Engineering Science - More Graduate Students? Comments

Comment on 'More Graduate Students?' by Bob

2007-04-26T12:38:11Z

The America Competes Act (S. 761) passes Senate on Wednesday, April 25, 2007

PRESS RELEASE

Sen. Hutchison Applauds Passage of Competitiveness Legislation

Date Released: Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Source: Sen. Hutchison

Excerpt:

WASHINGTON – Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), Chairman of the Republican Policy Committee and Ranking Member of the Space, Aeronautics and Related Sciences Commerce Subcommittee, today applauded the passage of the America Competes Act (S. 761). The legislation to make America more competitive in the global marketplace by increasing investment in research and expanding education in math, science and engineering. The bill passed by a large bipartisan margin of 88 to 8.

Follow this link for the rest of the article: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=22493

Here is a link to the text of the bill: S. 761: A bill to invest in innovation and education to improve the competitiveness of the United States...

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s110-761

This is a long bill, but with some important changes.

At first glance, I think some changes were made in these "competitiveness" bills in 110th Congress relative to those I looked at in the 109th Congress. It looks like the massive increase in PhD fellowships that were part of last years bills have disappeared. The details of these bills deserve further study. Differences in House and Senate bills will have to be resolved in conference at some point. Note also, these are "authorization bills" authorizing Congress to spend the money. The "appropriations bills" authorizing the actual spending budget are more the "real deal" in the end and come later.

Below is another press release on the subject that appeared in the Chronicle.

Useful link for tracking bills:

http://www.aaas.org/spp/cstc/stc/legtracker07.shtml

Bob

Senate, House Pass Bills on Science and Competitiveness, Despite Bush's Qualms

By JEFFREY BRAINARD

Washington

http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/04/2007042601n.htm

The U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approved a sprawling bill on Wednesday to increase federal support for university research and education of scientists in order to enhance America's global economic competitiveness, even though the Bush administration had expressed "serious concerns" about the measure.

The 88-to-8 vote was part of a flurry of legislative activity in Congress this week on the topic. Also on Wednesday, the House of Representatives science committee approved a bill that endorses the goal of doubling the National Science Foundation's budget over 10 years. On Tuesday, the full House approved two other bills on scientific research and education by large margins.

Comment on 'More Graduate Students?' by Geoff Davis

2007-04-26T00:47:13Z

Sure, I'll add something to phds.org about this stuff.

Comment on 'More Graduate Students?' by Geoff Davis

2007-04-26T00:45:02Z

Nicely spotted, Bob. I looked at the version of the bill that passed the House on Thomas and didn't see much on allocation to graduate fellowships beyond a line requiring NSF to allocate 1.5% of its budget to young scientists (not 3.5% as listed in the LA Times article). Here's the bill.

The bill specifically targets money to IGERT, which is a great program from what I remember. IGERT makes conscious provisions for ensuring that grad students don't just end up being clones of their advisors.

IGERT is currently small - this page makes it sound like the annual budget is on the order of $12M, but I"m having trouble parsing. 1.5% of a $5B budget is about $75M, if my math faculties are serving me right, so we're talking about a 6-fold increase in IGERT.

I don't think ramping up IGERT would be all that bad.

Comment on 'More Graduate Students?' by Bob

2007-04-25T21:25:47Z

     Update:               "Gathering Storm" bills have passed the House

Below is an article in the LA Times that updates the status of some of the "Gathering Storm" bills we have been discussing.

So much for Congressional gridlock on these issues. These bills are on a fast track. So, while we chat, or blog, about PhD production, the changes proposed by the "Gathering Storm" report are now much closer nose to being passed into law, almost verbatim.

Bob

From the Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-compete26apr26,0,515402.story?coll=la-home-nation

Bills to enhance science, math education unifies parties

By Joel Havemann Times Staff Writer

11:44 AM PDT, April 25, 2007

WASHINGTON — Congressional Democrats and Republicans have finally found something today that they can agree on--legislation intended to boost U.S. prowess in technological competition worldwide by improving science and mathematics teaching from kindergarten through graduate school and assisting researchers early in their careers.

The House passed two bills Tuesday by overwhelming majorities. The Senate debated a lone bill, more sweeping than the two considered by the House, and planned a final vote later today.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a leading Senate advocate of competitiveness legislation, said the bill was designed to "help us keep our brainpower so that we can keep our jobs."

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) sounded a rare negative note. Pointing out that the Senate bill would create 20 government programs without killing any, Coburn said few American families could afford to find 20 new ways to spend their earnings without cutting lower-priority spending elsewhere.

The first bill passed by the House, by a vote of 389-22, would encourage universities to recruit science and math students who wanted to become teachers. Among the incentives to students: scholarships of $10,000 a year.

It would also establish master's degree programs for persons already working as math and science teachers and expand university programs for training the next generation of mathematicians, scientists and engineers.

The bill would authorize $1.4 billion in new spending over the next five years. The money would not be available until provided in subsequent appropriations bills.

The second bill, at a potential cost of just over $1 billion, would mostly support math and science students and researchers early in their careers. The legislation, which gained a 397-20 positive vote, would also require the science foundation to spend at least 3.5% of its research budget, which is nearly $5 billion this year, on the program for young scientists.

The more far-reaching bill that was being debated on the Senate floor would double the overall $5.6-billion science foundation budget in four years. It would add $2.6 billion by 2011 to the Energy Department's science office and increase authorizations at the National Aeronautics and Space Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) tried but failed to tack on to the Senate bill a provision allowing small companies to waive some of the more onerous features of the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate reform law. DeMint argued that Sarbanes-Oxley was disproportionately burdensome to small business.

The competitiveness bills grew out of a 2005 National Academies report that warned that the United States could lose its competitive edge to Asia and elsewhere if it didn't make a concerted effort to improve the quality of the nation's mathematicians, scientists and engineers.

President Bush embraced the idea in his 2006 State of the Union address, dubbing it his American Competitiveness Initiative.

joel.havemann@latimes.com

Comment on 'More Graduate Students?' by Bob

2007-04-25T20:18:40Z

                        The legislative impact of Romer's work.

Geoff,

OK, so ignoring the fact that Romer's work is fundamentally flawed, and I know you don't agree with everything in it, here is some more background info. I remembered his idea was discussed in a Science Magazine article over five years ago. See the 2001 article in Science below, 3rd paragraph down. You may be correct that Paul Romer's NBER working paper has had some influence on legislation proposing to subsidizing undergraduate S&E production as ultimately advocated by the "Gathering Storm" report:

"His (Romer's) ideas have formed the basis for new legislation, the Technology Talent Bill (S. 1549 and H.R. 3130), that would create a competitive grants program at the National Science Foundation (NSF) for universities that promise to boost the number of undergraduates majoring in science, mathematics, and engineering."

Can you link this Science article with Phds.org ?

Bob

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/294/5551/2466

Science 21 December 2001:

Vol. 294. no. 5551, pp. 2466 - 2467

News Focus UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION:

Can Universities Be Bribed to Train More Scientists?

Jeffrey Mervis

Economist Paul Romer has persuaded Congress to test his theory of why too few U.S. students major in science and engineering. But is money the real roadblock?

Stanford University economist Paul Romer readily accepts the conventional wisdom that the United States isn't producing enough scientists and engineers to ensure a healthy economy. But his explanation of who's to blame, and how to fix the problem, is anything but conventional. Romer argues that U.S. universities deliberately underproduce science and engineering graduates because they are so expensive to train. The traditional weeding-out process is simply a smokescreen for holding down costs, he says. His solution: Pay the universities to turn out more scientists and engineers. "Most schools will do the right thing if you make it worth their while," asserts Romer, who has spent 15 years analyzing the factors behind long-term economic growth.

His fresh insights into what has traditionally been seen as an intractable problem have made Romer the darling of politicians and business leaders who believe that the federal government should be playing a bigger role in training the next generation of scientific talent. His ideas have formed the basis for new legislation, the Technology Talent Bill (S. 1549 and H.R. 3130), that would create a competitive grants program at the National Science Foundation (NSF) for universities that promise to boost the number of undergraduates majoring in science, mathematics, and engineering. The concept is so appealing politically that last month Congress gave NSF $5 million to start a pilot project to test Romer's thesis even before it took up the authorizing legislation (Science, 16 November, p. 1430).

Most educators agree that the country needs more scientists--and are delighted that Congress is willing to tackle the problem. But the vast majority take strong exception to Romer's analysis. They say it ignores a vast body of literature on why students avoid or drop out of the sciences, from the field's unappealing image to high family expectations, that have nothing to do with an institution's unwillingness to pay the bill. Romer's explanation fails to account for the steady growth in the life sciences, they note, as well as the realities of higher education, where departments compete for students and universities flaunt their scientific prowess.

See link above for the rest of the article.

Comment on 'More Graduate Students?' by Geoff Davis

2007-04-25T16:13:06Z

Hi Bob--

Romer is well aware of discussions of PhD gluts - he talks about them in his paper. I'm going to elaborate on that in my next installment.

The unemployment graphs are interesting - I wonder if they'd look similar for non-S&E's? I.e. do they represent a special feature of S&E careers? Or is that just what happens when you get older?

Anyway, like I said, I don't agree with everything Romer writes, but I do think it's important to understand what he's arguing so one can better understand the ideas behind The Gathering Storm and the legislation that's moving through Congress.

Geoff

Comment on 'More Graduate Students?' by Geoff Davis

2007-04-25T16:08:58Z

If I remember correctly, Romer anticipates the concerns about excessive portability by advocating traineeships that departments would apply for. I'll dig into that on the next post.

I am in fact planning to tally where the NSF and NIH graduate fellows end up as part of the rankings stuff. Stay tuned - it'll happen over the summer.

Remember, Romer isn't advocating controlling PhD production - he wants to increase it and is looking for the most efficient way possible. It's a different problem.

Comment on 'More Graduate Students?' by Bob

2007-04-25T14:34:17Z

I think the work by Paul Romer is fundamentally flawed from the outset.

Should the Government Subsidize Supply or Demand in the Market for Scientists and Engineers?

Paul Romer http://www.nber.org/~confer/2000/ipes00/romer.pdf

Why do we need to train more scientists and engineers when we are not gainfully employing the ones we have now?

As you know, the NSF gathers statistics on the employment of S&Es [see References below]: The NSF statisticians put a positive spin on the fact that there are "Twelve million workers have an S&E degree as their highest degree and 15.7 million have at least one degree in an S&E field....However, only 4.9 million were in occupations formally defined as S&E." See:

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind06/c3/c3h.htm

This would seem to indicate a vastly underutilized S&E workforce-by some 10 million people who already have S&E degrees but who are not actually working as S&Es. Even those 4.9 million S&Es employed as S&Es are not usually employed in an efficient manner. Most S&Es, even at the PhD level, are in such plentiful supply that their time is often spent doing work that could be better taken up by tech assistants and administrative assistants. Employers know this, but it is more cost effective to hire more advanced degreed S&Es and far fewer support staff than the other way around.

When was the last time you saw a doctor or a dentist answering the phone, filling out paperwork, returning phone calls, fixing the Xerox machine, etc.? Never, because he has a staff that preserves his time for seeing patients. This is an extreme example, but I feel S&Es are completely on the other side of the spectrum concerning the utilization of their time because there is such a glut of S&Es. The underutilization of S&Es, relative to other professions, is obvious to those on the inside, but not to some economist writing a "working paper".

I think some of the statements and statistics cited above can be used to make the case that it would be difficult for a "shortage" of S&Es to materialize anytime soon (within 5-7 years), even if hiring were to pick up. A more efficient utilization of those with existing S&Es, would take up increased demand for the foreseeable future.

Here is an interesting graph from the NSF:

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind06/c3/fig03-13.htm

Note the strong uptick in unemployment for those with 30 years since their degrees (people in their fifties). It might be interesting to plot unemployment vs. salary demands for S&Es.

These readily available statistics from the NSF are also ignored by the NAS/NRC in their "Gathering Storm" report. This is part of the case that needs to be made to Congress, not the ones by Paul Romer.

Bob

References:

For link to NSF's Science and Engineering Indicators:

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind06/front/about.htm

Here is a great list of links to very useful figures:

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind06/figures.htm

Comment on 'More Graduate Students?' by Peter Fiske

2007-04-24T20:31:37Z

Geoff,

There is another side of the demand/supply issue with respect to graduate students: the demand for them on the part of science departments. These departments need graduate students to teach and perform research. The demand for teaching assistants is largely controlled by undergraduate enrollments in departmental classes. The demand for research assistants is largely controlled by external funding (though quite a few science departments have their own, or university-wide fellowships to buffer this). This IS the "supply" side that Romer and others refer to, but I think it's important to understand the demand structure that underlies this supply.

If Congress creates a large number of new, externally-funded fellowships it will allow science departments some flexibility in how graduate students are paid - but it will likely increase the number of graduate students at the same time. One result of such "external" funding would be that the holders of such (presumably desirable/prestigious) fellowships would gravitate to the best programs - because they would be in control of their own destiny and not beholden to the department for their funding. Science departments that were less successful in attracting these externally-funded fellows would still have the current supply of foreign S&E applicants to rely on.

We have a current example of externally-funded graduate fellowships: the NSF Graduate Fellowship program. I wonder if anyone has tabulated where these (prestigious and competitive) fellows have chosen to do their graduate work. I would guess that they would be highly concentrated in the top 10 departments of each field.

To control PhD production on the whole we will have to either teach less science at the undergraduate level (undesirable) or drive out the marginal programs that are competing for scarce research dollars (painful but, perhaps, inevitable). Alternatively, NSF or NIH could dictate which departments were "allowed" to support graduate students on research grants (though I'll live to be 1,000 to see that sort of micromanagement handed down from funding agencies!)

Peter