should look for jobs where that is welcome, even expected.
A line or two in your cv and perhaps a paragraph in your cover letter won't use up a lot of real estate.


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Why is obtaining research grants so important to universities?
I do not understand why universities are putting “pressure” on staff to obtain research grants. Well, in certain fields, research grants might be important for getting instruments or equipment, but in other fields, what we really need in order to produce research outputs is really just a good library.
This question might seem naive, but it seems no one is willing to explain this to me in a frank and clear manner.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. Please post answers as answers, folks.

Given that other responses are quite US-centric, here a counterpoint: in Germany (and possibly many other continental European countries), there used to be no pressure for grant money for regular-sized research, as departments endowed their professors with sufficient funds for typical research in their field. Exceptions would be large-scale projects which required significantly increased budgets or special governmental programs one could apply for.
About the '00s, this model changed and increasingly the US model was adopted. It is difficult to point to a specific reason why this happened. Notably, German universities are typically getting their money from the state and not from endowments, so essentially, this constitutes a redistribution of governmental funds in what is considered a more competitive process. It is not clear whether this is indeed the most effective use of funds, as now researchers time is invested in the process of writing proposals, reviewing them, writing reports etc., all including the high failure rate of such proposals increasing the volatility of research funding continuity and high churn.
As for the argument of overheads, again this is effectively just an accounting model. In the UK, it was explicitly changed from a "the university pays for the infrastructure, the government pays the salaries and equipment" to "everything is separately accounted for".
It is again not easy to disentangle to which extent this has really changed how money is being used or whether it is now used more appropriately; many such accounting rules are conventions, but one consequence is that it changes price tags on projects, reducing fundable project volume, while the institutions need to run their infrastructure whether or not they run a project.
There is no question that there are ambitious project ideas that require funding beyond the regular and for this, funding is essential. However, the idea that even the funds for regular research activity needs to be competitively applied for has distinctly originated in the US, due to the specific structure of the US university funding model.
It is not clear at all that the European university funding model needed such a strong veer towards the US research funding model; it was a specifically political decision.
One possible explanation was the intention to save money. If that was the intention, it is not clear whether it was successful, because with the significant friction of competitive funding processes, the output per invested money may actually have gone down instead of up (note that in, say, Germany, this is mostly government money anyway, whether in the universities, or the funding agencies).
A second possible explanation is the desire for competitiveness. The idea is that researchers with higher quality research should get more money. This may be partly working, but it also favours proposal-churning models of operation and not-too-adventurous and risk-averse research, no matter what the calls say. Very outlandish projects are not likely to be funded.
A third possible explanation is gatekeeping. Funding distribution models permit more influential researchers (and political agents)
to direct research agendas. Instead of curiosity-driven research, this enables agenda-driven research. To be fair, if one bewails the loss of curiosity-driven research, one should remember that over most periods, research was mostly agenda-driven, whether alchemists hiding gold dust in their oven, or Galilei giving out telescopes to his patrons. The concept of a curiosity-driven scholar thrived in particular pockets of time and space and was never a universal feature of university. Nonetheless, one will notice that some of the most lasting and celebrated achievements of science emerged from permissive niches of curiosity.
These are several reasons I am aware of, maybe I will extend this list with additional ones.
Whatever the reasons, with the adoption of the US-type perspective on research funds, university gain not only money, but prestige from being able to acquire grant money. As such, grants are considered a way to measure the research prowess of an institution, with large grants indicating more prowess. Funding volume follows scientific excellence with significant delay and averaged over time - rarely does the volume of a project directly correlate with its scientific value (with some exceptions, again, such as large-scale instruments and experiments).
TL;DR:
While ostensibly universities need grant money to fund personnel and overheads, in its basic form, this is a US-centric perspective. For Europe, this is not ultimately an explanation, as there used to be different funding models for universities. The move towards a competitive grant-based funding model has many potential reasons, ranging, for instance, from the desire to increase competitiveness, save money, or be able to set the agenda of scientific research.
As such giving importance to external funding is a political decision, and as consequence, European universities have begun to vye for grant money not only for reasons of finance, but also of prestige, power and influence.

What does "faculties endowed their chairs" mean precisely?

@Captain : do you think the “old” model is now unworkable because the size of the research pie never grew as fast as the number of researchers?

You pointed out that "not-too-adventurous" projects are more likely to be funded and now I am also wondering about hyped domains. For example, since "quantum" and "neural network" are somehow buzz words, I suppose that a project about, let's say, "quantum neural networks" would have more chances of obtaining funding, so this funding model could also impact the academic freedom of the researchers, as they could drop legitimate/important projects in less hyped domains because they are less likely to get money for their research... Do you think that effect could really happen?

As a comment for Germany in particular, it may be noted that the universities are funded by the states, while the most grant money comes from the federal budget (or from the EU in case of European funding). They way tax money is allocated and distributed in Germany, the states' tend to have more budget problems than the federal government. The interest of the states to use federal funding to offset their reduction in university funding is likely to have contributed to the current state.

@AzorAhai-him- "Faculties endowed their chairs" means that a new appointed prof would get several assistantships and a generous starting package, sometimes even running costs from the beginning, without needing to request any external funding.

@ZeroTheHero I am not sure if the number of researchers in Germany grew as much as in places where student fees were a thing. Numbers in Germany, where programs were oversubscribed, were limited by the marks achieved at high school, not via monetary considerations. But I do not know the concrete numbers.

@DCTLib Yes, that may be a point. Question is why was it possible then, and became no longer feasible? Perhaps Zero is right and numbers of potential researchers have gone up. There might have been political pressure to have more students graduate; but I left the country before that would have been a thing, so I am not sure of that. Note however, that Germany made the transition to the Bachelor/Master model in the Bologna process, so this may have affected the situation.

@HilderVitorLimaPereira Of course that happens. It is difficult to do research in topics which are badly funded when you are expected to bring in money; not impossible, but definitely an uphill battle.

I remember reading a (german) book arguing along the same lines (Binswanger: Sinnlose Wettbewerbe, 2010) some time ago, but unfortunately I only remember the description of the (then) current state (time and thus money is wasted because competition supposedly improves everything) but not how or why the situation changed to become this way.

The adoption of the "US model" in the US coincided in time with a truly vast increase in the amount of funds directed at university research.  These two events were probably not directly causally related, but the coincidence may have led to a conclusion that the US model "worked" politically for increasing research funding overall.

This is a good answer that indeed applies to other continental European countries as well. The main con in some is that the search for grants still involve digging into governmental resource. No extra money is really flowing to research.

@Alchimista Precisely. It's a redistribution - though, as DCTlib says, there may be a rebalancing of State-level and Federation-level funding in Germany, so, as always, it is not quite as simple.

Ah, got it, every prof is a chair in Germany?

@CaptainEmacs: I’m fairly sure that Azor’s question is because you might have mis-translated “Fakultäten” as faculties, which in English would be professors. I assume you meant something closer to “departments.” Or that’s how I read that part of your interesting answer, and how I remember things.

@gnometorule Oh yes, thank you for pointing that out. Fixed.

@AzorAhai-him- This was careless writing from my side, not every prof is a chair, but even non-chair profs used to get guaranteed resources and running costs, just not as much. Fixed. Thank you for pointing this out.

At least in STEM, funding ("endowment") for chairs still seems to be decently high in Germany. Not as high as it used to be, maybe, but looking at the offers various friends of mine have negotiated recently it's still a pretty far cry from the international standard (which seems to vary between "you get your salary" and "you don't even get 12 months of your own salary").

As a point of comparison, here in Sweden my research university expects to pay about 50% of my salary, and 0% of any PhD student or postdoc except for the time when they are explicitly teaching.

@xLeitix Do you have any idea whether it used to be different? Or whether the number of professorships has gone up?

@CaptainEmacs I don't really know the answer to the first question, but at least not recently. The answer to the second question is "yes", but partially due to title inflation ("professors" used to be more like Dutch-style one-per-field-and-uni professors, and now we tend to have US-style tenure tracks).

@CaptainEmacs But the deeper philosophical difference is that Swedish universities really only want to pay for teaching and service, and expect staff to fund close to 100% of their research activities externally.

@CaptainEmacs Congratulations on leaving the country! I'm instead going to (have to) leave academia after many, many years because with family responsibilities I can now no longer afford to play the "funding roulette" game. It's a shame, though, I love this job.

@Thomas Sorry to hear that! However, I can assure you that there is "life after academia" as I hear from my friends, and some of them continue doing good research in industry, especially today. It's a bit of a joke that some of the best opportunities funding and execution-wise are actually now outside of academia.

@CaptainEmacs Thanks. I hope that I will reach a stage in my life where I'll be interested in a life outside academia, or it might get pretty miserable pretty quickly for me. Regarding your last sentence, I think this is actually intended - as a country, you have an incentive to get (some) bright minds out of academia and into the industries, and the academic funding system currently in place supports this goal. Nevermind that it's a game played on the backs of actual people, though.

@Thomas I think your view is a little overly cynical. Academia, in Germany and everywhere else, has the problem that there are many more "bright people" interested in staying in academia than actual jobs. It doesn't need some conspiracy or big overarching plan to push people out of such a system.

@xLeitix I don't find my point of view cynical at all, although I see how it could be misunderstood as such. As a country, you have an interest in a high-quality academia - but at the same time, you need to avoid that research becomes too self-centered. You will have noticed what a big focus current research funding puts on dissemination of the results. There's an old article in which Edsger W. Dijkstra compares the research landscape of the US and Europe and laments how terrible the US system is. The description he gives of that system matches pretty much perfectly the European one today.

@Thomas Maybe I read too much into your comment, sorry about that.

@Thomas Yeah, I sympathize with Dijkstra, and yet we adopted the system here. I have really no idea why. However, the incentives for dissemination of results is not one of the things I criticise, though. So many good results were gathering dust in the cupboards of scientists in Germany only to be overtaken by faster and sloppier versions of similar results from the US. Publications are the ultimate outcome of research efforts, and all that remains of it. As for "impact", I have a different opinion, because of much a later influential result, the impact can not be predicted.

@CaptainEmacs Agreed. Unfortunately, I don't remember from the time I worked in the US whether an equal pressure to disseminate was imposed on researchers over there. If not, one might wonder how those "sloppier versions" ever made it into the markets. I also cannot help but feel that there's a reversal of responsibilities at play here: shouldn't it be up to companies to look out for innovation potential coming from academia? I often feel unqualified for the role of "pushing" project results onto whatever stakeholders outside the community because I don't know the commercial landscape.

@Thomas As academia is not directly productive, I guess this is Father Government's way of saying "you, go out and start making your own money".

@CaptainEmacs Probably. But isn't this attitude limiting academia to "near product" lines of research and disincentivizing "crazy out-there this-might-not-work-at-all" ideas? And what about discipline which by nature are more removed from applications - say, pure mathematics?

@Thomas You do not have to convince me. This is the message from above. It does not make sense and shows a tenuous understanding of what makes great research. But I guess, the West needs a second "Sputnik Shock" to realise that they are spending the capital of knowledge rather the interest. However, I can assure you that there are enough scientist who are still interested in the right things (i.e. unpredictable outlandish stuff) surviving in the "underground".

@CaptainEmacs No, no, I understand. I think we are pretty much on the same page. Another interesting aspect to discuss: why have researchers (in Germany, anyway) failed so far to organize themselves effectively to better lobby for the interests of science? Germany has a strong tradition of workers' unions but not so much in academia. The GEW for ex. is really more focused on K12 teachers. There are some recent initiatives but it remains to be seen whether they can create some traction. For me personally, they are coming too late (or, rather, "we are" since I'm trying to help), which is sad.

@Thomas It's bikeshedding (google it).  If they had put as much effort into stopping Bologna as they put into slapping down plagiarising politicians, things would have gone differently; as justified as the first was, the second was far more impactful.

@CaptainEmacs Thanks, very interesting exchange - would love to discuss more but unfortunately, it's already gotten quite OT and admittedly, the SE comment section is not the best place for it.

I’m in pure math, so my perspective is that of someone who really only needs “a good library” (and these days, not even that a lot of the time) to produce good research. Indeed, in my area funding is a lot less crucial than in the experimental sciences that rely on large amounts of both infrastructure and human labor. In that sense, there is a kernel of truth to what you’re saying.
Despite that, your question still contains a false premise. Even “a good library” employs a fair number of people and costs money to build and run. Likewise for all the other buildings and offices where all those smart brains that “only need a good library” work their magic. More importantly, those brains belong to people, who need to be paid for their efforts. Many of them are graduate students, who need to be trained to do research by much more experienced (and expensive to employ) faculty before they can begin to produce anything approaching good work. So, the research component of a university, even in purely theoretical areas, ends up being a rather costly enterprise to run, with high expenditures on both physical and human infrastructure. And of course, unlike a for-profit corporation, there is no obvious source of incoming funds to fund those activities based on their immediate economic value to society, which is close to zero.
Anyway, the pressure that you mention is not equally strong in all areas. But it is a fact that the research mission of a university needs money to operate, and grant funding is one of the main mechanisms for obtaining that money. Applying for grants is less fun than most other components of a researcher’s job, so universities come up with various ways to, er, motivate their researchers to be be successful in that aspect of their job. It is not inconceivable that such incentives are designed in a way that makes them perceived as “pressure” by at least some people.

I don't know which country you are describing but from my experience in pure math in several European countries virtually all postdoc positions are paid through research grants. In some cases the postdoc has the grant themselves, in other cases a professor got a grant to pay for a postdoc for a few years but either way it is money that was acquired through applying and getting some research grant.

Quoting Ian Sudbery's answer to another question:

Funding is all. If you don’t get funding, you can’t do research. If you don’t get funding, you definitely won’t get promoted. In my university, if you don’t get funding you won’t pass your probationary period to get a lectureship, and at many places if you don’t keep getting funding, you are in danger of losing your job. Not all funding is equal, because not all funding comes with overheads: that is, if I apply for a grant to buy a $ 100,000 piece of equipment and the funder gives me $ 100,000, then the university gets nothing. There are different ways of seeing this. You could see it as the university wanted to profit from the grant. Or you could see it as the university needing to find the funds to pay my salary, heat, light and clean my office etc. Making the university a lot of money is primarily what gets you promoted.

Funding lets you hire students/postdocs, buy equipment, buy computers, etc. The overhead on the grant also helps pay the electricity bill, pay the cleaners, pay for the library, etc.
Money makes the world (and universities) go round.

This response fails to mention the fact that this is a specifically US-centric perspective that was exported to the rest of the world and now it pretends to be "the natural state of things". It isn't. In Germany, it used to be fact ('70 and '80s and even early '90s) that a professorship came with batteries (i.e. assistantships and generous startup funding) included (in STEM). Having 4-6 research assistantship positions associated with a chair was standard expectation. You only applied for grants for special equipment/requirements. Under this perspective, OP's question is quite reasonable.

But in something like math, isn't all you need a salary and university funding? For example, in the US, my understanding is that students and postdocs are paid by the university. Sometimes they can be funded by grant money, but not always. I always thought of grants as just ways to show that you're a productive researcher doing "cutting-edge" work.

This answer is wrong because universities, on average, loose money on grants.  The cost of applying and managing grants exceeds the overhead.

@AnonymousPhysicist I do not know where you have this information but in all places I know overheads from grants are a massive source of income.  Granted: not all this additional income is spend wisely by the powers that be, but is it certainly a net positive.

@Mehta there is no free lunch: universities do not usually pay students scholarships from operating budgets.   This funding usually comes from endowments or from recycled overheads.  Other income for graduate students and postdocs comes from work: teaching or TAing.

@CaptainEmacs Its been this way in the UK for quite some time. My dad was an academic, and the pressures were the same in his day also. In fact he was denied promotion to professor for years because his funding record wasn't good enough.

@AnonymousPhysicist Well, its funny, isn't it? Because our esteamed leaders tell us that they lose money on grants when it suits them. But then they also tell us we lose money on student fees and it suits them as well. Its a miricle any unviersity manages to continue existing! The answer is that the loss is an accounting effect. Those things the university claims cost more than what they get in overheads? They would have had to pay them anyway, even if there was no grant. So while the income per unit might be less than the cost per unit, they still make less loss than without the grant.

@IanSudbery Yes, I wasn't sure about the UK's historical funding models, so, by Europe I mean continental Europe, possibly with some emphasis on German-speaking countries.

The moment universities start operating according to the profit motive is usually the same moment when they become diploma mills.

If the university needs external funding to pay your salary then they really should not be employing you at all. How can any institution employ a person if they cannot fund your salary?

@NeilMeyer All sources of income are "external", whether tution fees, direct government subsidy, charitable donation or research grant, it all comes from outside the university. Research grant income is particularly volitile on an indevidual level, but its much less volitile when averaged across the whole university - actaully less volitile than tuition fee income.

Overheads from grants are a substantial net source of income: if your grant is X, the university (in the US) will directly claw back a non-negligible percentage from X to keep the lights on (the researcher gets X-overhead). In Canada, overheads on Tri-Council grants are usually paid on top of the grant, directly to the institution, on a sliding scale (less than most US places I know).
It is true there is cost incurred (electricity, heating, maintenance, admin etc) in doing research but if you run a Uni you have these costs anyways so the marginal cost to the university of having researchers is much smaller than the overhead amounts they receive.  Research income is increasingly crucial in times of diminishing (state) government funding of higher education.
There are multiple indirect benefits.  Because grants are competitive, research income is often taken as a proxy for the quality of the faculty.   If you have research-active faculty, they will need graduate students who usually bring in tuition. Research is also a recruitment tool: research opportunities for students are often a major factor in selecting a university.  It is also a fundraising tool: Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, has endowed multiple research chairs at the University of Oregon and at Stanford (in addition to multiple hundreds of millions of dollars in donation to the universities.)
Sometimes, faculty members will start a spin-off company based on research results they obtained, and universities will get a slice of those revenues.  Gatorade is a product developed at the University of Florida, where the sports teams are named “Florida Gators” (hence the name); the university got of piece of those revenues (Gatorade was sold to PepsiCo so I don’t know how things sorted themselves out after.)
Now… one should really take this in context because in some areas (philosophy, music, English literature etc), there are very few grants, and it doesn’t mean faculty in these departments aren’t doing research or don’t have good ideas.

Re: "Overheads": In other words, an internal tax.

@PeterMortensen in part yes but since applicants bake in the overhead in the actual amount asked it’s really a tax on the funding agency.  There is cost to managing a grant, but when the overhead is 40%, or even 50%, it does become a magic money tree for the institution.

Well, PhD students very often do not bring in any tuition, but they also profit the university, who gets reasonably expert teaching assistants for the salary of a fry cook, in a counterfactual sense.

"Overheads from grants are a substantial net source of income"  I do not believe this is true when you account for the costs of administration, facilities, utilities, and importantly the cost of failed grant applications.

Marginal cost of energy and other utilities is not small for all kinds of research.

A university IP office told me that on average universities lose money on IP licensing because enforcement is so expensive.  That includes startups.

@AnonymousPhysicist IP is a grey area.  It depends who you ask, but in some cases such offices are mandated by governments to justify university research.  I think we could do without on a philosophical basis, but I lost that battle.

@AnonymousPhysicist WARF may be an exception because they've held a couple very valuable patents, but they have a billion dollar endowment and give out $70 mil in annual research grants. Maybe some IP offices lose money but not all of them.

@KevinArlin grad students typically have tuition offsets, i.e. it’s part of their scholarship.  From an accounting perspective, the scholarship $$ comes from various sources but rarely operating funds (except for TA, which is just salary for hired work).

@BryanKrause Yes, I am aware of the outliers.

Just a data point, but the main Austrian grant agency doesn't pay any overheads since a fee years ago.

@henning is this compensated then some sort of block grants or is it baked in the grants? after all, these research groups do have their admin staff to pay.

@ZeroTheHero afaik, the university is supposed to provide admin and other basic resources.

@henning Editorial: Overall I think your system is better than ours.

This is not a naive question, but as you can see from the many good existing answers, how universities are funded isn't straight-forward (and grants are a substantial part of it).
I will try to explain based on my own university (Chalmers University of Technology). Some of the specifics will be, well, specific to our university, but in broad strokes I have seen similar dynamics at play at every university I worked at.
We are a well-known, privately owned research university in South-West Sweden. Despite being "private", we are tightly integrated into (and a substantial player in) the Swedish educational system, meaning our positioning in practice is somewhere between a traditional European public university and a "real" private university.
A research university with large undergraduate programs, such as Chalmers, really has two jobs:

"Education" (in form of bachelor, master, and PhD programs, as well as lifelong learning)
"Research" (including basic research, innovation, technology transfer, etc.)

This two "jobs" bleed into each other (one of the key ways how innovative ideas are "transferred" into industry is by teaching undergraduates, and PhD education and research are so closely related that the border is basically impossible to draw), but those are essentially the two big things the government and society at large expects from us.
Unsurprisingly, both of these "jobs" cost money. Education needs teachers, research needs researchers, and both need administrative support staff. Buildings and other infrastructure need to be maintained, and many other small and large costs accrue. Sadly, neither of these "jobs" actually generates substantial money directly - in Sweden education is free (students pay no tuition, even at our private university), and with the exception of the rare patent- or spinoff-generating research, even world-class publications do not pay salaries or utility bills. At Chalmers, just like at most universities (at least in Europe), all our core functions are substantial loss leaders.
Hence, Chalmers needs income streams. The government pays us for graduating students, which is sufficient (more or less) to cover the "education job" at least on bachelor and master level.
However, who pays for research and PhD education? As a private university, we do not directly get money from the government to hire research staff. We do have an endowment, but it's not the size of typical US endowments. Hence, the only way to actually do research is by getting some external organization to pay for most or all of it. This is exactly what a grant is. Importantly, this typically includes all costs associated with doing research, not just equipment: salary for PhD students, some prorated amount of salary for administrative personnel, offices and other infrastructure costs, travel expenses, and laptops. Importantly, at Chalmers, even the researcher themselves will often "cover" some fraction of their own salary from their grants, to "buy out" themselves from other university duties.
In conclusion, even a researcher who needs zero equipment outside of a library still needs grants to actually conduct research. Otherwise they will have very limited or no money to fund students, limited money to travel or publish, and potentially no time to actually work on the research since they can't "buy themselves out" from other university duties. The key idea to understand here is that grants are really how universities pay for the "research job" they are asked to do, since doing research, by itself, does not generate money.

@CaptainEmacs' answer does a good job of explaining why it doesn't have to be this way, if the world were to choose a different system of university funding, but it doesn't really explain why universities behave the way they do given the current system.
Other answers deal with the question of overheads, and there is some discussion over what the marginal costs of research in terms of overhead, and how much of this would be costs the university would have irrespective.
But there is one big item that the university definately has to pay, irrespective, and that is the salary of the academic.
My contract says I spend 40% of my time teaching, 20% on admin and 40% on research. Lets just say, for the sake of argument, that student fees cover the 40% teaching time, and half the admin time. That still leaves 50% of my salary to find from somewhere.
UK universities (where I am) don't have endowments - what capital they do have (generally in the $10m's rather than the fractions of $1b) is generally kept as cash reserves, rather than income generating investments. Their is some government block grant for research, known as the quality-related research grant, but this does not cover every one's salary.
If I charge 10%-20% of my time to a grant (which is average), that is 10%-20% the university doesn't have to find from somewhere.
But what of the costs of applying for the grants? Is that greater than the 10% I get? Well, no, because generally if my funding is running out, I write new applications on top of all the things I was doing anyway, in the evenings and weekends, not instead of - thus while there is a cost involved in applying for grants, often, the individual, rather than the university foots that cost.

To turn briefly to CaptainEmacs' point about why things have changed: Firstly, they haven't changed that much in my field, in the UK - research funding was still important 40 years ago, but perhaps not quite as much as now. So what has changed?
Well, one thing that has changed is that we have gone from 10% of young people going to university, to 50%. That means a large increase in the number of academics to teach them (not quite 5x, but still quite a large increase). If all those academics were traditional research & teaching positions, it would have meant a similar increase in research. But the increase in government research funds is way, way less than that.
One solution would be that everyone spends less than 40% of their time of research (i.e. a change in the classic 40:40:20 model). But instead what happened was that some people funded their research through grants, and stay 40:40:20, while others didn't and became almost fully teaching focused, leading to research intensive institutions, and teaching focused institutions, where as previously all universities had been "research intensive".

see the classic http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive_print.php?comicid=1060

To set the record straight, most US R1 universities don't have endowments. They are state universities, depending on  a mix of funds, including taxation. Those that do have endowments don't spend them on normal expenses such as salaries. They are long term (sometimes very long term) investments.

I also think that European research universities, including UK, are heavily subsidized by taxation. Pleas verify or refute. They aren't "student funded", nor are they in the US.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universities_in_the_United_Kingdom

@Buffy I've removed to the comparison to US universities - I have to admit I'm most familier with the Ivy league, where, for example, Harvard's endowment earned a $3.5bn income, of which $2bn went to paying the unviersities operating costs. https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy20_harvard_financial_report.pdf.

@buffy UK univerisites are not really "heavily" subsidized by taxation these days, other than via research grants. You can find the financial statements of my instution (which is a middle of the road reserach intensive) here: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/finance/annual-report-financial-statements, if you look at 2018-2019 (i.e. pre pandemic), you'll see the university's income (p 42) is made up of £331m from tuition fees, £86 from direct government grants, £183m research grants and £110m "other", which is mostly commerical income.

The largest chunk of tution fees (see p46) is Full time home undergrads (£132.7m) and overseas students (£149m). We have 14,800 home undergrades (p22), so that works out at 132.7m/14800 = £8,966, which is very close to the £9,250 that students pay.

Think of it this way a university is not really a full job. You are still self employed and you need to sell something, You just happen to sell projects for grants. Writing a proposal is like bidding. So in essence this is a form of capitalism.

@joojaa At least in the UK you will continue to be paid full time even if you don't have grants, although if this continues for a while, you may find you are in trouble.

@IanSudbery well yes they have a contract... But at renewal that might be a problem. Obviously there are other possible roles too

@joojaa no, academic contracts in the UK are mostly (at the time of writing) permanent positions with no "renewal".  You are unlikely to be sacked for not getting research grants, but you may find yourself doing more teaching and admin, although this may vary from subject to subject (in some it is impossible to do research without substantial grants, but that is by no means true for all subjects).

@DikranMarsupial In particular, UK law states that if you employed continuously by the same employer for more than 2 years, it is not legal to just no renew a contract, the university would have to either demonstate that your services were no longer required and make you redundent (and then not be allowed to replace you), or start incompetency proceedings against you.  There are such things as insecure adjunct-like teaching positions in the UK, but they are postdoc equivalents, these people are general not eligable to apply for grants.

[I]n certain fields, research grants might be important for getting instruments or equipment, but in other fields, what we really need in order to produce research outputs is really just a good library.

At least in Germany and Austria, but probably also in other EU countries, grant money funds a large chunk of positions (salary etc.). Many postdocs apply for grants to fund their own (precarious fixed-term) position these days.

I would say it all boils down to a fundamental lack of leadership. At a governmental level and at the university's level. Governments motives when it comes to education are typically not in the best interest of students or universities, but still they have to be unhappy bedfellows and somehow coexist.
I personally know that the great decline of my local university coincided with the day when an accountant was made chancellor. I personally know of music students who were accepted to a music program with so little theory training that I knew they had virtually no chance of passing their first year of harmony studies. The standard of acceptance gets lowered to anyone who can pay, but what is required to pass your first year still remains the same. The university accepts students who they know for certain have no chance of passing but because they can pay, the come, they pay, they fail and then they leave. None of this being a problem for an entity driven by profit.
When I think about the sad state of these affairs I think about what I once read on the Oxford university's website.  They mention that the whole of the music department on average admits 70 - 80 new students every year. The department also has around 30 full-time members of staff.
I cannot help but think to myself that there is probably no way that such a low student-to-teacher ratio could be managed without it costing the university more money than what it makes. That could probably be said about many departments at Oxford.
Do you think the Rector at Oxford would ever consider closing the music department over something as vulgar as money? A discipline that has been a part of Oxford since the middle ages? Money is not the metric of its success.
There are for sure some liberal arts colleges in the US which I would love to be a part of. Sarah Lawrence is a whole university dedicated to the character traits that I admire most in women. Does that university make lots of money probably not. Does it produce women whom I would consider lucky to know, for sure?
It just seems unfortunate to me that money is how we consider the success of higher learning, it is a rather one dimensional outlook on what it's influence can be on society.

This seems unrelated to the question.

I'll note that in most universities, the individual departments aren't required to fund everything. At least in the US, the goal is a broad education, not just a lucrative one. So some departments are carried by the more popular ones to provide balance. Music might well be in that category at Oxford, or even Sarah Lawrence.

@Buffy how do we put value on an education, some people go to uni to be admitted to a profession, some have no idea what they want to do with there lives? I don't really have the answer as to how you should judge higher learning institutions success, but I still believe it can be a life affirming experience for many people even if it is not profitable.

Universities do not apply for grants to get grant money.  Grant money is spent on expenditures the university would not have made if it did not have the grant.  Receiving a grant usually causes the university to lose money.  The university must spend money on compliance, administration, space, utilities and grant applications (70-80% of which fail).  The university may receive "overhead" money from the grant agency, but this is less than the costs.

Universities do apply for grants to gain prestige.  Grants are the ultimate competition in academia.  If you win grants, you are the best.  The research resulting from the grants also contributes prestige, but that is secondary.

This is nonsense. If I do not get a grant, the uni must pay my salary from some internal funds (which are limited and I might be stripped of my bonuses that make a big part of my salary). If I do get the grant, 50% of my salary might be covered by the grant agency. In fact, more than 90% of the funds requested (before adding the fixed overhead) in my application goes for the salary. And then the uni pockets the overhead, which is almost completely a pure gain.

@VladimirF "50% of my salary might be covered by the grant agency."  NSF limits it to about 20% (two months additional salary, no salary replaced).  Other funding agencies I am familiar with limit it to 0%.

Hmmm. The voting here is a bit harsh, I think. But I'd like a reference for the statement that the compliance cost is more than the overhead charged.

I got grants for equipment and for (primarily) travel. I might have gotten the money anyway from the university, but it would, as the writer here says, have to come from internal sources not specifically budgeted. My salary was always a normal university expense.

@VladimirF, perhaps faculty funding in the Czech Republic is very different from some other places. "Bonuses"??? Whatever is that? Or are you a student who is grant funded?

yeah not sure why it’s downvoted….

I don't understand the downvotes either. Sure, grants bring in money to the university, but, at least from a superficial perspective, the costs are very high. I'd like to see a rigorous study of the costs and benefits. Most research professors I know spend a majority of their time writing and reviewing grants. Typically, the grants pay for only a couple months of their salary. From this perspective, the universities are paying professors $50K–$100K per year simply to write and review grants, plus employing grants specialists and all the people in award services.

@WaterMolecule Ironically, if a lot of these guys weren’t so busy travelling they’d have more time to do more than just grant writing.

@Buffy Unfortunately overhead varies greatly (sometimes it's zero) and nobody's willing to admit how much they spent (including salary) on failed grant applications, so good data is hard to get.   But it's pretty obvious:  grants have about a 20% success rate, and often you spend months of faculty salary on each one.  That's about $100,000 in faculty salary costs per successful grant, and you haven't even looked at the other expenses.

@ZeroTheHero The traveling and meeting people got me quite a few grants that otherwise wouldn't have materialized. Some of my best and most productive collaborations started as the result of a few meetings in a foreign location. Maybe it doesn't work for you, but don't generalize it to others.

@CaptainEmacs as with many things moderation is the word.  Just pointing out that many claim to be busy yet spend a disproportionate fraction of their time just travelling to attend the next conference.  Some travel works for me too and indeed is likely essential in the current environment.

@ZeroTheHero Moderation is never wrong. However, super-active academics often also cultivate a network for grant acquisition etc. You never know where your next collaboration will come from; for me it came from very unexpected and unplanned encounters.

@Buffy The "bonuses" make a big part of one's salary. No-one would work for the basic salary based on the tables. Instead, any person in the public sector earns the basic salary + personal bonus. The bonus is determined by the department boss based on productivity and similar criteria. It can be a very big part of the actual dalary. If were to be stripped of the bonuses, I would resign immediately, it is loughably low for people in STEM (even with the bonuses one of course would get more in the industry, but without them one could as well go begging).

@VladimirF, there is nothing like that in US, however.

@Buffy And it wasn't really the main point, it is the reason for mw, not for the uni. The reason for the uni is that it gets the salary covered. 100% of the claimed-time salary in-fact, those 50% is for a typical 50% project.

Grant money is spent on expenditures the university would not have made if it did not have the grant. 1) ok, but these are expenditures the uni wants to make, and 2) at least German unis did make those expenditures when their basic funding (i.e. non-grant funding) was still generous enough for them not to depend on grants.

@AnonymousPhysicist Our research costing system gives us a number called the "Net Research Contribution", which is the amount the university estimates the grant will bring in once it's marginal costs are accounted for. The numbers vary grant to grant, and discipline to discipline, but on my last grant this was 34% or £136k. It takes me about a month full time equivalent to write a grant, success rates are 20%, and the full cost of me to the uni is £6250 a month, so a succesful grant costs them about £30k (is not quite the case, as I don't actaully stop doing all other duties while I write).

@IanSudbery I have to say I do not believe the 34% actually accounts for all the marginal costs.  But I may be unfamiliar with your funding agency.

@AnonymousPhysicist - Its 34% left after marginal cost, not 34% covers marginal costs. But I can't speak to how accurate the calculation is, this is just what the universities tells us they are getting after marginal costs.

@IanSudbery I understood that.

@AnonymousPhysicist The weakness in your argument is in estimating that it cost salary to write a grant.  This is not quite true in most cases.  It does cost time to the applicant, but the reality is a tenured professor could choose not to write grants and this would not significantly affect the salary paid by university: it might influence bonuses or other forms of income directly related to research, but not the base salary.  Research, writing papers, reviewing grants and papers, is mostly unpaid work as far as university accounting goes.  (There are exceptions.)

"could choose not to write grants and this would not significantly affect the salary paid by university"  But they could be punished.  Also, most grant writers are not tenured; either they are pretenure or they work in places where tenure does not exist.

@AnonymousPhysicist it is absolutely false that “most grant writers are not tenured” or “work in places where tenure does not exist”.  It is true that in humanities, where grants are few, there are fewer faculty bothering to write grants, but in STEM most tenured faculty are still research active and need grants. I really have no idea where you get the impression that tenured academic (in STEM fields) don’t write grants.

… moreover: there is no real punishment.  If you are no longer interested in research, you may (sometimes) be asked to teach more, you probably cannot justify a sabbatical, but such instances are exceptions rather than the rule.

@ZeroTheHero There are entire countries where tenure does not exist.  Not getting a sabbatical is a huge punishment.

@AnonymousPhysicist with due respect: if you’re not doing research and don’t care to apply for grants, what’s the sabbatical for?

@ZeroTheHero Sounds like you agree with me.

@AnonymousPhysicist ‘seems you agree with me.

@AnonymousPhysicist we obviously have very different experiences on this topic.

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text:
Conference discussant: Is it appropriate to ask someone to present my comments?
I am a new assistant professor.  I have been invited for a conference discussant and said yes. However, I just realized that I am required to register for the conference (fee is $710) to serve as a discussant; my school doesn't pay for it because it is not my own study.
In this case, can I ask someone to present my comments instead of me? Is it rude to the organizer or harmful to my career?

Do I understand correctly that you have been invited to pay a fairly large sum of money? What kind of invitation is that?

The amount of money requested points to a predatory conference. It is nowadays relatively common that invited speakers are requested to pay the fee too. But I feel you have fallen in a trap. You shall be able to judge yourself if your work qualifies you as an invited speaker. It is already unusual that you are in this situation and come asking here.

Just tell them that you won't go if you have to pay them any money. You don't need to give them any reasons. Your invitation will almost certainly be rescinded, and you will be $710 richer for it.

The answer you need is from the conference, probably from the person that invited you.
But, make sure that this is a reputable conference. I get many "invitations" to less than reputable venues who are trolling for those fees.
For a reputable place, it might depend on why they asked you, specifically. If they want your expertise, then a substitute probably isn't going to satisfy them.
For a reputable place, you can also plead poverty and ask if the fee can be waived. Whether this works or not depends on lots of things, but if they really want you then --- maybe.
But ask them. An affirmative answer from this site does you no good at all.
A request to attend and speak at a conference not in your field is a fairly clear sign that it isn't reputable. The exception would be for superstars who might have something to say about the crossover between fields. For an assistant professor, I'd guess they want your money more than your ideas. Red flag.

How to ask?  Can you very kind provide proper sentences or wording?  It is not a conference in my field -- I think that it is a new conference.

If it isn't in your field it is a special reason to beware. Just ask, say you can't pay them, not will your institution. First for dropping the fees and if they say no, for the substitute to be invited. For the last, you can just suggest that person X might be able to accept an invitation.

Odds are it IS a predatory one. Make sure it isn't before even attempting any more steps.

Did you mean "red flag" instead of "red herring"?

@GoodDeeds, yes thanks

@neeehelp Just to emphasize a bit more strongly...it is extremely likely this is a fraud, do not pay. A new conference not in your field charging you a high fee to provide them a service: these are all huge red flags. They hope that you will feel so honored you will pay them money. There is absolutely no harm to your career for not participating in a predatory conference - there's more harm to do so.

Let's assume that the conference is organized in good faith and it is not a predatory one.
The organizers think your contribution is very relevant to the conference general success and they want you onboard.
Unfortunately, your current institution does not offer travel costs, because they do not understand the importance of the conference.
Once you reply this to who invited you, after a couple of days you will receive the reply from the organizers. They will have covered the session without your important contributions, therefore picking a second class discussant, or they may have decided they really need you. Since the organizers of the conference are really interested in you bringing your contributions, not in you being just a +1 carrying money and credibility to the conference with your affiliation and title, of course they will waive the conference fees. The fees waiver will most likely allow you to participate just for the day your contribution (you will have a no-frill conference, no banquet dinner and no excursion), plus maybe they will offer you some form of travel bursary.
Or, they will reply with a 10% discount, since most likely they are the usual predatory conference outsourcing all the communications to a cheap company which will organize the conference the same way they would organize a sight-seeing cruise in the Gowanus Canal.

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text:
My friend got into Johns Hopkins and UVA Math program with (almost) zero undergraduate research experience. How is that possible?
I am a rising junior, looking to apply for Ph.D. programs in Math or CS when my time comes. I heard that my friend got into the two prestigious universities for a Math Ph.D. program without much research. All he had was an undergraduate senior capstone paper in Mathematics (written in the fall semester of one's senior year to complete your math major) -- that is all for research --, a decent GPA (3.55), and I'm assuming decent recommendations. He graduated from a top 30 liberal arts college. I've seen people emphasizing the importance of research to get into Ph.D. programs but why are some undergraduate applicants accepted with very little experience?

We do not know details about your friend. There may be so many factors influencing the decisions, that we cannot possibly know.
But the important question is: why do you care? it is only one anedoctal point, aiming at a PhD you should know that even many anedoctal points do not add up for statistics. If you had infinite anedoctal points, well, then maybe yes ...

Graduate admissions in the US is based on many factors besides research experience and is often somewhat subjective.  See https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/38237/how-does-the-admissions-process-work-for-ph-d-programs-in-the-us-particularly/38238#38238 for a general overview of what's involved.

Because undergraduate research in pure mathematics is usually not worth very much, so most PhD programs don't expect it of applicants.

what about Computer Science? Do PhD programs expect of it a lot?

@heythere987, not in the US. An undergraduate degree, in any field, here is not a research degree and so it isn't expected. Some research can be a bonus.

For CS, don't many of the top programs like UIUC or GT have competition where undergrads are applying with a bunch of research experience?  Also I'm pretty sure people have posted where having some sort of research experience is ideal if you want to enter a PhD program, unless you are talking about a MS/PhD or a program where you earn an MS along the way?

For the top engineering programs I’m familiar with, “does this student have research experience of some form?” is a first-pass filter on the grad applicant pool

Well as a prospective applicant, I would pass this first filter.  But in fields like ML/NLP, which I want to pursue, don't people generally need publications, or is this only for places like MIT, etc.?


text:
Are there any funding issues going on in the US universities which are affecting PhD admissions this year?
Location: USA
Department: Computer Science
I’ve applied to 8 schools for PhD admissions this year and have only received a rejection from one so far (a private university). Rest of my applications are to public universities in the USA. I understand it is mostly a rejection if they’ve already started sending out offers to other candidates. But that is not the case this year. Speaking with the admissions committee and checking self-reporting websites like gradcafe, I see no offers have been rolled out at this point in time (previous years admissions have finished rolling out by end of Feburary). Is there any specific issue going on in universities and will that affect the acceptance rates?

I don't know about CS but the programs I know about are at their normal pace. You'll find out when you find out, but definitely do some contingency planning (which should be done from the start).

@BryanKrause: constructive, measured guidance. +1


text:
Journal keeps messing with my proof
Our work was accepted at a prestigious Q1 journal. We have gone through the peer review process and we’re in the final state of correcting the proof. I heard that it, the journal, is bad at editing,... and turns out it is worse than I thought. We sent them the full LaTeX source and the PDF. They sent us the draft of the proof and there were font errors everywhere. They sent us a link to an online editing tool used for editing the proof and it was the laggiest thing I have ever used (it is like MS Word, but worse). I can't even properly add a reference if it is not published. It took me a few days to point out most of the errors for them to fix and they later sent us the second proof. So I decided to use their online tool to edit the proof, it took me almost a week to propagate modifications from our original LaTeX source to the proof. A few weeks later, everything was gone. So I contacted them along with a PDF file containing all modifications (I printed it out with Chrome). They looked at my PDF and applied the mods manually. They missed a few equations because the online tool can't track changes to equations. My supervisor was really upset for the second time. I went back to use the tool to apply the changes and implement some new ones. It took me another whole week just to propagate the changes, which took me only one day to implement using LaTeX. And guess what! A month later, all of my mods and my supervisor’s are gone. I am sure that they won't be able to recover our mods by merely looking at the PDF that I sent them (again, with most of the changes). I think my supervisor's tolerance is at its peak.
I am still at the early stage of my career and might have said that my work was going to be published in this particular journal here and there. I am sure we can have it published in another journal pretty easily. What are the possibilities that can happen to our work? I am really sick of using their online tool. Should I be afraid that the journal will reject us ?

Primarily just a rant.

Word is many things but laggy is not one of them

You haven't actually said who your advisor is upset with. Is it with you or with the journal? Are they a co-author of this work?

@AzorAhai-him- Word is many things, and laggy is definitely one of them, especially with long, complex documents.

Your advisor's tolerance is probably at a low point, not a peak (local maximum).

Please avoid answering in the comments.

What was the purpose of the online tool, if not to give them direct ready-to-print input?

This sounds like a very frustrating situation. What I would probably do at this point is to attempt to escalate handling of the case to higher-level staff or editorial members of the journal's team than the ones you have been communicating with so far. Ask to be put in touch with the editor in chief, managing editor, production editor, or someone of that stature who is experienced enough to understand your frustration and will be in a position to come up with a plan for fixing the situation. Explain the problem and ask for their help. If they tell you to just try using their crummy web software again, tell them that it's not working and has led you to waste a lot of your time already, and ask them to propose another solution.
I have had my own share of frustrations of similar types dealing with the publishing industry (though nothing as bad as what you're describing, fortunately). What seems to be happening is that book and journal publishers often try to cut costs by outsourcing important parts of their production work to faceless overseas companies. These third party contractors are usually competent at handling routine matters but can be completely clueless whenever any even slightly unusual issue presents itself. This is why it's important that you enlist someone on the inside from the journal itself, not from the third party contractor, to advocate for you and help you resolve the problem. Such a person will also understand that the journal's reputation is at stake and that it's not acceptable for a reputable journal to accept a paper and then completely mess up the actual publication process.
Good luck!

Talk directly to the chief editor about the situation. I had a similar experience when some overzealous technical editor decided to correct my (imperfect, but, I surmise, mostly understandable) English and changed the meanings of quite a few sentences with mathematical statements beyond recognition. I wrote to the chief editor directly (I did it in rhymed verse, but you don't need to go that far) and his quick decision was just to revert to the original version and publish it as it was. It helped a bit that the chief editor was a good acquaintance of one of my friends and co-authors, of course, but I think any reasonable editor should be able and willing to resolve the issue, and if not, just give up and resubmit elsewhere.

Any journal will have its own procedures for producing output. This assures some consistency over time. It also aids maintainability of the digital files. If you don't like to work with their tools you can complain, but probably without effect. You can withdraw your work and take it elsewhere and deal with the tools and processes of the other journal.
I suspect that a "prestigious" journal has usable tools or they wouldn't merit their reputation. I also suspect they are less likely to break their own, long standing, rules.
If the work has been accepted, it is not especially likely, though possible, that they will dump you. But fighting with them will delay publication.
If you have already signed over copyright to them then you have few options. I suggest you "grin and bear it".

I am ok with using their tool. The fact that it deletes all of our mods after a month or two is the real issue here. But anyway, thank you for the information.

‘I suspect that a "prestigious" journal has usable tools or they wouldn't merit their reputation.’ — If only this were always true!  As Dan Romik’s answer says, publishers (especially large corporate ones) often outsource production editing to third-party contractors, who are often completely lacking in subject-matter expertise.  The very worst contractors (like OP’s situation) presumably don’t last long, but I’ve seen serious journals persist for years with production-editing processes that are just barely fit-for-purpose, and a huge headache for authors.

'I suspect that a "prestigious" journal has usable tools or they wouldn't merit their reputation.' [citation needed]

@CaptainEmacs, a citation for my suspicion?

@Buffy Of course, linking the citation request to your suspicion was more to humorous effect. The statement that a journal has useable tools or wouldn't merit their reputation is provably wrong, I have encountered that very good journals had very questionable tools. They survive by their reputation, not their tools.


text:
Hitting a plateau in my PhD research: what to do?
3rd year in my PhD (AI in Healthcare field) ,
i read a lot and experienced different methods to come up with some novality or improve any older method results, with no luck.
not sure what to do now.
i cannot think of any new method, and this field is not my supervisor speciality and he can't help me.
Is that it? I do not want to give up, but there is nothing I can think of that can be considered as new to this field or significant.
What shall I do?

This is where you need to talk to your supervisor(s).  A good supervisor will always know where to go or has a set of novel research questions just in case a student is stuck.

Odd that you’ve exhausted the field already. What is something that, if it could be done one thousand times faster or a thousand times cheaper, would be influential in the world of healthcare? Is there a connection to your research? What if you tried to explain your research to-date to family and friends? What sort of reactions do you imagine you’d get if you did? Research, at least professional research, sometimes means looking for connections outside of your immediate environment. .

Many papers write something about "future research" or what still needs to be done. Many of the authors of these papers then don't do it themselves. Also on conferences such things are mentioned, and you could ask the authors whether this is something that they'd hope that other people do. Frankly I'm a bit surprised - 3rd year is quite late to discover that you don't have a proper research project and to wonder what to do about that.

For the love of God, please use proper grammar in your post (e.g., capitalising the first letter of sentences).  You are a doctoral candidate and this is a forum open to the scrutiny of the public.

AI is a data-heavy field. Obviously, not reading anything at all and trying to come up with stuff on their own typically only causes irritation, but if all you do is reading, thinking and running models on the same old dataset which is dusting in some archives for a decade and has hundreds of papers on it, well, either you get a golden nugget or nothing at all, and chances for the former are rather slim.
Oftentimes, a solution to an "AI problem" is going to the field and talking with actual experts in the subject area. Lots of your assumptions about how they collect this data etc. might turn out to be completely off, and discussing some edge cases, outliers and whatnot gives valuable insights. Despite what glamorous ads about AI/ML ("sit in front of your pc and deliver sexy results everyone swoons over on a daily basis with the power of your brain alone") tell people, working on tools themselves is a big part of the job for a relatively minor part of researchers: typically, more time is spent understanding the requirements, sometimes exploring better ways to collect data and so on. If you discover that quite likely the source of major confusion for you model is, say, hair color (and it is not included in the data), trying to collect it and include it into analysis might be super valuable not only for the model performance but for the understanding of the field in general.
So, go to the field, rub some shoulders, try to understand data collection procedures and how your results could be used by experts. Best of luck!

In the OP's case, should the OP talk to healthcare experts? Or better yet, become a healthcare expert and then apply AI?

@scaaahu "better yet, become a healthcare expert" - no, that is an entirely different specialization requiring A LOT of time (easily over 10 years in some cases) and a different mindset. So my answer is: talk to healthcare experts, a lot. Whoever wants to dabble in AI research should be prepared to be figuring out the subject topic. It is no good if one works on, for example, H&E stained cell microphotographs not knowing which parts of the cell are basophilic and which are eosinophilic, and all there exists for them is ROC AUC/F1/whatever.

It is just hard to imagine for me that OP is 3 years in and completely out of both ideas and results if they have discussed their work a lot with those who supposedly will be using it...

@Lodinn I tried multiple methods and spoke to many, there are areas of improvements in the field, but every method I try I end up with no improvement!

@asmgx What do you call a "method" in this context (as in, is it a NN architecture/type of NN architecture/non-NN approaches?)? Also how much time approximately did you spend per approach? Your understanding of the task and even the task itself should be evolving, and I have really hard time thinking of the scenario of working on a project for a few years and not producing any knowledge. Your goal is more broad than "achieve higher accuracy than SOTA on a given set" - even taking the same SOTA algorithm and applying it to some subsets could produce valuable insights...


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Suggestions for math post doc topic after PhD
I am a math PhD student and I should finish the PhD in about 1.5-2 years. I am already thinking about what to do next. At the moment I am not even sure that I will be staying in the academic world, since I found out that some industry jobs can be quite fun and challenging too, but we'll see. Anyway, I am a bit worried that by the time I graduate I should have 3-4 publications on a specific topic, i.e. the topic of the PhD thesis, but after these papers are done I am not sure on how to proceed if I wanted to pursue an academic career.
I mean, I know what some interesting questions left open in the sub-sub-topic I picked are, but, except one or two, the other ones seem way too hard for me to tackle, in all honesty. So I am wondering: what is expected from a post doc? I can't see myself in two years to be that much more knowledgeable or skilled than I am now, and changing topic is a bit scary: after all it took quite some time to do research in the topic I chose for the PhD, so if I had to start over with a different (although related) topic I would need some time to adjust, and the time needed may be highly variable depending on the topic.
Also, I was wondering if in principle it is better to try to find a post doc where you can basically continue your PhD thesis or to change topic afterwards. I know I'll have to do that eventually, but maybe for the first post doc it's more common/better to keep the same research topic of the PhD? I don't know. I can see pros and cons with both options and I am not really sure what's the best bet here. Any advice from more senior mathematicians would be really appreciated.

A post-doc should show that you can move on from your thesis and do something new. Two years from now you should be much much more skilled at math than you are now. Productivity of a graduate student looks like an exponential curve as your learning and experience compound with each other.

Keep in mind that you will generally work in the same field as your PhD, just perhaps not the exact same problems. Most people in pure math don't change fields from PhD to postdoc.

You have to be realistic here: unless you are extremely strong, you will be lucky to get 1 or 2 job offers and choosing between the two might be based on very different factors (location, salary, teaching load, prestige...).

" I can't see myself in two years to be that much more knowledgeable or skilled than I am now" are you sure? In hindsight my academic learning has followed something of a geometric growth. 2 years before I graduated from my PhD I knew nothing comparing to now.

It seems to me that you don't have a birdseye view of where your work fits into your corner of mathematics. This is normal for a grad student, but you should start learning this relatively soon.
To this end, I think you need to attend more conferences and read more papers in your field. If your advisor isn't making you read stuff, I'd suggest starting with work of people you and your advisor cite frequently. (Also ask your advisor who the prominent people in your field are, especially ones who see things differently and/or write clearly.)
When you go to a conference in your field, don't just talk to other grad students, but tag along with the senior people in your field. It's very uncomfortable, but it's a great way to learn the "zoomed out" view of how your field is structured. I learned a huge amount of math you can't easily find in books or papers from uncomfortably hanging around during smoke and coffee breaks.
It's very common for a postdoc to attack a completely different problem from their thesis problem, using technical tools they became expert in during the PhD. Or they learn a new thing they can combine with an old thing. I can only think of a handful of examples of people who basically did a second PhD with no connection to the prior work.


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Job Prospects for a Retired University Director with a PhD in Geology
This question is for my father, a 62 yr old Retired University Director and Professor. He has a PhD in Geology from the University of Montana on a Fulbright scholarship. He taught geology for a while and then switched to an administrative position from which he retired almost 2 years ago. My father is a man who cannot sit idle at home, he likes to be productive and despite his impressive portfolio and many accomplishments, for the past 2 years he has unable to find a job or any kind of work that suits him. He is a extremely accomplished and well educated man who has been the pioneer of several educational programs in his life time.
What kind of jobs and work can he do now at this age? We live in Pakistan, so the work could preferably be remote but if there are any opportunities for him abroad then that would be great too since he has work and travel experience in many countries around the world.

welcome to this site. Sorry to hear that your father cannot get a job, but your question is individual specific and therefor off topic for this site.

My late grandfather was a mining engineer for his career. In retirement he took up archaeology as a hobby and the local university department was quite happy to have a very knowledgeable volunteer who was well practiced in surveying and proper documentation. But, that wasn't a job, but it sure kept him satisfied.

Is your father financially able to explore new areas, projects, groups, clubs?

A paid job is probably not an option. He can write books. He can volunteer. He can speak to students at a local educational institution at any level. There are hobbies. He can tutor, perhaps. Lots of things, but few are traditional employment. Hopefully his retirement is well enough funded that he doesn't need a salary.
He can attend scholarly conferences if such exist in his field. He can consult with other geologists.
If he is a member of a professional organization in the field, they may have some suggestions. He could even think about running for election to an office there.


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Understanding position for graduate school
I'm an 3rd year undergraduate student graduating this year studying computer science at a top 20 (read 10-20) school. I'm not sure how to even begin evaluating where I am compared to other students so that I can compile my "reach, target, safety" list, because I'm not sure what exactly admissions committees care about and most of the stuff online seems to be from seemingly disreputable sources. How do I determine what is cared about?

Letters of recommendation - obviously matter a lot
GPA - seems to matter, but I'm not sure where the cutoff is for Top 10 CS programs. I can find equivalence tables, but am not sure how widely used these are used or what the cutoff is for the standardized GPA
GRE - very confounding. Many institutions don't require it, seemingly due to COVID. However, given that the schools will take the scores if you choose to provide them, they must consider it to some level. I'm not sure if/how helpful it would be to take or if I misunderstand about the GRE being an unsaid requirement.
Statement of purpose - seems to matter a lot, but I'm not sure exactly how much. In terms of actually writing it, it seems like there's a lot of information but it should me somewhat tailored to each school
Internships - doesn't seem to matter, but this doesn't seem to make sense. I've done almost exclusively research-based internships that were more grueling/productive than the undergraduate level of research done at university and feel like the quality of these internships speak more towards my level as a researcher than the couple labs
Years in university - doesn't seem to matter. I'm a 3rd year student that will likely graduate early, so the opportunities for research were at least 25% lesser (although I suspect more because it's easiest to get good research later).

This is a somewhat broad question, but to summarize - I have a little idea of where I am compared to my peers on each of these metrics. I'm not sure how these metrics are weighted and how I would go about choosing which selection of colleges to apply to

@GoodDeeds - not particularly. It seems to discuss the relative importance of some aspects (points 1-4 in particular), but doesn't address what a good GPA actually is. This probably varies school to school, but, for example, I was told that having the highest GPA possible matters for all jobs; it turns out even the best jobs just take anything >3.75/4.0. It also doesn't really touch on point 3, 5, or 6, which are more COVID related

That's the point of the duplicate, though - there is no formula. No one thing matters "most". The GPA you need isn't a "good GPA", your GPA is going to be weighted with all the other information supporting your application by the human beings looking at your application and all the others in front of them.

This question comes up pretty often, and I regret we still haven't found a great way to answer it. I know that a formula (even a very rough, buyer beware) formula would be super helpful to applicants, but there really isn't one. Some programs do give guidelines about what it takes to be competitive; looking for these on their websites (or even contacting the schools to request these) is probably the best way to get a sense of where you stand.

regarding GRE scores, for future reference

The way to learn this is to "get in the game". Make some applications. Make a fairly broad search, not just top ten institutions.
But asking the question this way is like standing on the edge of the pool going through a list of things that contribute to good swimming and wondering how you do even before you get wet.
Your ideas about the importance of things seems about right. Get good letters, do well in the courses you are now taking and don't fret about the past. Take the GRE if needed. Write a good future-focused SoP. Have a prof or two review it.
Get wet.

How would I get wet in this example? I can't exactly throw away 1 year by just writing applications, seeing what sticks, and trying again next year

@yjx78903 Why not?

The industry I'd like to go into requires MS/PhD degrees. I don't fancy sitting around for a year doing something I'd rather not be doing; I would much rather finish out the degrees and be doing work I like

You should ask your professors for advice, and ask in particular the professors from whom you are requesting letters of recommendation.  Considering that you are in a program that regularly sends undergraduates to a variety of graduate programs, they should have a good idea of what programs are more or less likely to accept you.  You may have to fill them in on parts of your application they are not familiar with.


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How to assess whether it is imposter syndrome or actual low quality work during Ph.D.?
I am a Ph.D. student and my field is pure maths (analysis). It has been 33 months since I enrolled in Ph.D. I have produced a few papers as well. However, serious doubts have been rising in my mind regarding the quality of work that I have produced, ever since I collaborated with an established researcher, Dr. X of another country. Before this collaboration, I had four papers published in journals indexed in SCOPUS and ESCI (I made sure they are not predatory and have no APC). Additionally, I have one paper accepted for publication in SCI journal and three more papers are under review; one in SCI journal and two in SCOPUS+ESCI journal (again, no APC).
After I finished my collaboratory paper with Dr. X, I checked his complete publication list and noticed that all his work has been published in top-tier SCI journals. I know that he is much senior to me and is well established in our field, yet I feel embarrassed as most of my work is published in non SCI journals.
I talked about this with my Ph.D. advisor and he said that I am just being too hard on myself and he is actually quite happy with my work. However, I still feel disappointed with myself.
So, I would like to ask how to handle my dissatisfaction with my own work and assuming that many senior professors, who are advisors as well, are reading this, what would be your honest assessment of my work.

Please explain what the abbreviations you are using mean. Also, why don't you name the actual journals?

I published over 100 math paper: I do not care at all about the acronyms that you listed and I do not know any mathematicians who do. I do not think editors and authors of thoe unnamed journals care at all if you have mixed feelings about these (I would not).

What are your career goals?  What does your competition look like?  I can fairly safely say that even 1000 papers at the average level of a paper in one of those journals (note: sometimes journals publish papers much better than their average paper, and sometimes the quality of the paper is only noticed well afterwards!) will not get you an offer for a tenure-track job at a US research university, unless you have some better papers.  But you might not be aiming for a tenure-track job at a US research university.

Alexander is totally right, if you want a postdoc in the US you should aim higher.

4 papers in pure mathematics during PhD sounds a lot to me.

Generally, the best source of validation of you work and, hence, your ability, is others with experience in your field; especially senior researchers . By this standard you have tons of validation, including your advisor, your collaborator(s), and the reviewers of your papers.
Imposters are usually "outed" fairly early. You seem to be quite a bit beyond that especially with less than three years at "the game". Relax. Have a culturally appropriate beverage.
In the US, most doctoral students in math are still taking courses after three years, but that is starting without a masters. I assume you are somewhere else with more of a background before starting, but to an old math PhD from the US, your record seems pretty impressive.
Thinking that "I can do better" can be a good thing as long as it doesn't lead to depression. In the latter case, professional help is needed.

Your speculation is correct. I had Master of Philosophy in Mathematics before I joined Ph.D. program.

Still, I'm impressed, and not alone, apparently. I earned my doctorate three years after masters and with no publications. That only came later.

There are several reasonable ways to assess the quality of your research work relative to expectations at your career stage.  Here are some of them:

Get feedback from senior academics in your field: It appears you have already done this, and the feedback indicates that you are performing at or above level for your career stage.  Senior academics in your field are likely to have a reasonable understanding of the range of outcomes for researchers at your career stage and so they can probably reasonably calibrate where you stand relative to expectations.

Successful publication of peer-reviewed work: You have already published four papers while you are still a PhD student.  That is substantially above average for a PhD student in mathematics.  While the "level" of the journal is one possible measure of esteem, time will tell if your papers yield interest and citations, and whether or not they are well regarded.  In any case, on this measure you appear to be performing above career level.

Comparison of publication record to others at the same career level: A reasonable further comparison you could make is to look at your own publication record relative to other PhD students in your program and other similar programs (ideally comparing students at the same stage of their PhD as you, if you have a large enough sample size).  It is likely that such a comparison would confirm that your publication record is substantially above average for a PhD student in mathematics.

Fish for reassurance on Academia.SE: Done --- consider yourself reassured.  ;)