Not remembering the past, or selective amnesia - I am not sure which!

I suspect a number of (totally foreseeable) factors have contributed to the tragedy that is now unfolding for the NIH and the tens of thousands of people who depend upon it for support. here are some off the top of my head:

1. Most R&D funding goes to support salaries. Since salaries didn't go up by a factor of 2 during this time we can only assume that a LOT more people started getting their daily bread from the NIH. Once you're in, you continue to seek more funding. More people, more mouths to feed.

2. I suspect that the doubling of funding (which was widely advertized at the time) must have gotten a lot of Deans of Research fired up - so I am sure various Med School and Life Science research departments probably grew a bit in anticipation of the gravy.

3. Proposals are the ultimate recycled product. If yours doesn't get funded in Year 1, take the reviewers comments, add some new data and re-submit. The marginal cost (in time, effort etc.) of resubmittals is relatively low.

4. (a comment you have made, Geoff): NIH funds a bunch of research centers. On the plus side, I don't think these kinds of places train up a lot of grad students. On the downside, that means that they can't pay for themselves by teaching, so there are a bunch of new people who have to bring in grants to cover their salaries. Oops. Each center is probably expected to become self-sufficient with universities, industry and states kicking in something to keep things going. I have watched soft money places go through extremely traumatic downturns due to funding. SRI - the for-profit research center in Menlo Park CA is an amazingly lean and hungry organization, it's really admirable what they are able to do for so little. In contrast, some of the national labs have big fat pipes of money coming in for nuclear weapons and homeland security. All that fatty cash gives the beasts some reserve when things change.

And, let's consider the sources of that change for NIH. I am sure 911 and the big shift in research priorities across the entire federal R&D infrastructure added to the abrupt change in funding growth for NIH.

5. Bring on the post-docs! With more money from NIH, there are more soft money slots - post-docs, staff etc. I suspect (and I hope data could be found to verify) that big up-ticks of funding corresponds to a big pulse of post-docs. When funding bumps up, the domestic supply of post-docs doesn't change very much - it is very viscous because there is a lag time in the production of PhDs. So any "shortfall" in post-doc supply is filled quickly with foreign nationals. Then, 5 years later, the crop of newly minted domestic PhDs begins showing up - but the post-doc population has already expanded due to the pulse of foreign PhDs. Basically, the domestic PhD population arrives at exactly the WRONG time - after the party is over.

That being said - I suspect that the number of post-docs is probably a contra-indicator of the health of the job market. When times are good, post-docs don't need to stay in that position very long - they move up the glory ladder to other positions. But when times get bad, the post-doc population swells and mean time in a post-doc grows.

This is rather pathetic, if you think about it. Why didn't NIH consider the production of PhDs (and the repercussions) when they (and Congress) embarked on a doubling of funding over 5 years? It's not like it's a secret that grad students are the inevitable by-product of academic research. Heck, I'll bet we could calculate a fairly precise production ratio (X million dollars of NIH money to R1 institutions produces Y graduate students). And it's not like we haven't been here before! As you pointed out, the down-turn in funding in the early 1990's, coupled with the promulgation of The Myth and a recession, produced a fairly widespread malaise in young scientists' career prospects back then. And, even before then, the huge pulse of funding for NASA in the 60's resulted in, frankly, a calamitous collapse of aerospace R&D in the 70's and even into the 80's.

Policy makers need to understand what the steady-state "carrying capacity" for R&D workers is in the various broad disciplines. Big pulses of funding are two-edged: several years of pleasure, followed by a decade of pain.

That being said, while some sort of economic planning for PhD production should be part of the policy-making equation, explicit production quotas by discipline is likely not to work very well either. Consider what's going on in the geosciences now.

After two decades in which the "extractive" industries (oil, minerals, etc) have been flat on their back in the US, academia has all but abandoned the field. Petroleum Engineering, Mining Engineering, and such degree programs (the few that remain today) seemed to be populated entirely by foreign students who were headed back home to get industry jobs in their countries (where these industries were still alive - largely because many of them were state owned!). The oil companies had shut down hiring for a number of years, which has led to a big fat pulse of people retiring today and a thin trickle of mid-career people to follow behind. Big Oil is REALLY in trouble. Today, with nearly every element in the periodic table at prices 3-10X what they were 3 years ago - practically any creature that stand on two legs and can pass Geo 101 is getting a job offer!

So, my bottom line: when people (or the state) try to plan workforce needs 5 years down the road they almost invariably get it wrong. Even the smarty pants people in industry (where these things REALLY matter) get it wrong.

I think we should discuss (and hear from any of you out there) what things might have been done (or could be done now) to avoid this pathetic boom-bust cycle that seems to hit young scientists and engineers particularly hard.

I've got some ideas! And I'm even working on putting a few of them into practice. More to come in a future posting.