The PhD Glut and What Can be Done About It. (May 9, 2011)

In November last year The American Society for Cell Biology's journal MBoC (Vol. 21, Issue 22, 3823, November 15, 2010) published a short essay by the president of Princeton University, Shirley Tilghman, "It's All about the Talent". Prior to taking up the university's presidency in 2001 Professor Tilghman's research interests included the function and mechanism of genomic imprinting and genes that regulate embryonic development.

In her essay, Professor Tilghman quotes from Vannevar Bush's 1945 Science the Endless Frontier: "... without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world," and goes on to say: "...it put the nation's future in the hands of students—young men and women who were at the very beginning of their scientific careers. Yet, I would argue that this was the most salient of the recommendations, and the source of the U.S. pre-eminence in science today."

Princeton's president then writes: "my foremost concern is that we continue to replenish the pool of brilliant and ambitious students whose energy and curiosity—and yes, sometimes even naïveté—are so crucial for discovery. That end will require universities and colleges to rededicate themselves to two goals. The first goal is to inspire the next generation of undergraduates by exposing them early to the "big questions" in science, and demonstrating why one would want to dedicate one's life to scientific discovery... The second structural problem we must address if we are going to attract the best and brightest is to fix the profoundly broken training regime for young scientists... If the next 50 years of U.S. science are to be as exciting and impactful as the past 50 years, we have to inspire our best undergraduates to choose careers in science and then provide them with a career path that looks fair to them. In science as in everything else, it is all about the talent."

Then the December 16, 2010 issue of The Economist published "The disposable academic" which concludes: "Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year’s new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else. They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that."

As an aside, Michael Kirkham's separated triptych is a cogent commentary.

The May issue of the quarterly bulletin published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, HHMI Bulletin, features an interview with Professor Tilghman where she discussed what she sees are the problems and goals to be pondered by the NIH "external working group" which she will chair -- e.g. how many biomedical scientists the country needs and the ideal balance among principal investigators, postdocs, graduate students, and other personnel in NIH-funded laboratories and other settings like industry and teaching.

Ultimately, we want to create a biomedical enterprise that produces the best science and brings out the best in the people engaged in it. Today the training path has become too long. The average age of a biomedical scientist receiving a first NIH grant is 42. I don’t know a single person who thinks that’s optimal for generating good science. So the question is, why does the path take so long? And are there things that could be done to speed it up?

Many feel that significant changes in how NIH supports the biomedical workforce must be on the table, including reducing the number of trainees and changing the way they are supported.

At the root of the problem is the fact that we are overproducing Ph.D.s. As a consequence, there are too many people chasing too few jobs and too few grant dollars... I believe there could be changes made to the structure of the typical biomedical research laboratory. The typical lab consists of about 10 trainees, a technician, and a principal investigator. The majority of those trainees will not become principal investigators...

From years of being a mentor, I know that not all students want a career running their own lab and raising money. Instead, they want to do what they love: research. Perhaps more members of a lab could be permanent employees, and fewer could be trainees. We need to explore such options.

And in response to being asked should graduate students continue to train in areas of fundamental research:

Absolutely. There will be no jobs in applied science in 20 years if we are not doing fundamental research. Basic science feeds the applied science pipeline. They are deeply complementary to one another. Everyone knows the applied work is important, but frankly, you can’t do it without the basic stuff.

Finally, Professor Tilghman was asked if policy makers are open to hearing from young researchers.

Yes, in fact, I think the public discourse on science is better now than any time in my memory. Under this [the Obama] administration, we have highly distinguished scientists in important positions, who speak effectively about science. We have an administration that is pro-science and makes a clear distinction between what is scientifically knowable and what can be known only through religious faith. I welcome the disappearance of politics from science that many of us found disturbing in the past.

The makeup of the "external working group":

Shirley Tilghman, Ph.D., president, Princeton University, N.J., co-chair
Sally Rockey, Ph.D., NIH deputy director for extramural research, co-chair
Sandra Degen, Ph.D., vice president for research, University of Cincinnati
Laura Forese, M.D., chief operating officer, chief medical officer, and senior vice president, New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill
    Cornell Medical Center, New York City
Freeman Hrabowski, Ph.D., president, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
James Jackson, Ph.D., professor of psychology and director, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Leemor Joshua-Tor, Ph.D., professor and dean, Watson School of Biological Sciences, Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.
    Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Richard Lifton, M.D., Ph.D., Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn.
Garry Neil, M.D., corporate vice president, Corporate Office of Science and Technology, Johnson & Johnson, New Brunswick, N.J.
Naomi Rosenberg, Ph.D., dean, Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston
Bruce A. Weinberg, Ph.D., professor, John Glenn School of Public Affairs, Ohio State University, Columbus
Keith Yamamoto, Ph.D., executive vice dean, School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco

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The journal Nature in its April 21, 2011 issue devotes 12-pages to the topic of what, is/should/might be, done about the Ph.D.

Mark C. Taylor, chair of the department of religion at Columbia University headlines his view:

Reform the PhD system or close it down: There are too many doctoral programmes, producing too many PhDs for the job market. Shut some and change the rest.

In his view: One reason that many doctoral programmes do not adequately serve students is that they are overly specialized, with curricula fragmented and increasingly irrelevant to the world beyond academia... in far too many cases, specialization has led to areas of research so narrow that they are of interest only to other people working in the same fields, subfields or sub-subfields... universities must tear down the walls that separate fields, and establish programmes that nourish cross-disciplinary investigation and communication. They must design curricula that focus on solving practical problems, such as providing clean water to a growing population.

Professor Taylor's overall solution: [E]liminate programmes that are inadequate or redundant... To facilitate change, universities should move away from excessive competition fuelled by pernicious rating systems, and develop structures and procedures that foster cooperation. [University departments] could outsource some subjects. Teleconferencing and the Internet mean that cooperation is no longer limited by physical proximity... Consortia could contain a core faculty drawn from the home department, and a rotating group of faculty members from other institutions.

Although significant change is necessary at every level of higher education, it must start at the top, with total reform of PhD programmes in almost every field. The future of our children, our country and, indeed, the world depends on how well we meet this challenge.

In addition Nature devotes 4-pages to "The PhD Factory: The world is producing more PhDs than ever before. Is it time to stop?" 3-Pages to "Rethinking PhDs: Fix it, overhaul it or skip it completely — institutions and individuals are taking innovative approaches to postgraduate science training;" and 4-pages to the "Seven Ages of the PhD: Scientists share memories of doing doctorates in different decades, disciplines and locations, from the hunt for the structure of DNA to deciphering the human genome."