The current approach — trying to improve the students or schools — will not produce the desired result, the experts predict, because the forces driving bright young Americans away from technical careers arise elsewhere, in the very structure of the U.S. research establishment.
scores of thousands of young Ph.D.s labor in the nation’s university labs as low-paid, temporary workers, ostensibly training for permanent faculty positions that will never exist.
Back when today’s senior-most professors were young, Ph.D.s routinely became tenure-track assistant professors, complete with labs of their own, in their late 20s. […] The tiny fraction who do manage to land their first faculty post are generally in their late 30s or early 40s by the time they get their research careers under way.
But disagreement rages about causes and cures. Is the influx of foreigners a cause of high-achieving Americans’ reluctance to become scientists, as the labor force experts assert, or an effect, as the industry interests insist?
America’s schools, it turns out, consistently produce large numbers of world-class science and math student […] But the incentives that once reliably delivered many of those high scorers into scientific and technical careers have gone seriously awry.
If the nation truly wants its ablest students to become scientists, Salzman says, it must undertake reforms — but not of the schools. Instead, it must reconstruct a career structure that will once again provide young Americans the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career.
“It’s not an education story, it’s a labor market story,” Salzman says.
And today’s postdocs rarely pursue their own ideas or work with the greats of their field. Nearly every faculty member with a research grant […] now uses postdocs to do the bench work for the project. Paid out of the grant, these highly skilled employees might earn $40,000 a year for 60 or more hours a week in the lab. […] The majority of today’s new faculty hires are “soft money” jobs with titles like “research assistant professor” and an employment term lasting only as long as the specific grant that supports it.
Many young Americans bright enough to do the math therefore conclude that instead of gambling 12 years on the small chance of becoming an assistant professor, they can invest that time in becoming a neurosurgeon, or a quarter of it in becoming a lawyer or a sixth in earning an MBA. And many who do earn doctorates in math-based subjects opt to use their skills devising mathematical models on Wall Street, rather than solving scientific puzzles in university labs, hoping a professorship opens up.
For scientifically trained young people from abroad, though — especially those from low-wage countries like China and India — the calculus of opportunity is different. For them, postdoc work in the U.S. is an almost unbeatable opportunity. […] a postdoc research position is likely to pay many times more than a job at home would. […] These drastically different opportunity structures explain why more than half of what theNational Science Board has estimated as 93,000 postdocs in the U.S. are now foreigners on short-term visas.
three times as many Americans earn degrees in science and engineering each year as can find work in those fields, Science & Engineering Indicators 2008, a publication of the National Science Board, reports. The number of science and engineering Ph.D.s awarded annually in the U.S. rose by nearly 60 percent in the last two decades, from about 19,000 to 30,000, the report says. […] but the number of under-35s holding the tenure-track positions rose by just 6.7 percent, remaining under 2,000.
White Americans on average substantially outscored Europeans in math and science and came in second to the Japanese, but American black and Hispanic students on average significantly trailed all other groups. Raising America’s average scores therefore doesn’t require repairing an educational system that performs poorly overall, but boosting the performance of the students at the bottom, overwhelmingly from low-income and minority families.
In regard to science- and math-based careers, Salzman says, “Everything shows that wages and working conditions and career prospects have … gotten worse.”
Academic science functioned as an apprenticeship system, with graduate students and postdocs accepting meager pay and long hours, knowing that their teachers took personal responsibility for launching their careers.
Starting about three decades ago, however, this long-standing agreement began to unravel. In a number of fields, placing students in desirable faculty jobs became more and more difficult, and several years of postdoctoral “training” gradually became the norm for nearly everyone rather than, as formerly, a mark of special distinction. It was, in fact, a form of disguised unemployment. “Simply put, there are not enough tenure-track academic positions for the available pool of … researchers,” the Bridges report says.
Graduate students and postdoctoral “trainees” were less and less the protégés of mentors morally responsible for their futures, Mangematin points out. They morphed instead into highly skilled, highly motivated and invitingly inexpensive labor, doing the bench work needed for professors to keep their grants. Winning those grants gradually came to outweigh placing their students in good jobs as a major mark of professional stature.
The obstacles facing today’s young scientists […] meets the needs of major interest groups within the existing structure of law and regulation. Essentially, this system provides a continuing supply of exceptionally skilled labor at artificially low prices, permitting the federal government to finance research at low cost. Based on federal statutes, regulations and appropriations, the system can be fundamentally altered only by congressional action.
During the 1990s dot-com boom […] lobbyists for the tech industry struck a deal with those of the research universities: If the universities would support a higher visa cap for industry, industry would support an unlimited supply of H-1B visas for nonprofit organizations, essentially giving universities the right to bring in as many foreign postdocs as they wished.
Since then, tens of thousands of Ph.D.s, primarily from China [… and …] India. The transformation of postdocs from valued protégés to cost-effective labor force was complete.
The director of postdoctoral affairs at one stellar university […] puts it more acidly. The main difference between postdocs and migrant agricultural laborers, he jokes, is that the Ph.D.s don’t pick fruit.
Like any Ponzi scheme […] will collapse when it runs out of suckers […] “new steady-state model” that will limit the production of new scientists and offer them better career prospects, she adds.
Any change in the science labor market would, of course, require dismantling the current system and erecting something that would value young scientists for their future potential as researchers and not just for their present ability to keep universities’ grant mills humming. This would mean paying them more and exploiting them less. It would also mean limiting their numbers by both producing and importing fewer scientists, so incomes could rise to something commensurate with the investment in time and talent and the high-level skills of a Ph.D.
But dismantling the current system would require overcoming the powerful vested interests that now benefit from the inequities and exploitation of young scientists.
