It¡¯s a strange thing, applying for a job you¡¯re objectively qualified for ¨C one that aligns with your research, teaching and leadership experience ¨C and being quietly passed over without feedback. Or with feedback that just says ¡°there was a lot of competition¡±. Stranger still when it¡¯s not the first time.

Among mid-career colleagues, these moments are spoken about in hushed tones or glossed over entirely, folded into the usual narrative of ¡°bad luck¡± or ¡°poor timing¡± or ¡°it¡¯s tough out there¡±. That¡¯s because the truth is harder to swallow: many mid-career scientists, even those with strong track records and competitive fellowships, are finding themselves locked out of the very system they¡¯ve spent years building their lives around.

A career is meant to be something you grow into ¨C layered with experience, trust and time ¨C but in academia these days, you¡¯re uprooted before anything can truly take hold. The opportunities to stay put and flourish are so often dependent on whim and circumstance, rather than demonstrably superior merit.?

As a PhD student, you¡¯re full of excitement and passion ¨C the world is your proverbial oyster, and networking sites overflow with inspirational posts telling you how many skills you would bring to any workplace. As a junior researcher, you still believe in the system. You believe your institution values the teaching you do, the mentorship you give, the hours you spend going above and beyond. You believe that if you work hard, rewards will come.

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Senior academics encourage you to apply for fellowships, and your confidence builds. You got a PhD, so of course you can get a fellowship. But as soon as you get one, you¡¯re told to think about how to get the next. This one¡¯s only two, or three, or five years and you¡¯ll need more support after that. Or, worse, no one tells you anything, assuming you¡¯ve absorbed the unspoken rules by academic osmosis.

By now you¡¯re in your early thirties. You¡¯re thinking about having children, maybe buying a house. But how do you plan for a life when you may be unemployed in two years? Or three? Or five?

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Your friends outside academia have stable jobs, pensions and salaries twice yours. But you tell yourself it¡¯s not about the money ¨C it¡¯s about the science. You watch colleagues who left after a PhD or postdoc move into industry, earn more, live more stably. But you reassure yourself that they¡¯re told what to do, while you still have that ¡°academic freedom¡± everyone raves about.

So you apply again. Another fellowship. Another idea. You get it. But now you¡¯re higher up the ladder, and the rungs are getting looser and further apart. You¡¯ve got the house and toddler, even a cat. You can¡¯t move cities without wrecking your finances, even though, despite your title, you¡¯re still underpaid because you didn¡¯t write yourself enough salary in your own grant, and HR says there¡¯s nothing they can do.

So what now? You hope someone notices all the extra work you¡¯ve done: the students you supported, the papers you published, the care you took. You¡¯ve had ¡°publish or perish¡± drummed into you since day one, and you¡¯ve done your best. Couldn¡¯t your head of department find it in their budget to finally offer you a permanent position?

But you haven¡¯t published in the right places. And while you¡¯ve brought in funding, it isn¡¯t enough, or isn¡¯t the right kind. So unemployment looms again.

You could write another fellowship. You have good ideas ¨C but there¡¯s no guarantee anyone else will think so. Besides, by now you¡¯re getting very weary of precarity and the constant merry-go-round.

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Or you could leave academia. But now you¡¯re in your late thirties. You¡¯re too experienced for entry-level industry jobs, and not experienced enough for senior ones. Your CV is full of ¡°senior¡± roles ¨C senior fellow, senior researcher ¨C but companies won¡¯t let you near the bench because you¡¯re overqualified (and probably out of touch), and they won¡¯t trust you to lead a team because leading a team in academia doesn¡¯t count. You¡¯ve stayed too long, and now you¡¯re stuck. Somewhere between too much and not enough.

This isn¡¯t a story of individual failure. It¡¯s a story about systemic failure ¨C a research ecosystem that funds science in three-year bursts and then acts surprised when promising scientists burn out or walk away. We train scientists for a decade or more, fund them to do outstanding work, and then offer them no path forward. We treat fellowships as prizes, not as stepping stones, and when people win them, we abandon them to figure out the rest. Everyone scrambles to survive, and nothing is built to last.

Starting over every few years ¨C rebuilding a team, rewriting grant applications, developing new ideas to stay ¡°competitive¡± ¨C is not just exhausting, it¡¯s profoundly wasteful. At best, promising research gets shelved because continuity is impossible. At worst, labs are shuttered, PIs and postdocs lose their jobs and students are left without mentors.

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Precarity hits some harder than others, of course. Those without financial safety nets, without partners who can shoulder the risk, without family support ¨C they¡¯re often the first to go. We talk a lot about diversity and inclusion, but we rarely connect it to the structure of academic labour. You can¡¯t diversify the pipeline if your pipes are corroded by years of neglect and complacency.

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The irony is that we already recognise the folly of this model. No one in academia would propose to train more medical doctors than the NHS has the capacity to absorb ¨C so why is it so different for academic doctors? Why are precarity and a high level of churn normalised ¨C even rationalised as healthy competition? Why are those who bring in funding increasingly rewarded regardless of whether they can teach, mentor or lead? Why are brilliant educators pushed out simply for not being cash cows?

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When stability is punished and holistic contribution is devalued, the very foundation of long-term, high-quality research and education begins to erode.

And then there¡¯s the personal toll ¨C the part we don¡¯t talk about enough. I still think about the permanent jobs I didn¡¯t get. Not because I expected certainty ¨C none of us do any more ¨C but because they crystallised something I hadn¡¯t wanted to admit: that doing everything ¡°right¡± might never be enough. I had the outputs. I had the funding. I had the experience. And still, nothing.

And the silence after the rejection wasn¡¯t just external; it crept inward, too. I began second-guessing everything ¨C my decisions, my work, even my worth. Was I fooling myself? Was I actually good at this, or had I just been lucky and the luck had finally run out? So many academics feel like impostors, and who can blame them in a system set up to make them feel that way?

These moments repeat and repeat, and the emotional baggage they burden you with only gets heavier. You project confidence in meetings, in lectures, at conferences. But at home, the exhaustion catches up. You sleep badly, grinding your teeth and waking up with a headache. You scratch your skin to the point of bleeding. Your hair starts to fall out.

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And you stop applying for jobs you might want because rejection has started to feel inevitable. You stop writing papers and grant applications because what¡¯s the point if people are only going to say that it¡¯s the wrong journal or the wrong funder? You tell yourself this is just how academia works. But no system should make people feel this disposable, especially when it claims to value them so highly.

It¡¯s not easy for those making the decisions about who to filter out of the pipeline either ¨C even if they at least have a permanent job. Hiring without metrics is an ideal worth striving for ¨C but in practice, identifying the best candidate without them is like trying to distinguish the best singer in a football crowd. If everyone has a PhD, a couple of decent papers, a fellowship, a grant ¨C how do you pick just one?

In theory, we¡¯re meant to assess ¡°potential¡± and ¡°fit¡±, but in a stack of 50 applications, the absence of hard filters just makes the process harder, not fairer. Without transparent, structured ways to evaluate candidates, over-pressed committees often drift back towards the very proxies we are warned against by the powers that be ¨C prestige, publications, impact factors.

But we must do better. If we¡¯re serious about saving science ¨C about retaining talent, building inclusive teams, and producing meaningful work ¨C we need more than words. Institutions and funders must take responsibility not just for research outputs but for researchers.

There are fellowships and schemes that encourage permanence: fellowships that tail off after five or six years but are designed to be undertaken over eight or 10, the idea being that the funder contributes less and the university contributes more as the fellow gains seniority. But universities are reluctant to play ball. The bigger ones prevent their staff from applying to these schemes in the first place by saying: ¡°We cannot support you at the end of the fellowship.¡±

What they don¡¯t realise is that, in your brain, that translates as ¡°We don¡¯t value you beyond this short period of time.¡± Or, even worse, ¡°We don¡¯t believe in you.¡± And how are mid-career academics, who have had years of rejections and refusals, supposed to believe in themselves if nobody above them does? But big universities don¡¯t care if you fall out of the system: you are absolutely replaceable at these institutions. Thirty younger, cheaper, keener people are clamouring to leap into any hole created by your absence.

We need to create real pathways to permanence, recognising mid-career scientists not as anomalies or exceptions, but as essential. Funders must start demanding or incentivising transition plans as part of fellowships ¨C not in theory, but in practice. We need national strategies that provide stability beyond the postdoc years, and we need to be honest with early-career researchers about what lies ahead ¨C and what doesn¡¯t.

Because what we¡¯re wasting isn¡¯t just money. It¡¯s people. It¡¯s ideas. It¡¯s futures.

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The author is a scientist at a UK research-intensive university.