Not only the Humanities- also the Sciences. Why Are There Still Too Many Graduate Students?

As the economy tanks the number of new graduate students is going up. In Sept 2009 the Council of Graduate Schools reported a 4.7% rise in the number of US national students, beating out the increase in foreign students for the first time in several years. Its not surprising that more young Americans are choosing graduate school as a refuge in times of economic uncertainly, what is surprising is that our universities and our federal funding agencies are allowing this to happen in the face of extensive evidence that we are training far too many PhD students. Despite shrinking opportunities in the academic world and massive layoffs of PhD scientists by the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and other high-tech industries, our universities continue to pump out new PhDs at an ever-increasing rate.

What drives this heedless increase in PhD production? Most likely it is the very nature of current ultra-competitive scientific research combined with an outmoded approach to faculty advancement prevalent in universities. This leads senior investigators (PIs) to build up their labs with as many students and postdocs as possible irrespective of whether this is really beneficial to the trainees.

What is to be done? First of all graduate training needs to be uncoupled from the drive of PI ambition. The goal of training should be training, not PI advancement. A good way to do this would be to end support for graduate research assistants on federal research grants. Graduate students could be supported on individual competitive fellowships or as part of university wide training grants. Work in the labs would then become more dependent on postdocs and technicians rather than students. This would also give granting agencies a better way to align the number of PhD candidates to the expected demand in various fields by controlling the number of training slots. A second thrust would be to reconstitute the Master’s degree as an essential element of graduate training. Increasing the pool of individuals with Master’s degrees in the sciences would help industry and government to fill those middle management positions that require an element of scientific sophistication, but not a PhD. Finally, universities need to develop stable, non-replicating research career pathways. Contemporary science depends on a large cohort of postdoctorals, research associates, and research track faculty who perform the day-to-day work in the laboratories in a highly skilled manner. However, these types of positions almost uniformly depend on the success on an individual PI in obtaining grant funding; thus they have no stability and no status in the university aside from the connection to the PI. This needs to change. For more information see http://scienceforthefuture.blogspot.com/.