Hi Bob--

There are a couple of ways one can estimate the total number of postdocs. First, you can look at the Survey of Doctorate Recipients, a biannual survey of about 7% of the people who earned their PhDs in the US. That will give you a pretty big undercount because, as you say, it misses all the postdocs who earned their PhDs outside the US (about half of all postdocs). A second method is to look at the NSF's annual survey of graduate students and postdoctorates. This is a department by department head count of postdocs and gets both people who earned their PhDs in the US and elsewhere. However, this second survey just counts people at academic institutions and misses people who have postdocs at government labs and at nonprofit biomedical research centers.

From WebCASPAR, I find that as of 2005, there were 48,653 postdocs at academic institutions. Sigma Xi surveyed the NIH postdocs in our survey in 2005; there were about 3,000 all told. There are probably a couple of thousand more spread out over the various national labs, and a few thousand at places like Scripps, Dana Farber, and so on. So maybe 55K-60K all told.

The NIH doubling created about 4,000 new postdocs -- see here

Having Congress dictate ratios of postdocs to staff scientists sounds to me like a recipe for lots of trouble. Imagine if, say, lab automation changed staffing needs dramatically - how long would it take for Congress to catch up? The H-1B numbers are random and capricious because they have to be manually adjusted by a slow and painful Congressional intervention. Imagine if that kind of time lag were involved in basic staffing or salaries! I was on an NSF postdoc in the early 90's; the amount was never adjusted for inflation, so it had been the same for a decade or more by the time I had gotten one. That's what you'd get if you put salary decisions in the hands of Congress.

I think there are things Congress could usefully do that are less heavy-handed than having them intervene directly in staffing and salary decisions. Think about kinds of things that would make labs want to do the right thing. Transparency measures would help a lot.

Perhaps some liability-like things as well. I'm sort of surprised that there have been so few high-profile cases of postdocs suing their PIs - after all, a federal circuit court has ruled that PIs have a fiduciary duty to their postdocs.

Also, Congress is rarely a place where innovation takes place. At best, they will pick up successful innovations from elsewhere. Professional Science Master's programs were created and funded by Sloan, and now the senate is allocating money to have the NSF pick up the tab. What kinds of similar practices might lend themselves to such extensions?

Geoff