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Does the U.S. Produce Too Many Scientists?
There are a lot of Reader Comments. Here's one point made:
The growth industry of the US is war, like it or not. . . .
It would be nice if it were otherwise, but that is idealistic considering the vast amount of taxes spent on military pursuits, don't you think?
I expect the US will not really focus on science for another 30 to 50 years. Of course, if I were in another country, I would answer differently to this question.
Taking five percent of the military budget and applying it towards science would go a long way to help, and still leave the US with the most powerful military on earth. It's a question of national priority.
Editor's Note: Beryl Lieff Benderly, a fellow of the American Associaton for the Advancement of Science, writes about scientific labor force and early career issues in the Science Careers section of Science.
In this rough-draft article, she argues that the scientific labor market is broken, that the U.S. educational system actually produces too many qualified researchers for too few positions, and that a perverse funding structure perpetuates the problem, among other points. We'd like your views on this topic and suggestions on ways to further develop the article. Please use the Comments section at the bottom of the page.
by Beryl Lieff Benderly
For years, Americans have heard blue-ribbon commissions and major industrialists bemoan a shortage of scientists caused by an inadequate education system. A lack of high-tech talent, these critics warn, so threatens the nation’s continued competitiveness that the U.S. must drastically upgrade its K-12 science and math education and import large numbers of technically trained foreigners by promptly raising the current limit on the number of skilled foreigners allowed to enter the country to work in private industry. “We face a critical shortfall of skilled scientists and engineers who can develop new breakthrough technologies,” Microsoft chairman Bill Gates testified to Congress in March 2008.
But many less publicized Americans, including prominent labor economists, disagree. “There is no scientist shortage,” says Harvard University economist Richard Freeman, a leading expert on the academic labor force. The great lack in the American scientific labor market, he and other observers argue, is not top-flight technical talent but attractive career opportunities for the approximately 30,000 scientists and engineers—about 18,000 of them American citizens—who earn PhDs in the U.S. each year.
“People should have a reasonable expectation of being able to practice their science if they’re encouraged to become scientists,” says labor economist Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation “It shouldn’t be a guarantee, but they ought to have a reasonable prospect.” But today, however, few young PhDs can get started on the career for which their graduate education purportedly trained them, namely, as faculty members in academic research institutions. Instead, scores of thousands of them spend the years after they earn their doctorates toiling in low-paying, dead-end postdoctoral “training” appointments (called postdocs) in the laboratories of professors, where they ostensibly hone skills they would need to start labs of their own when they become professors. In fact, however, only about 25 percent of those earning American science PhDs will ever land a faculty job that enables them to apply for the competitive grants that support academic research. And even fewer—15 percent by some estimates—will get a post at the kind of research university where the nation’s significant scientific work takes place.
Many Applicants, Few Academic Posts
The competition for science faculty jobs is so intense that every advertised opening routinely attracts hundreds of qualified applicants. Most PhDs hired into faculty-level jobs get so-called “soft-money” posts, dependent on the renewal of year-to-year funding rather than the traditional tenure-track positions that offer long-term security. In the information technology field, meanwhile, experienced professionals blame outsourcing and industry’s preference for cheap young foreigners for blighting their careers. The firms using the largest number of H-1B visas, the type of immigration document that admits highly skilled temporary residents to the U.S workforce, are not supposedly talent-starved American technology companies but Indian-owned firms in the business of outsourcing work from American companies to the subcontinent.
Despite these realities, the existence of a technical talent dearth is nonetheless almost “universally accepted” in political circles, where it plays an important role in shaping national policy on science funding, education and immigration, says Ron Hira, assistant professor of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology. “Almost no one in Washington” recognizes the “glut” of scientists, nor the damage that lack or opportunity is doing to the incentives that formerly attracted many of America’s most gifted young people to seek scientific and engineering careers, he says.
But the real dearth—the lack of clear pathways into careers that could enable today’s generation of gifted young Americans to become the researchers who make tomorrow’s great discoveries—is convincing more and more of the nation’s best students not to seek careers in fields such as law, finance, medicine and other fields that offer much better short- and long-term career prospects instead of dedicating an average of seven years to PhD study plus an additional five years or more of postdoctoral training now considered necessary to compete for an academic career in many scientific fields.
Continue reading this article at the url below.
— Beryl Lieff Benderly
Scientific American
2010-02-22
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=does-the-us-produce-too-m&sc=WR_20100224
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