[lmm]

> I agree with your diagnosis of the problem, but don't think your solution is a good way forward - immediately after undergrad is way too early to be evaluating research potential and would just shift the hyper competitiveness earlier.

Immediately after undergrad is how it used to work in the golden days of science, more or less.

If the competitiveness is the problem maybe tenure should be a lottery that you enter once at a fixed stage, preferably before you're expected to start publishing in journals.

[msg3]

I think we had a far smaller number of people going to university back in the "golden days of science" - not sure you can really compare.

A tenure lottery seems like an extreme option - there has to be a middle ground between what we have now and something entirely random.