More Graduate Students - Brought to You by IGERT
The increase in graduate students discussed earlier in the week just came a step closer to reality: the House and Senate just passed a set of bills that will steer a big chunk of funding toward new graduate fellowships, among other things. I assume there will be some negotiation in conference over the final form, but the boost to graduate numbers is a lot closer to reality.
One caveat: the bills just authorize increased spending, but they don't actually provide it. So there is room for things to be cut by failing to be funded in appropriations bills.
I have started looking through a few of the bills, and as best I can tell, there is some interesting and good stuff in them. There are also some things that are disappointingly omitted. As with HR 1453, the bills smack of AAAS Fellow influence - hats off to any of you who are reading this.
The House passed 3 bills:
HR 1867, the National Science Foundation Authorization Act of 2007, which doubles the NSF budget,
HR 363, the Sowing the Seeds Through Science and Engineering Research Act, which funds a bunch of undergraduate and graduate fellowships, and
HR 362, the 10,000 Teachers, 10 Million Minds Science and Math Scholarship Act, which funds S&E teacher training.
The Senate passed a single, 200+ page bill, S 761, the America Competes Act (more formally, the America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science Act).
I've just started looking into these, and I imagine they'll take a few posts to digest.
HR 363 is the House bill most relevant to grad students. It passed 397 to 20, so at least some portion of it seems pretty likely to happen. Doubling the NSF budget will likely increase spending on grad students as well, but probably not in ways qualitatively different from current expenditures.
I notice in GovTrack that authorization for funds has been stripped out of the bill. So I'd guess that it will be funded at a lower level than the bill calls for.
Section 4 of the bill is the interesting bit:
SEC. 4. INTEGRATIVE GRADUATE EDUCATION AND RESEARCH TRAINEESHIP PROGRAM.
(a) Funding- For each of the fiscal years 2008 through 2012, the Director of the National Science Foundation shall allocate at least 1.5 percent of funds appropriated for Research and Related Activities to the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program.
(b) Coordination- The Director shall coordinate with Federal departments and agencies, as appropriate, to expand the interdisciplinary nature of the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program.
(c) Authority to Accept Funds From Other Agencies- The Director is authorized to accept funds from other Federal departments and agencies to carry out the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program.
I'm disappointed that there are no provisions for measuring efficacy or for linking expenditures to the state of the labor market, so it ends up being a command-and-control type of program (like most of the rest of science, alas). That being said, funding IGERT rather than more traditional NSF fellowships seems like a promising way to go.
The good thing about IGERT (from the IGERT FAQ):
"A major objective of NSF's IGERT program is to train students in areas where industry, government and academic institutions are experiencing a shortfall. IGERT graduates may work in industries ranging from pharmaceutics to petrochemicals, government laboratories devoted to health, commerce or energy, small teaching colleges and major research universities. An important benefit of the IGERT programs is that most students have opportunities to sample these locations during their training. This makes it easier to decide which career environment is right for you."
So IGERT is not about creating a bunch of new professors.
Another good thing about IGERT he IGERT money goes to traineeships rather than research assistantships. The funding is not as portable as what Romer was calling for, but funding tied to the department is a lot more portable than funding tied to a researcher. I think it's a reasonable compromise between full portability and the increasingly common no portability.
(An aside: There have been a number of National Academy reports that have called for more portable funding, but they always seem to get shot down. I've spoken to some National Science Board members about the issue, and the story I have gotten from them is that they are terrified that given full portability, students will all end up at some program other than their own. This discussion gives a sense of the "debate." It's total BS - people say they don't want more portability because it might screw up the wonderful system we have now. But there is no analogous concern raised when funding shifts away from portability as it has steadily for the last couple of decades. Moreover, they complain about the lack of data documenting benefits of portability, but they never actually try running any experiments to gather any. It's not rocket science. In fact, there is actually a lot of data available in the SED and the SDR that would let one compare career outcomes for people funded by portable vs. non-portable funding, but nobody has bothered to run the stats. As best I can tell, nobody wants to know.)
The less good thing is that IGERT seems to emphasize interdisciplinarity for its own sake. Googling "IGERT" turns up some goofy sounding programs - "Interactive Digital Multimedia" at UC Santa Barbara (you can get a PhD in that?), "Biological Invasions"(!) at UC Davis, and so on. But plenty of sensible things, too.
IGERT seems to be about creating new programs, too, but maybe I'm just not understanding correctly. I'd be happier if there were provisions for existing programs getting their acts together in terms of providing professional development for their students, but maybe IGERT would lead to some diffusion.
It's interesting that the bill steers a fixed fraction of the NSF's budget toward IGERT rather than a specific amount. I'm guessing that's so that IGERT would benefit proportionally if the NSF budget is doubled and so that there isn't some convenient dollar amount to target once appropriations committees take their knives to the bill? 1.5% of a $5 billion dollar budget is $75 million. IGERT currently gets about $12 million / year, so that's a hefty boost. And $150 million if the NSF's budget doubles.
IGERT students get $30K stipends (more than NSF gave their postdocs back in my day, stingy things), plus tuition (call it $20K) plus maybe some overhead for health insurance, etc (say $10K). Probably there is some faculty and institutional money in IGERT (after all, creating new programs isn't cheap). So let's say half the money goes to students at $60K apiece. $75 million buys you a grand total of ... 625 students. And 100 of those were already funded. Even doubled, we're talking a not very large number of people. Romer's proposal is for an extra 17,000 new PhDs per year, so this is a tiny fraction of what he's talking about.
The administration has indicated that they don't like the idea of having a fixed fraction of the NSF's budget allocated to a particular program (because the other 98.5% just isn't enough). I assume this is because of pushback from senior people who don't like the idea of either portable funding or their pot of grant money being diminished - similar complaints were heard during the NIH doubling.
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on Fri, Apr 27, 08:04AM
HR 362, the 10,000 Teachers, 10 Million Minds Science and Math Scholarship Act
One of the fundamental recommendations of the NAS Gathering Storm report is that the U.S. government needs to subsidize, at taxpayer expense, the training of more (~10,000) math and science teachers at the high school level. I contend that increasing teacher retention, through improved working conditions, will go much farther towards increasing the quality of math and science education in the U.S.
However, the result of the Gathering Storm recommendations is that Congress (or the NAS) came up with HR 362 which was passed by the House, as discussed above.
See: HR 362, the 10,000 Teachers, 10 Million Minds Science and Math Scholarship Act, which funds S&E teacher training.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.362:
Below is an article I noticed in the LA Times that discusses a survey of teachers in the LA School District, perhaps not a representative school district, but the results of survey, and the article are interesting.
Here is an excerpt of the article:
"By some estimates, about $455 million per year is squandered in teacher training in California because of premature departures. Vastly improving teaching conditions probably would cost much more.
"We have a high-school dropout problem," Futernick said, "in large part because we have a teacher dropout problem."
I believe there are many other fundamental policy flaws in the NAS Gathering Storm report, but seeing this article reminded me of one of them.
Bob
Teachers dropping out too
A study blames working conditions. Higher pay isn't the answer, it says.
By Howard Blume, Times Staff Writer
April 27, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teachers27apr27,0,6989401.story?coll=la-home-headlines
As a mid-career professional with a doctorate in chemistry, Maurice Stephenson appeared made to order for the Los Angeles Unified School District, especially because he was eager to teach at a high-poverty campus in a system woefully short of qualified science teachers.
But the honeymoon ended abruptly after less than two years. Fed up with student insolence and administrative impotence, he stalked out of Manual Arts High School on March 12 and never went back.
Few teachers quit so dramatically, but leave they do. In California, teachers are departing the profession in alarming numbers — 22% in four years or fewer — but simply offering them more money won't solve the problem, according to a report released Thursday.
The real issue is working conditions, which are the flip side of a student's learning conditions, said Ken Futernick, who directs K-12 studies at the Center for Teacher Quality at Cal State Sacramento.
His study, which was based on a survey of nearly 2,000 California teachers, maps a growing crisis that fundamentally affects student learning.
The study also casts doubt on commonly pursued remedies both for the teacher shortage and student achievement in general.
Classroom interruptions, student discipline, increasing demands, insufficient supplies, overcrowding, unnecessary meetings, lack of support — all play a role in burning out teachers.
"They're not just driving teachers crazy; they're driving teachers out of the classrooms," Futernick said.
Stephenson is among the 35% of L.A. Unified teachers who quit within five years, according to school district data.
And as in most other cases, salary wasn't the primary factor.
In fact, L.A. Unified's data lists salary as the No. 9 reason why new hires leave. No. 1 is "moving." But also cited are "lack of support from administrator," "student discipline policy" and "unmotivated students."
See link above for the rest of the article
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on Tue, May 01, 10:05PM
Yet another fundamental flaws in the logic of the "Gathering Storm" report is the conclusion that since China and India are training more S&Es, the U.S. must also train more S&Es to remain competitive. Although the report mentions outsourcing by U.S. firms, it seems to naively ignore the fact that layoffs of U.S. S&Es often precede the outsourcing of such jobs to India and China.
The article below is a nice summary of a scenario that runs completely counter to conclusions and policy actions of the Gathering Storm report, namely, the movement of "perhaps 40 million high-skill American jobs to other countries."
This trend, if it plays out, begs the question of where all those "10 million minds" educated in the U.S. will find work, without moving to China or India-a trend that is occurring more frequently for some U.S. workers.
Bob
Highly skilled Americans in jeopardy
Tuesday, April 17, 2007 FROMA HARROP
http://www.dispatch.com/dispatch/contentbe/dispatch/2007/04/17/20070417-A7-04.html
The master plan, it seems, is to move perhaps 40 million high-skill American jobs to other countries. U.S. workers have not been consulted.
Princeton University economist Alan Blinder predicts that these choice jobs could be lost in a mere decade or two. These involve computer programming, bookkeeping, graphic design and other careers once thought firmly planted in American soil. For perspective, 40 million is more than twice the number of people now employed in manufacturing.
Blinder was taken aback when, sitting in at the business summit in Davos, Switzerland, he heard U.S. executives talk enthusiastically about all the professional jobs they could outsource to lower-wage countries. And he's a free trader.
What America can do to stop this is unclear, but it certainly doesn't have to speed up the process through a government program. We refer to the H-1B visa program, which allows educated foreigners to work in the United States, usually for three years. Many in Congress want to nearly double the number of H-1B visas, to 115,000 a year.
To the extent that the program helps talented foreign graduates of U.S. universities stay in this country while they await their green cards, it performs a useful service. But for many companies, the visa has become just a tool for transferring American jobs offshore.
Ron Hira, a professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, has studied the dark side of the H-1B program. He notes that the top applicants for visas are outsourcing companies, such as Wipro Technologies of India and Bermuda-based Accenture.
The companies bring recruits in from, say, India to learn about American business. After three years, the workers go home better able to interact with their U.S. customers.
In other cases, companies ask their U.S. employees to train H-1B workers who then replace them at lower pay. "This is euphemistically called, "knowledge transfer, " said Hira. "I call it, "knowledge extraction. "
Another rap against the program is that it?s used to depress the wages of American workers. The program's defenders argue that the law requires companies to pay "the prevailing wage."
But prevailing wage is a legalism, Hira says. It does not translate into market wage.
The median pay for H-1B computing professionals in fiscal 2005 was $50,000, which means half earn less than that. An American information technology worker with a bachelor's degree makes more than $50,000 in an entry-level job.
Businesses bemoan the alleged shortage of Americans trained to do the work. But wait a second. The law of supply and demand states that a shortage of something causes its price to rise. Wages in information technology have been flat.
The companies fret that not enough young Americans are studying science and technology. Well, cutting the pay in those fields isn't much of an incentive, is it?
The threat that they will outsource if they can't bring in foreign temps is a hollow one. "There's nothing stopping those companies from working offshore anyway," Hira said. "They're not patriotic."
This vision for a competitive America seems to be a few rich U.S. executives commandeering armies of foreign workers. They don't have to train their domestic work force. They don't have to raise pay to American standards.
A provision for revving up the H-1B program is contained in the immigration bill that last year passed the Senate. The co-sponsors, Democrat Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Republican John McCain of Arizona, have contended that their legislation requires employers to search for U.S. workers first. It does not.
Skilled U.S. workers had better start looking out for their interests. No one else is.
Froma Harrop writes for Creators Syndicate.
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on Wed, May 02, 07:05PM
A couple of points:
There are arguments for increasing the number of S&Es in the US independently of the number of S&Es in China / India / EU. Romer's rationale for increasing the # of S&E PhDs is that S&E workers are linked to GDP growth.
I heard Blinder talking about the 40 million number on NPR a couple of weeks ago. One thing he pointed out was that there would not be 40 million NET jobs lost. Outsourcing does save money, and that money ends up in other places in the economy and creates jobs. The trouble is that it's pretty hard to count those other jobs because they are widely diffused.
The solution Blinder proposes is to emphasize training people in things that are impossible to outsource, which seems problematic to me. We'll end up with a nation of barbers.
One read of the article you cite above is that we should be training more, not less native S&Es, since relying on the H-1Bs is problematic. See http://voxbaby.blogspot.com/2007/03/blinder-on-free-ish-trade.html
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