Can a Country Really Have Too Many Science Ph.D.s?
by Douglas Steinberg
AT A MEETING right after Labor Day, Princeton University’s
molecular biology department surveyed the plans of its recently
graduated seniors, and professor Shirley M. Tilghman wasn’t
happy with the results. Thirty-one out of 72 students awarded
bachelor’s degrees last June were going to medical school,
eight planned to do community-service work – and only three
were heading directly for Ph.D. or M.D.-Ph.D. programs.
Recalling the meeting, Tilghman notes that the cohort of
doctoral wanna-bes has never topped 10 percent of graduates.
But she describes this year’s yield as the worst ever. “It
worries me because the future of science needs these kids
opting to do science,” she says. “And they’re not opting to.”
A recent 120-page report from the National Research Council
(NRC) helps explain why. “Addressing the Nation’s Changing
Needs for Biomedical and Behavioral Scientists” http://www.nap.edu/books/0309069815/html
is the 11th in a series of reports since 1975 mandated by
the National Research Service Award (NRSA) Act. Rife with
graphs, tables, and demographics, this “National Needs” report
differs from earlier ones by examining the entire workforce
in the targeted sciences, not just NRSA trainees.
Drafted by an 11-member committee drawn largely from academia,
the report discusses biomedical, clinical, and behavioral
research, as well as inadequate minority representation in
those fields. Its starkest conclusion about biomedical science
is that the number of new Ph.D.s awarded annually “is well
above that needed to keep pace with growth in the U.S. economy
and to replace those leaving the workforce as a result of
retirement and death.”
The report notes that biomedical Ph.D. production swelled
over the past quarter-century as the bulk of funding shifted
from training grants to research grants. It recommends that
“research training and overall Ph.D. production in these fields
should not be increased.” No particular strategy is advocated
to achieve that goal.
Why didn’t the committee call for a decrease in the number
of Ph.D.s awarded? Chairman Howard Hiatt, a professor of medicine
at Harvard Medical School, explains that “to change suddenly
the numbers of people could be very disruptive to the research
that’s going on at the present time” – research that he stresses
is “extraordinarily effective.” Insisting that “the notion
of keeping things constant is, in itself, a major step,” he
observes that a future committee could assess the outcome
of a no-growth strategy and, if warranted, propose a decline
in Ph.D. production as a further step.
As another observer points out, NRC reports are political
documents whose messages are carefully calibrated to be taken
seriously. If the committee had advocated a cutback, this
observer continues, “All hell would have broken loose,” even
though the proposal may have lacked any practical means of
enforcement.
Reports Have Impact
The findings and advice presented in the National Needs report
should induce a sense of déjà vu. Two years ago, an NRC-sponsored
committee chaired by Tilghman also depicted a Ph.D. glut in
the life sciences and called for restrained growth of the
graduate student population.(1) And in 1995, a paper by William
F. Massy, now professor emeritus of business administration
and education at Stanford University, and Charles A. Goldman,
a senior economist at RAND in Santa Monica, Calif., shoehorned
science training into a theoretical framework consistent with
the new report.(2)
Massy and Goldman argued that doctoral enrollment was driven
more by the need for research and teaching assistants than
by the labor market. The resulting Ph.D. glut, they explained,
had led to chronic underemployment and deteriorating career
attractiveness, particularly to American students. Though
the paper encountered some hostility at first, Goldman points
to “an accumulation of corroborating evidence and perspectives
in the last five years.”
Although these reports and papers may seem ineffectual – as
well as obvious – to many biomedical trainees, their authors
do perceive the work as having an impact. “I think there’s
a lot of interest in and concern about these issues” at the
National Institutes of Health, says Michael S. Teitelbaum,
a demographer at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York
and a member of the panel that drafted the National Needs
report. Tilghman notes that unpublicized proposals “are wending
their way slowly through the NIH machinery.”
Both the 1998 and the new NRC reports mention gradual increases
in the duration of graduate and postdoctoral training. Tilghman
points to a recent initiative to treat this “symptom of a
system that is broken”: In 1998, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
established a small graduate program that expects its students
to earn Ph.D.s in four and a half years. If the program succeeds,
she hopes it will force other elite programs that compete
for the same pool of applicants to speed up training as well.
According to Goldman, the NRC studies and his and Massy’s
paper have had two other notable effects: Graduate departments
are increasingly exposing students to teaching skills, which
are in greater demand than research skills. Departments are
also much more conscious that “large numbers of their students
will not be going into academic careers.”
In the last few years, that realization has apparently taken
hold among students and postdocs. “Now I go to Career Day
meetings at universities, and people are admitting that they
got into their Ph.D. program in order to get a job in industry,”
says David G. Jensen, managing director of Search Masters
International, a Sedona, Ariz., recruitment firm for the biotech
and pharmaceutical industries. Stephen Rosen, chairman of
Celia Paul Associates in New York, notes that most scientists
who consult him about career transitions “are trying to move
out of the academic environment into an industrial environment,”
even if that means changing fields.
The National Needs report asserts that growth in industrial
employment slowed in the mid-1990s, with the percentage of
biomedical scientists working in industry slightly lower in
1997 (23.9) than in 1993 (25.1). But for now, Jensen sees
a swelling demand from companies, which keeps recruiters “very,
very busy.” He acknowledges, however, that the job market
still isn’t hot enough to absorb all Ph.D. recipients, except
for those in a handful of specialties.
Postdocs and Post-Postdocs
The National Needs report documents a drop in the fraction
of new Ph.D. recipients planning postdoctoral study, from
73 percent in 1996 to 65.1 percent in 1997, the lowest such
figure since 1977. But it’s too early to tell if this downturn
signals a trend or is merely a historical blip. The preliminary
figure for 1998, according to NRC project officer James A.
Voytuk, is 67 percent.
“Our initial reaction was that the figure for 1997 was a
reflection of improvements in the economy,” says Jennifer
Sutton, NRC study director for the National Needs report who
has since moved to the National Cancer Institute. Instead
of planning to do a postdoc, “[Graduates] were more likely
to find other types of more permanent or more attractive jobs.”
Graduates were never interviewed, however; they merely indicated
(on a survey form) their plans rather than their subsequent
actions, and Teitelbaum describes the numbers as “really hard
to interpret.”
For Ph.D. recipients who carry through on their intentions
to become postdocs, the report suggests their plight better
than it does their options. It briefly mentions a 1998 paper
by Elizabeth Marincola, executive director of the American
Society for Cell Biology, and Frank Solomon, a biology professor
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that advised “the
creation of respectable, reasonably paid professional scientist
positions, to be held by fully trained researchers who neither
write grants nor train others.”(3)
“People genuinely want to do labwork at the bench as their
career,” Marincola remarks now. “But we’ve not yet made a
place for them.” While acknowledging that a few such positions
already exist, she adds, “The vast majority lack the stability
that we would like to see them have. And I think it’s a critical
mass issue, because unless jobs are available on a fairly
wide scale, then they stand a good chance of being marginalized.”
A case to consider are the hundreds of nonpostdoc, non-tenure-track
staff scientists employed by NIH’s intramural program. Generally
appointed five years or more after they have received their
doctorates, they lack independent resources and are supervised
(usually one per lab) by senior investigators. Their appointments
can last as long as five years, and annual salaries start
at about $55,000. Noting that many staff scientists’ appointments
have been renewed, Michael M. Gottesman, deputy director for
intramural research, asserts that he “can state unequivocally
that this new professional designation has been a big success
at the NIH” since it was introduced six years ago.
More Studies – and More Money?
According to Hiatt, NRC plans to send the National Needs
report to the NIH director, who will forward it to the Secretary
of Health and Human Services. Hiatt is set to discuss the
report with the director of the National Institute of General
Medical Sciences. An NIH spokesman says the report will be
sent to congressmen who request it.
NRC issued the report six years after the last National Needs
report and almost two years late. More frequent publication,
however, may be in the offing. NIH research training officer
Walter T. Schaffer says that the National Academy of Sciences
(of which NRC is an operating agency) has proposed providing
interim reports to NIH. These would appear every two years
following release of the demographic data on which the National
Needs reports are based.
Marincola and Solomon, meanwhile, are wrapping up a second
phase of their work, in which they’re collaborating with Richard
B. Freeman and Eric R. Weinstein of Harvard and the National
Bureau of Economic Research, a think tank in Cambridge, Mass.
(Freeman was also on the committee that drafted the new National
Needs report.) Focusing on 25 prominent cell and molecular
biology labs in the United States, the group is asking all
the principal investigators and many of the postdocs and graduate
students detailed questions about their productivity and career
choices. The study, which the group hopes to publish by year’s
end, examines subjective judgments of productivity rather
than objective measures such as numbers of papers published.
Goldman says he and RAND colleague Valerie Williams may do
a study pursuing topics in the National Needs report in greater
depth. One idea meriting further analysis, he adds, is “increasing
the [NIH] stipend in good times so that when funding is increasing,
the number of positions that are created does not expand as
fast as the funding. Then when funding is leaner, keeping
the rate of stipend growth low so that the number of positions
can be preserved until the next funding increase.”
In a similar vein, the National Needs report recommends regular
cost-of-living increases in stipends and other forms of trainee
compensation. It advocates that such increases “be incorporated
into budget planning, so that stipends are not again allowed
to decline in real value.” Recalls committee chairman Hiatt:
“We urged these changes because they seemed so obvious.”
References
1. P. Smaglik, E. Russo, “NRC report: cap life sciences graduate
school enrollment,” The Scientist, 12[19]:6, Sept. 28, 1998.
2. W.F. Massy, C.A. Goldman, “The production and utilization
of science and engineering doctorates in the United States,”
Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research Discussion
Paper, 1995. This paper is soon due to come out as a book,
The Ph.D. Factory (Bolton, Mass., Anker Publishing Co., 2000).
3. E. Marincola, F. Solomon, “The career structure in biomedical
research: implications for training and trainees,” Molecular
Biology of the Cell, 9:3003-6, 1998.
