Physicists, scientist, mathematicians, any medical research scientist. While some around here don't trust these people. they are all professions that don't have the opportunity for high income but who are critical to many areas of society. Hell, research scientists have to work from grant to grant. no grant = no job. Basically they have zero job security. No free education for them.
Which is exactly why I am yet to pay off my HECs debt. Grant runs out, job goes with it. Finding the next job is difficult. Looking for the next opportunity now, as I only have three months left here....
Know this feeling all too well. The lack of general support from the government to cultivate and maintain a viable research regime (or even tertiary education in general) is not helping at all. That's why many turn to going outside of Australia, but even that does not address the fundamental idea of "job security", if that is what we can call it. Maybe the only exception for some overseas environments is when you can gain tenure, but that is far from easy and in some cases very difficult if you are not a citizen of that country. There's hardly any notion of tenure in Australia, though you can be experienced enough (years and money) to be too important to be let go.
I guess one could add that is it viable to provide "security" for researchers. I don't think it will get to such a point, unless the government / universities (not withstanding other non-university research organisations) move to a model which is less about competitive grants and more about simply employing people to do research. The problem with this notion is that it will limit the career opportunities of researchers as they will not be able to add the prestige of having being part of a certain grant or having contributed to winning a grant as part of their achievements. That in itself is not a bad thing, but rather because the rest of the world runs on a competitive model where grants and papers are the key indicators, getting employment in those environments without showing the credentials they want to see is disadvantageously difficult, even if you really have the competences to fulfill a given role. An unfortunate prejudice, if you will. On top of this, research is getting more and more focused on industry or geared towards tangible societal outcomes, in one way to avoid "ivory tower syndrome". In principle this is good, but industries who support or fund research need to understand that they are not necessarily supporting research for outcomes they will be pleased to hear. It is for these reasons that researchers will continue to be attached to funding and not much else, forcing them to play that game indefinitely or seek another career path. Some might argue that a researcher's role is quite laid back that if they really don't like it they can find something else to do, because society doesn't need more researchers (in an opposite fashion to how society does need nurses).
As for free degrees for researchers, yeah, that's never going to happen. In fact, researchers often have to do a lot more than just basic degrees to be able to be fully fledged in that profession; viz. a PhD is often a prerequisite to becoming fully fledged in research. There less positions - mainly technical - in research where a postgraduate degree of some sort is not required. Whilst for domestic students, a PhD is often tuition-fee free (and is often supplemented with a scholarship to cover basic living expenses), the time investment is not trivial, and it doesn't mean your life stops for a few years either.
My strategy is to switch careers now, hopefully to something with more solid opportunities. Or, at least if the latest reports from employment experts on the most in-demand jobs is to be believed (though considering that they just said #1 in demand is engineers, I'm tempted to take a much larger grain of salt than usual...)
