Engineering Science - Labor Market

White House Round Table Views

2007-11-27T06:18:00Z

There were two viewpoints that were in evidence at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy meeting on graduate and postdoctoral education earlier this month.

The first view, which was most thoughtfully articulated by Michael Teitelbaum, Vice President of the Sloan Foundation, is that the national discussion on science funding has focused too much on the supply of scientists and not enough on demand. We need to do a better job of ensuring that the training we provide matches what employers (both academic and non-academic) need. We also need a better (quantitative) understanding of how science functions as a system, and we need to use that understanding to optimize the way that we invest in science. Michael's slides are available here This was more or less the majority view at the meeting, though some were skeptical that demand could be gauged in any useful fashion.

The second view, which was most forcefully advocated by David Skorton, President of Cornell, is that the real problem with science is that there are simply not enough federal resources being invested. Investments in science lead to economic growth, so demand-side problems will work themselves out. I must confess that his talk left me scratching my head, so my summary probably doesn't do Skorton full justice. Peter Lee, head of the CS department at Carnegie Mellon, summarizes Skorton's views and adds some of his own in his blog. Take a look, because similar arguments have been very influential in getting things like America COMPETES passed.

Having seen for myself in the mid-90's just how badly things go when the supply of PhDs outstrips the demand for them, I'm much more inclined to agree with Michael Teitelbaum's views than with Skorton's and Lee's. But I'll have more to say about both.

Universities and the money fix

2007-09-24T04:17:00Z

Nature has been running some good stories this past month on the mess at the NIH.

Universities and the money fix, by Brian C. Martinson, points out what I think is the central problem:

[L]argely because of the structure of the funding flows between the NIH and the universities, there are few checks in the system to keep competition for grant funding at a healthy level. Thus, calls for further increases in the NIH budget may only make matters worse. In my view, it is time to ask the biggest beneficiaries of NIH largesse — the universities and academic health centres — to find ways to balance supply and demand that better reflect their obligations to researchers and society....

(emphasis added) Exactly right. The current problems are structural in nature. Anything that fails to address the underlying issues can only serve at best as a temporary stopgap.

There are insufficient 'feedback loops' linking the production of biomedical researchers to the availability of resources to support them. Instead, the educational system is replete with incentives to generate ever more PhDs and medical doctors. In the short term these arrangements may benefit universities, but in the longer term, such extreme levels of competition for funding are unsustainable. And they may already be doing harm.

The harm Martinson sees is greater potential for ethical lapses, something also predicted by David Goodstein. Reader BioScientist has more to say about the potential for harm in a comment on the NSF's new postdoc mentoring requirement:

None of these proposals matter, nor will any changes or improvements to them. The bottom line is that as long as there are too many scientists present the competition to stay alive will be intense and therefore conditions will remain poor. NIH/NSF proposals like this attempt to legislate behavior without recognizing the realities on the ground.

The lack of attention to graduate/post-graduate training is borne from two areas: 1) PIs are pushed by the system to extract every bit of effort possible effort from employees. The penalty for not doing so is a loss of funding and the end of a career. 2) As long as there are multiple applicants for every scientist/PI position there's less need to insure development of most individuals. As an example, one can simply ignore the bottom sixty percent of CVs to no ill effect when considering tenure-track positions. Those that remain will no doubt be pretty impressive. In this respect, post-graduate training is less an education than it is a 'selection' process in the biological sense. Put another way: why bother training postdocs, when most of them will fall out of the "system" anyway? The best will claw their way to success on their own and the rest are irrelevant. (This is a sentiment I've heard multiple times from faculty at my current Tier-I, top-20 research institute.)

Until the supply of PhD scientists comes back into line with demand working conditions will remain poor, salaries low, and hours long. In absence of a solution to the supply/demand imbalance all attempts to solve the resultant phenotypes will fail.

While I agree with Martinson's diagnosis, he unfortunately doesn't offer much in the way of solutions:

So is the only solution to force long-time NIH grant getters into retirement? Perhaps not. Universities have benefited handsomely from the efforts of senior faculty members in securing NIH grants during their careers, perhaps those same universities could now return the favour by taking full responsibility for paying these faculty salaries in their later years. This would serve the dual purpose of getting them off the NIH dole, and encouraging them to share their knowledge with their younger colleagues through more teaching.

Getting enough senior scientists to give up research for teaching to make any kind of difference seems, um, implausible.

Employment Trends in Biomedical Sciences

2007-08-22T21:20:00Z

Ginny C just pointed me to a recent FASEB presentation that summarizes recent trends in the life sciences labor market. It's great that they have done this, since I suspect a lot of people don't know the big picture, and FASEB has a very broad reach. Give it a read.

There is a great deal of overlap with Paula Stephan's findings and a few other things that Peter and I have discussed here.

A few things that struck me in the slides:

I knew that numbers of women have been increasing rapidly in the life sciences, but the graphs in the presentation are still pretty striking. Ditto for the number of postdocs on temporary visas.
Success rates for NIH fellowship applications have been falling almost as fast as for R01s. They're down from ~45% in 2001 to ~27% in 2006.
NIH spending on students as a percent of the total budget is down from ~4.3% in 1985 to ~2.7% in 2006
Foreign PhD recipients are increasingly staying in the US
The fraction of all US biomedical PhDs who are tenured or in tenure-track positions is steadily decreasing. ~46% in 1981 to ~28% in 2006
Almost all the new positions created during the NIH doubling period were MDs in clinical departments
Hiring of PhDs by med schools has pretty much ground to a halt in the last couple of years.
Average GRE Quantitative scores are surprisingly low for life sciences folks: 529 for health sciences and 606 for biological sciences applicants (out of 990 total). I have always wondered if part of the reason the labor market for life scientists is so much worse than for physical scientists and engineers is that quantitative skills give the latter folks more options.

Survival of the "Fittest"?

2007-08-09T00:17:00Z

There's an intriguing article in yesterday's Times about a new theory about the factors that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution in England.

For centuries, England's citizens lived on the brink of starvation. Although innovations would periodically increase agricultural productivity, greater access to food invariably led to population increases, which in turn brought per capita food levels right back to where they started. It took the Industrial Revolution to finally bring the growth rate of the food supply above the growth rate of the population.

Historian Gregory Clark's study of wills from 1200-1800 found the following:

Given that the English economy operated under Malthusian constraints, might it not have responded in some way to the forces of natural selection that Darwin had divined would flourish in such conditions? Dr. Clark started to wonder whether natural selection had indeed changed the nature of the population in some way and, if so, whether this might be the missing explanation for the Industrial Revolution....

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.

As the progeny of the rich pervaded all levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for wealth could have spread with them. He has documented that several aspects of what might now be called middle-class values changed significantly from the days of hunter gatherer societies to 1800. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped.

Clark speculates that there may be genetic and/or cultural components to these changes in behavior:

Dr. Clark says the middle-class values needed for productivity could have been transmitted either culturally or genetically. But in some passages, he seems to lean toward evolution as the explanation. “Through the long agrarian passage leading up to the Industrial Revolution, man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern economic world,” he writes. And, “The triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus may lie as much in our genes as in ideology or rationality.”

What was being inherited, in his view, was not greater intelligence — being a hunter in a foraging society requires considerably greater skill than the repetitive actions of an agricultural laborer. Rather, it was “a repertoire of skills and dispositions that were very different from those of the pre-agrarian world.”

I don't know enough about behavioral genetics to have a sense of whether this is plausible; regardless, his application of Darwinian thinking in this particular case is intriguing.

Substitute funding for food, and it's clear that the current NIH mess is a Malthusian crisis. And as with England, this is only the most recent of a series. What are these selection pressures doing to the population of academic scientists?

When times are tight, it becomes a lot less pleasant to be an academic. Fewer proposals get funded, and even if you do get funded, a lot more work has to go into your proposals. Industry starts looking a lot more attractive by comparison. Increased numbers are forced out, and more interestingly when we start thinking like Darwin, increased numbers either leave by choice or never seek academic careers in the first place.

Economics tells us that the more attractive one's industry prospects relative to academic alternatives, the more likely one is to end up there. And if you work in industry, you don't "reproduce" by training students. Thus, academia's Malthusian crises may very well be selecting against those who are most capable of success outside of academia.

Funding levels in academia are driven by the prospect of economic returns to investments in research. Unfortunately for all concerned, unlike Clark's hypothesized England, academia appears to be selecting against some of those most capable of increasing the "food" supply.

Immigration Bill Lives

2007-06-18T14:14:00Z

Reports of the demise of the immigration bill appear to have been greatly exaggerated. Science has a couple of interesting pieces on provisions affecting scientists that I missed in my earlier look at the bill (perhaps they have been added in one of the many, many amendments?), and they are big ones.

From the first article:

Foreign students earning an S&E masters or PhD from a US university would be granted permanent residency.
2/3 of the visas in the diversity lottery would be reserved for people with advanced S&E degrees (the lottery sets aside 50,000 visas for people from countries that do not send large numbers of immigrants to the US)

From the second article:

Foreign students could remain in the US for 2 years after graduation while trying to find a job that will sponsor them for an H-1B.
H-1Bs would be granted preferentially based on a point system that looks at such things as whether one has a graduate degree, whether one has employment in S&E, and proficiency in English.

So, in summary, as best I can tell:

If you get an advanced S&E degree from the US, you get to stay.
If you get an advanced S&E degree from anywhere else (or if you already have one), you can come work in the US and potentially stay.
If you have an advanced S&E degree and are trying to get an H-1B visa, you are either exempt from numerical caps or go to the front of the line, depending on who you work for.

Wow. I think these provisions and the ones described earlier could have potentially huge implications for the global S&E workforce.

Permanent residency for those earning S&E degrees in the US is great - the current practice of bringing in really smart people, letting them gain valuable work experience in tech companies, and then sending them back home seems perverse. I haven't been able to find the provision in the bill (there are 350 amendments at this point, so who knows what's in there), so I'm unclear on when exactly people would qualify. Immediately upon graduation? Or some time later?

The goal of the bill is to make the US more competitive, presumably with China and India, but it's not clear that that will be the long-term effect. Here's why:

If you are in the US, the value of your S&E advanced degree has probably dropped because you will be competing with a lot more people for jobs. I say "probably" because the new entrants will also help create a lot of new opportunities as well. One thing to consider, though: tech companies and the ecosystem that surrounds them employ a lot more people with advanced degrees than just scientists. There are lots of MBAs and JDs running around the tech sector, and nobody is trying to import more of them. Even if the new opportunities for S&Es cancels out some (or all) of the downside of increased competition for jobs, the net effect is likely that the value of an S&E degree relative to an MBA or a JD has fallen. And that means that smart US students will gravitate away from science toward other alternatives.
If you are in China or India, the value of an S&E degree just went up because it's a ticket to the US. That means that students will be even more likely to pursue degrees in these subjects. Some fraction of these S&Es will stay in country, and some fraction of those who come to the US on H-1Bs will return. As James Fallows describes in The Atlantic this month, there are some amazing opportunities for entrepreneurs in China.

So, while the US will get a lot of talent from the bill, China and India stand to benefit considerably as well. And it's not at all clear what the balance will be. Regardless, the world stands to gain a whole lot more scientists and engineers.

H-1B Hubbub

2007-06-01T15:48:00Z

Immigration policy has been in the news lately, but the talk has been almost entirely about low-skill workers. Buried in the recent Senate compromise immigration bill, though, are some provisions that will affect scientists and engineers.

There hasn't been much talk about the high-skill worker side of the bill, but what little I have read has been negative. From this past Sunday's SF Chronicle: "H-1B Federal Immigration Bill... Everyone agrees it's flawed, but how to fix it?" ScienceCareers.org asks, Who Speaks for Early-Career Scientists?. The Wall Street Journal reports that even businesses dislike some of the high tech worker provisions (Business Divided As Debate Opens On Immigration).

So just how bad is it? Here's the bill, S. 1348: A bill to provide for comprehensive immigration reform and for other purposes (who names these things?). Keep in mind that this is not the final text by a long shot - there are already 108 proposed amendments - but it gives a glimpse of the kinds of changes that are being contemplated.

As best I can tell, the proposed changes will primarily affect those with bachelors-level S&E degrees. The provisions that most strongly affect those with advanced degrees were put in place years ago; the current bill expands them modestly, but for the most part leaves them qualitatively the same. There is one change, however, that could have unintended long-term consequences for S&E.

First, some background. There is a quota on H-1B visas that varies from year to year. The quotas are set when Congress tinkers with immigration legislation, which is to say infrequently, so it's easy for the levels to get out of whack with what's going on in the economy. The current number is 65,000 per year, down from 195,000 for fiscal year 2003 (notice that the reduction didn't come until about 3 years after the dot-com crash). Now that the tech sector has recovered, visa requests are up again, and the 2007 quota was reached on the first day of the year.

One thing S. 1348 does is to raise the cap from 65,000 to 115,000. It also adds a provision that the cap will automatically increase by 20% the year after the current quota is reached. (I guess this is better than the 90's approach of making up a series of numbers except for the fact that it's a one-way ratchet. Much saner would be something based on wage levels: have the cap rise and fall based on wage levels for skilled workers - that way recessions would trigger automatic reductions.)

So how much does changing the cap affect S&E PhDs? Probably not much. There are already several exemptions that apply to researchers: First, universities, government labs, and nonprofit research organizations are not subject to the cap at all, so the quota is irrelevant in these sectors. Second, as of FY2005 there have been an additional 20,000 slots for people who hold master's or higher degrees from a US university. This second quota was just reached this year (http://www.immigration.com/newsletter1/h1bmasterreach06.pdf)

S. 1348 expands the set of organizations not subject to H-1B caps: all nonprofits would be exempt, not just nonprofit research organizations, and it exempts those who have "been awarded medical specialty certification based on post-doctoral training and experience in the United States." Sure, this will increase the number of PhD H-1Bs, but because of existing exemptions, it doesn't appear that there have been any serious limits on those with PhDs in recent years anyway.

The interesting bit is that the bill broadens the advanced degree exemption to include those with degrees from non-US universities. Here's why: suppose you are a top-notch Indian or Chinese undergraduate who wants to move to the US. Getting a master's or PhD in the US is a great step toward your goal - the degree provides a stepping stone to an H-1B, which in turn can lead to a green card. Suppose you get into a really elite local university, say one of the IITs, but you fare less well in your US admissions process, perhaps because they have difficulty interpreting your credentials or because of language skills. So you have to choose between one of the best in-country universities or a second- (or third-) tier US university for graduate study. Which do you choose? Currently, if your heart is set on ending up in the US, H-1B considerations weigh pretty heavily in favor of the US university. The proposed change, however, removes that advantage and could reverse the balance. So one consequence of S. 1348 might be to strengthen the top Chinese and Indian universities at the expense of lower tier US institutions.

“Boom and Bust” – April 20, 2007 article in Science

2007-05-02T06:15:00Z

Since this blog started in the Fall we’ve had an active dialog on the subject of funding at NIH. Science Magazine’s April 20 issue has a long article by Jennifer Cousin and Greg Miller detailing the issue, and confirming many of the trends and factors we have discussed on this blog. (Note that I think you have to be a AAAS member to see the entire article – if you aren’t, e-mail me at peterfiske@yahoo.com and I can perhaps get you a copy) The authors spoke to “dozens of investigators… [and] six NIH institute directors and agency head Elias Zerhouni” and confirmed what a lot of the readers of this blog are saying. Maybe Jennifer and Greg have been reading this blog all along?

In any event, the article is good and thorough and I thought it would be useful to provide a link to a pdf version that you can read – and to discuss this article as a group.

One issue that Geoff has speculated about – and that these authors confirm – is the fact that the doubling of NIH funding prompted a lot of infrastructural investment at universities and national labs in the US. According to the authors of this article, schools invested $2.2B in new medical school construction from 1990-1997, $3.9B from 1998-2002 and a whopping $7.4B from 2002-2007! Schools hired new faculty to fill the offices and were “expecting to recoup their investments from the NIH grants investigators would haul in.” Most ominously, the article notes that growth at medical schools has lagged the doubling of funding: “many institutions are still expanding”, they report.

Institutions have been confronted with huge increases in demand for bridge funding for their investigators. Dana Farber’s CEO told the authors that his institution was setting aside $3M-$4M for this year – historically the amount of money set aside for this category was a small fraction of this amount.

We have explored the growth in NIH grant applications in our blog – this article confirms the trends Geoff and others have reported. As we have discussed – investigators have reacted to the paucity of funding by trying to up their odds by submitting more proposals.

The result: misery among the investigatorial classes. Several young and mid-career investigators are interviewed and their lives over the past few years sound miserable. Ironically, NIH has tried to protect some of the youngest investigators by giving them a slight edge in funding for their first R01s – but this simply robs resources from the mid-career folks who are often struggling to get R01’s renewed. What a perfect time to get hosed by the NIH: just when you’re up for tenure review.

The authors talk a bit about the effect on early career scientists and graduate students. No data were presented but the authors describe the situation at Brown University: 49 faculty members were polled regarding how many were planning on taking a new graduate student next year: only 25% said they were – down from 90%. But Harold Varmus is quoted by the authors as saying “I don’t think we’re losing young people outright yet.”

My experience with Science magazine is that the journalism staff is first rate, but they tend to stick to the establishment line of thought. They shy away from perspectives that might be too critical of the powers-that-be, and often choose a “silver-lining” to close out the discussion. None of the anger that has been so eloquently expressed in this blog is evident in any of the quotes in the article. One might think that the catastrophic failure of the management of NIH, and of the science policy community as a whole, to prepare its community for this “day of reckoning” would elicit a bit more ‘what the F!@#!! were you thinking???’ comments from folks. According to the authors of this article, eight senior scientists and policy makers published a commentary in Science in 2002 presenting different budget models for NIH – the most pessimistic of which modeled increases of 4%. One of those involved is quoted: “We didn’t model increases below 4% a year because the tradeoffs and sacrifices that would have been caused…were too difficult for us to deal with in the model.” [!]. Director Zerhouni attributes the dive in funding rate to below inflation levels on 9/11, the wars and Katrina. No doubt they might have marginally affected the schedule of declines – but certainly not the inevitability: for any agency to assume long-term growth above the rate of inflation is… well, unsound at the very least…

Which gets us back to this blog. We started this discussion because, despite its abundant successes, “science” in the United States is far from perfect. The current crisis in funding at NIH is only the latest in a long history of similar crises in different disciplines since the advent of the “modern” science funding model proposed by Vannevar Bush. Even today, policy decisions on science funding almost entirely disregard issues related to the scientific workforce – and this makes young scientists particularly vulnerable.

More Graduate Students - Brought to You by IGERT

2007-04-26T20:31:00Z

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.

More Graduate Students?

2007-04-24T16:52:00Z

There have been a few bills working their way through Congress that seek to significantly increase the number of graduate students. Why now, at a time when people are asking, "Are we training too many PhDs?"

Much of the current impetus comes from the National Academies report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm -- the bills in question also address other Gathering Storm recommendations -- so the question becomes, where did the Gathering Storm report get the idea? Because the report was put together in very short order (10 weeks), the idea almost certainly came from elsewhere.

I recently dug up a 2000 working paper by Stanford economist Paul Romer that I think may contain the seeds of the current push to increase the ranks of graduate students. Here is a good piece on Romer's efforts to get Congress to implement some of his ideas. Romer is a smart guy, and while I'm not convinced by everything he says in the paper, it's a very interesting piece of work.

S&E research has been linked to overall economic growth. The question Romer addresses in the paper is that of, "What is the best way to increase the amount of science and engineering research done in the US?"

Several federal programs try to stimulate research activity by bolstering demand. Romer argues that there are 2 problems with a demand-side approach. First, demand subsidies don't necessarily increase the overall amount of research done. Unless the supply of researchers increases in response to demand, demand subsidies will just push wages up. Second, structural features of universities cause the supply of researchers to fail to respond to demand. This second point is the crux of the paper: because demand doesn't trigger increased supply, Romer argues that the government needs to subsidize supply instead of demand by creating large numbers of new graduate fellowships.

Romer discusses 2 reasons for the decoupling of S&E supply from demand:

First, S&E graduate programs provide no information on outcomes or salaries for their graduates, which prevents prospective students from being able to respond to demand signals in their enrollment choices:

"The lack of information that is available to students who are making decisions about careers in science and technology suggests that our existing educational institutions may not lead to the kind of equilibration that we take for granted in many other contexts. If students do not have information about what wages will be, it will be much harder for them to adjust their career decisions in response to wage changes."

Romer did an experiment in which he had an graduate assistant start the application process at the top 10 programs in business, law, and 6 different S&E fields. The assistant requested information on recent graduates' salaries from all programs, and got information from 80% of the business schools, 70% of the law schools and 0% of the 60 S&E programs. This problem seems straightforward to remedy - the Graduate School Guide provides some program level outcome information (but no salary information yet). The NSF is currently experimenting with a salary question on the Survey of Earned Doctorates, and should the test prove successful, it should be straightforward to assemble program-level post-graduation salary information.

Second, the response of competitive undergraduate institutions to increases in demand for S&E's is interesting. Elite liberal arts colleges gain prestige by being very selective. Suppose undergraduates respond to increases in demand for S&E's by enrolling in more classes that will prepare them for S&E careers. One response might be to hire more S&E faculty and to accept more S&E undergraduates. That's expensive and risky (if demand decreases, universities are stuck with excess faculty and facilities) and reduces selectivity. A simpler, alternative response:

"A liberal arts university that has a fixed investment in faculty who teach in areas outside of the sciences and that faces internal pressure to maintain the relative sizes of different departments may respond to this pressure by making it more difficult for students to complete a degree in science. Faculty in the departments that teach the basic science courses will be happy to 'keep professional standards high' and thereby keep teaching loads down. Faculty in other departments will be happy to make study in their departments more attractive, for example by inflating the average grade given in their courses. There is clear evidence that this kind of response currently operates on campuses in the United States."

So part of the reason that relatively few Americans pursue S&E careers may be the incentives under which universities operate.

Romer argues that immigration has provided a way around this undergraduate bottleneck and that S&E immigration levels have been much more responsive to changes in demand than domestic supply.

As an alternative to increasing reliance on foreign-born S&Es, Romer proposes creating large subsidies for both undergraduates and graduate students pursuing S&E degrees. These appear to be what we are seeing in current bills to increase the number of S&Es.

The details of his proposed subsidies are interesting, and it's worth looking into whether the current bills capture some of Romer's key points. More later in the week.

Congress, PhD production, and the Gathering Storm Report

2007-04-10T21:54:00Z

[Prolific commenter Bob has submitted a guest post - interesting stuff!]

There has been some discussion on this blog about whether we are producing too many PhDs, given the size of the job market. Some have stated that Congress is not likely to get involved with the issue of PhD production. That is currently not true as will be discussed below.

Here is some homework I have done on the issue of how Congress does get involved with issues like PhD production that I hope some of you find useful, especially in light of Geoff's recent post about the origin of another bill in Congress. The discussion also illustrates the science policy power structure in Washington.

Here is an example of how Congress became involved with the issue of PhD production, in both the 109th and 110th Congresses, and the origins of the "Gathering Storm" report. What Congress will do, is ask the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), or the National Research Council (NRC), to study an issue involving science and technology ("competitiveness") on its behalf. That is one reason the NAS was established. For other issues, Congress might turn to the CRS-the Congressional Research Service for example.

Here are the web links for the 300+ page report, and the executive summary:

Rising Above The Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future If you sign in, you can receive a free pdf of this 300 page report.

This executive summary explains how the report came about: Rising Above The Gathering Storm: Executive Summary

On page 2 (or 3) of the executive summary the origins of the "Gathering Storm" report are discussed: "The National Academies was asked by Senator Lamar Alexander and Senator Jeff Bingaman of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, with endorsement by Representative Sherwood Boehlert and Representative Bart Gordon of the House Committee on Science, to respond to the following questions: What are the top 10 actions, in priority order, that federal policymakers could take to enhance the science and technology enterprise so that the United States can successfully compete, prosper, and be secure in the global community of the 21st century? What strategy, with several concrete steps, could be used to implement each of those actions? The National Academies created the Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century to respond to this request."

On page 27 of the executive summary it shows who the committee members were made of, basically CEOs and university presidents. However, my guess is that much of this large report was already put together by the NAS staff, well before this committee was formed. The report is so large, with so much data, there is no way the CEO of Intel and the President of the University of Maryland gathered all these "facts" and wrote a 300 page report. They likely read it, and signed off on it, adding a several recommendations of their own.

Notice what the NAS committee and/or the NAS staff did recommend:

Scroll down to page 10 of the Executive Summary: "Action C-2: Increase the number of US citizens pursuing graduate study in “areas of national need” by funding 5,000 new graduate fellowships each year. NSF should administer the program and draw on the advice of other federal research agencies to define national needs. The focus on national needs is important both to ensure an adequate supply of doctoral scientists and engineers and to ensure that there are appropriate employment opportunities for students once they receive their degrees. Portable fellowships would provide a stipend of $30,0007 annually directly to students, who would choose where to pursue graduate studies instead of being required to follow faculty research grants, and up to $20,000 annually for tuition and fees."

It turns out areas of "National Need" are generic fields like the physical sciences. Thus, 5,000 new graduate fellowships would result in a very large increase in PhD production at a time when many are questioning how to employ current PhD production.

In summary, The Gathering storm report recommended a large INCREASE in the supply of PhDs in the physical sciences ("areas of national need"). The 109th Congress then converted these recommendations into a series of bills known as the PACE Act-Protecting America’s Competitive Edge (PACE). The PACE ACT had 62 co-sponsors in the 109th Congress, but did not become law. Here is a summary:

109TH CONGRESS: IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES JAN. 22, 2006 S. 2198 Protecting America's Competitive Edge (PACE) Act

To ensure the United States successfully competes in the 21st century global economy. Mr. DOMENICI (for himself, Mr. BINGAMAN, Ms. MIKULSKI and 50 co-sponsors)

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s109-2198

Full text of bill: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s109-2198

Scroll down: SEC. 181. GRADUATE RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS IN SCIENTIFIC AREAS OF NATIONAL NEED

(a) FELLOWSHIPS AUTHORIZED.—..establish a fellowship program to provide tuition and financial support for eligible students pursuing master’s and doctoral degrees in mathematics or science, engineering, or other areas of national need.

(b) AREAS OF NATIONAL NEED.—important to the mission of the Department of Energy, may use the areas of national need in determining the specific fields of study

(e) AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS.— $225,000,000 for fiscal year 2007; (2) $450,000,000 for fiscal year 2008; and (3) $675,000,000 for each of the fiscal years 2009 through 2013.

In effect, the PACE ACT proposed a large increase in PhD production in the physical sciences (perhaps a doubling by 2013 if my math is correct). There are some positive education features of the PACE ACT however, but that is another topic. The PACE ACT (S. 2198) did not become law in the 109th Congress.

However, similar measures have been reintroduced in the 110th Congress. Two important bills:

S.761 America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science Act (Placed on Calendar in Senate)

S.833 COMPETE Act of 2007 (Introduced in Senate)

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s110-833

...... More on the details of these bills to follow. I have found this link useful for tracking legislation: http://www.govtrack.us/

This is enough for one comment. One of the key points is that while there is discussion of reducing PhD production in the U.S., bills have been introduced in Congress in response to the NAS Gathering Storm report that will do just the opposite, in a very significant way. Currently, the average working scientist, postdoc, or graduate student has had basically no say in the formation of these bills. The question is, can we change this and have input? Again, a future topic.

Troubling Doubling

2007-03-03T00:30:00Z

Paula Stephan gave a great talk on the NIH doubling this week here at Harvard. Here are her slides.

To recap, shortly after the NIH's annual budget doubled from $14 to $28 billion, the number of new applications for R01 grants (the mainstay of life sciences research) increased dramatically, and as a result, acceptance rates for grants plummeted. Lots of people are upset about it.

One of the big questions is, who are all these new applicants? Paula presented evidence for the following scenario:

When the NIH announced their budget increase, a lot of institutions saw an opportunity to expand their life sciences divisions.
Universities started building new facilities, hoping to recoup their costs with the overhead from increased NIH grant money. Most of these new buildings were associated with medical schools.
Lots of new research space started coming online just as the doubling was winding down.
There has been an increase in hiring to fill all this new space. Most of the new hires have been MDs, not PhDs, and most of the positions are non-tenure track, soft money positions.
Now that the buildings have been completed, they have to be paid for. Both new and existing faculty are under increased pressure to bring in outside support. A typical arrangement: 3 years from the start of one's appointment to bring in one's full salary. The expectation in some cases is three R01s per investigator.
The increased pressure to bring in money is spurring everyone to submit more often. The percentage of applications from new investigators (people who have never received and R01) has remained roughly constant (~25%) throughout the doubling, so the new applications are coming from people across the board.

Paula also has some interesting data from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients about how the doubling affected careers for younger scientists. In brief:

The length of time people are spending in postdoctoral positions decreased modestly.
Job growth occurred. Most of the new jobs were outside of academia and in non-tenure-track academic positions.
The probability that a biomedical PhD holder aged 35 or younger has a tenure track job was the same in 2003 as it was in 1993.
New investigators (those who have never been a PI on an NIH grant before) receive more awards than before the doubling, but all the increase is in small grants (R03s and R21s). The total number of R01s awarded to new investigators has remained roughly constant.

The bottom line: $14 billion new dollars per year made things a little better for young scientists. When you consider that for $2.5 billion, you could double the salaries of all 50,000 postdocs in the US, you can see how small a share of the doubling went to younger scientists.

Now that grant acceptance rates are falling, things are likely going to be a bit rough for all the new hires. The bar has been set high for them at a time when total funding for the NIH is stagnant (actually decreasing in real terms). We'll probably see signs of a shakeout over the next few years.

Watching a Train Wreck, Part 2

2006-12-19T21:30:00Z

We've seen the effects of the NIH budget doubling on the grad student population. What about postdocs?

The NSF publishes an annual headcount of postdocs in academic institutions, and sure enough, the number of postdocs went up over the budget doubling period, 1998-2003. However, once you dig into the numbers a bit, some interesting things emerge. Take a look at the breakdown by citizenship:

From 1998-2003, the number of life sciences postdocs increased by 4,015. These new postdocs were all non-citizens. In fact, over the same time period, the number of US citizen / permanent resident postdocs decreased by 255.

This is not to say that foreign postdocs are not displacing US postdocs. Here's what most likely happened: the NIH announced a big new pot of money. As we discussed earlier, new graduate enrollments increased significantly in response. It takes 5-7 years for these new grad students to earn their PhDs, and in the meantime there simply were not enough US citizen PhDs to fill all the new positions, so universities had to import them. The new US PhDs will be coming online this year or next, but it's already too late. As Peter said earlier: "the domestic PhD population arrives at exactly the WRONG time - after the party is over." The delay in creating new PhDs means that similar increased immigration will occur during any rapid scientific expansion.

So one big question is, what happens when all the new US PhDs start showing up? Can an increase of 1000 -1500 new US citizen postdocs / year be absorbed? Postdocs are cheap, so 1,000 new 3-year postdoctoral positions would only cost about $150M - only about 0.5% in the $30 billion NIH budget. That's small potatoes when the NIH budget grows at, say, 5% per year, but if instead the growth rate is more like 2%, I expect to hear a lot of grumbling from senior people and significant downward pressure on stipends. NRSA fellowship amounts are already decreasing in inflation adjusted terms.

My guess is that the new NIH money that is not dedicated to infrastructure is now paying the salaries of a lot of new soft money positions. Over the next few years, we'll see a shakeout of these folks, and this once-promising escape route will be replaced by a lot of new postdoctoral slots.

Watching a Train Wreck, Part 1

2006-12-13T19:45:00Z

Effect Measure suggests that the current NIH problems have arisen because new NIH funds led to more grad students and postdocs, and these people are now applying for grants. Is this right?

First off, did the NIH budget doubling lead to more graduate students? Almost certainly.

Back in the 1970s, when the bottom first fell out of the PhD job market, a number of people were working on complicated models of PhD production to explain what happened. None of them worked very well. Richard Freeman came along and supplied the missing ingredient. Freeman observed that economics predicts that people's decisions to pursue graduate education should be based in part on financial considerations. People weigh their long term prospects as, say, a PhD physicist against alternative possibilities (e.g. investment banker / software engineer / other quantitatively-oriented careers). When prospects are good for physics PhDs relative to the alternatives, more people enroll in physics PhD programs. When prospects are bad (again, relative to the alternatives), fewer people enroll.

Now I'm sure that many people will object, "Money was not a consideration in *my* decision to pursue a PhD! I am doing it for the love of science / truth / rats!" That may be so. Freeman is not suggesting that everyone is motivated primarily by economic considerations -- it's a subtler argument:

Imagine that people's desire to pursue graduate studies lies on a continuum. On one end are people who will pursue a PhD in their chosen field no matter what, even if it leads to a life of miserable penury (the fact that English PhDs continue to be minted is proof that these people exist). On the other end are people who will never ever pursue a PhD under any circumstances. Somewhere in the middle are people who could go one way or the other. It's these people for whom economic considerations hold the most sway. That is not to say that money is a prime motivator even for these folks; rather, there may be stronger motivators pulling in opposite directions, and financial considerations are just the tie-breaker. Regardless, when Freeman included economic considerations into a simple model of physics PhD production, the predictions were spot on. (Here's Freeman's paper)

So do Freeman's ideas continue to have predictive power? The presence of foreign students complicates things (Freeman did his work in the early 70's when there were a lot fewer foreign students), but they are still important.

The NIH budget doubling almost certainly made prospects for PhD life / health scientists look a whole lot brighter. However, we must also consider these prospects relative to alternative choices for prospective life scientists over the doubling period (1998-2003). Given the changes in the 90's in the way health care is paid for, I'd guess that medical school is not as attractive as it once was. And the economy as a whole, particularly the tech sector, underwent a slowdown in 2001. Better prospects for PhD life scientists coupled with worse prospects for alternatives should mean an increase in enrollments. Sure enough, life sciences enrollments started increasing quite rapidly as of 2002.

We can see a similar pattern in the first-year enrollment data below for other S&E fields. For example, in math / CS / engineering / physical sciences, we see a peak in the early 1990s (presumably relating to the NSF's PhD shortage predictions in the late 1980s). There is then a decline (poor job market for PhDs coupled with a tech sector boom), then a rise again as the academic market improved in the late 1990s and the tech sector slowed in 2000-2001.

So getting back to our original question of whether new graduate enrollments have led to the current NIH woes, the answer is clearly "No". It takes 5-7 years to earn a life sciences PhD, and this wave of new students won't even start graduating until next year, let alone writing R01 grants.

Here's the sobering thing, though: Given that concerns about NIH funding levels have only recently hit the press, it's likely that we will see continuing increases in first-year graduate enrollments through at least 2007. This means increasing numbers of new PhDs for another 6-8 years and probably another decade of sizable increases in the ranks of postdocs. A whole crop of new PhDs is walking right into an already troubled labor market, and things probably won't start to improve for 10+ years. Yikes!

The R01 Lottery?

2006-11-30T18:00:00Z

I found some details about the recent sharp decline in success rates for NIH grants (R01s in particular) in this helpful FAQ. There are lots of useful data in the document, but also some interesting things between the lines. It sounds incredibly defensive to me: "Here are 6 things we did that you may think caused the current problems. They didn't. It's not our fault." Clearly the NIH is taking a lot of heat from PIs about R01 success rates.

Elias Zerhouni and the FAQ both take pains to assert that new NIH programs and priorities are not responsible for the changes in success rates. Let's take their word for the moment and dig into their explanation: the drop has occurred because many more people have started applying for R01s. Where did these new people come from?

Here's an explanation that came immediately to mind:

Think of an R01 application as a lottery ticket. The cost of the ticket is the effort required to prepare the application. The expected payoff is the product of the average amount of an award and the probability of receiving one. During the first few years of the NIH budget doubling, the amount of an award went up and so did the probability of receiving one.

When the expected value of a lottery ticket increases while the cost remains the same, more people buy. Is this the right model? Assuming the cost of preparing an application is constant, we'd expect the number of new applications to increase until the expected payoff returned to its value before the doubling (economists, feel free to correct me!). Let's look at the NIH's numbers for R01s:

Year	Applications	Awards	Success rate	Total $ (thousands)
1997	20,396	6140	30.1%	5,457,343
1998	20,039	6195	30.9%	5,980,395
1999	21,994	7028	32.0%	6,723,897
2000	22,088	7063	32.0%	7,602,572
2001	21,967	6965	31.7%	8,499,965
2002	22,212	6799	30.6%	9,346,440
2003	24,634	7430	30.2%	10,084,647
2004	27,461	6991	25.5%	10,538,699
2005	28,423	6463	22.7%	10,667,802

(For you sticklers, the numbers are for "R01 equivalents", i.e. R01, R29, and R37 grants.)

A few observations:

The increase in the total number of new awards per year was relatively modest -- generally about 15%, except for 2003. The budget doubling did not do much to spread the wealth, at least with R01s, and as a result, the probability of receiving an award never increased very much.
The big change is in the dollar amount of the awards. The FAQ does not provide average amounts per award, but the overall amount spent on R01s increased by 68% over the doubling period (1998-2003), so the per-award increase is probably in the ballpark of 45% or so.

The simplistic lottery model as we have posed it does not look quite right: for the first 4 years of the doubling (1998-2002), the number of applications increased only modestly, by about 10%, but the expected return increased much more. The data on individuals (rather than applications) below tell a similar story (again, the numbers are for R01 equivalents). For the first 4 years of the doubling, the number of new individuals applying increased by a total of about 9%.

	Data on Applications	Data on Individuals
Year	Applications	Awards	Success rate	Applications	Awards	Success rate
1997	20,396	6140	30.1%	17,065	5828	34.2%
1998	20,039	6195	30.9%	16,898	5812	34.4%
1999	21,994	7028	32.0%	18,281	6548	35.8%
2000	22,088	7063	32.0%	18,354	6559	35.7%
2001	21,967	6965	31.7%	18,273	6536	35.8%
2002	22,212	6799	30.6%	18,482	6357	34.4%
2003	24,634	7430	30.2%	19,964	6905	34.6%
2004	27,461	6991	25.5%	21,857	6485	29.7%
2005	28,423	6463	22.7%	22,536	6052	26.9%

What's wrong with the lottery model? My guess is that the flaw lies in the assumption that the cost of preparing an application is constant. What matters here is the marginal cost of an application. If you are a lab that is already submitting R01 applications, your costs don't change. The real question is, how much does it cost the new applicants to prepare an application?

Think about it this way: There is an existing pool of research labs for which it's pretty straightforward to prepare an application. They already have facilities in place and existing research programs from which to obtain preliminary data. Come up a new idea, task it to a postdoc or grad student, go into a frenzy of writing (or have the students / postdocs do it), and voila. Those labs are already submitting proposals as fast as they can. Adding more money to the pot probably doesn't induce much extra work from them in the short term because they are already operating near capacity.

The next tier down is smaller labs, maybe one or two person shops, that have never submitted a proposal or that do so very infrequently. Preparing a new application for these labs takes a lot more work -- they don't have an army of students and postdocs at hand, their equipment is probably less state-of-the-art, and so on. But the prospect of all those new, high-dollar R01s is tempting. Because the marginal cost of preparing an application is higher for these smaller labs than for more established ones, the additional dollars don't entice all that many new applicants.

My guess is that the 10% initial increase in applications and applicants came from the new money enticing a little more work out of established players and bringing in a small number of new ones. So far, so good.

The really interesting question is what happened starting in 2003? There's an initial 10% bump in applications in 1999, then a plateau until 2003. All of a sudden there's an increase of another 10%, and it's followed by still another 10% increase in 2004, and another 5% in 2005. We'll look at that next.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it?

2006-11-29T17:28:00Z

The launching of Sputnik in 1957 triggered not only the space race, but also a large new influx of NSF support for graduate education. Throughout the 1960’s, the number of science and engineering PhDs granted rose. The supply of new PhDs eventually increased well beyond the economy’s ability to employ them as researchers, and around 1970 stories about PhD cab drivers started to appear in the press.

In the late 1980s, a half-baked NSF report projecting a shortfall of 600,000+ scientists and engineers in the 1990s got considerable press coverage. The report and increased NSF funding that followed led to increases in graduate enrollments. The alleged shortfall never appeared, and once again, PhD supply outstripped demand. The result was a terrible job market in the mid-1990s.

In 1999 the NIH started a 5-year budget doubling. Judging from this article in Science, the expansion has already led to visible strains. The most notable side effect has been, perversely, that the acceptance rate for R01 grants has fallen from around 32% before the budget doubling to about 18% afterwards.

Elias Zerhouni, the current head of the NIH, attributes the change in acceptance rates to more people applying for grants:

In 1998, there were about 19,000 scientists applying for competing awards. In 2006, NIH expects to receive applications from approximately 34,000 scientists and forecasts that over 36,000 scientists will apply in 2007. Remarkably, the largest surge in demand for grants occurred at the end of the doubling period and continues today. This "perfect storm"--the imbalance between supply and demand for grants--is the fundamental reason for the painful circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Zerhouni’s explanation leaves open a number of important questions that we’ll start digging into over the next couple of weeks:

Where did all these new grant applicants come from?
Do things look better or worse down the road?
Could these problems have been foreseen?
What measures might prevent these kinds of problems from recurring in the future?