The National Science Foundation's Vertical Integration of Research and Education in the Mathematical Sciences (VIGRE)
The National Science Foundation (US) through its Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) designed the VIGRE grants to encourage departments in the mathematical sciences to carry out innovative educational programs to foster the integration of research and education and in which undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty are mutually supportive. The goals of the program as set out by the NSF are:
to prepare undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows for the broad range of opportunities available to individuals with training in the mathematical sciences;
and to encourage departments in the mathematical sciences to initiate or improve education activities that lend themselves to integration with research, especially activities that promote the interaction of scholars across boundaries of academic age and departmental standing.
Therefore, each VIGRE proposal has to present a coherent plan for the vertical integration of three main components:
a graduate traineeship program,
an undergraduate research experience program, and
a postdoctoral fellowship program.
Two optional components, the first in the area of curriculum/educational materials development and the second focused on outreach activities, would also be considered for funding, if properly aligned with one or more of the main components.
Recently, Science allotted a couple of pages in assessment and gave the program good marks.
VIGRE is based on the assumption that declining enrollments were caused by a lack of mentoring, according to Don Lewis, who as head of the [NSF's] math division created the VIGRE program. "Students viewed mathematics courses only as training for mathematics teaching," he says. Fields such as genomics, cryptology, and image processing were awash in jobs ideal for trained mathematicians, he adds, but students and postdocs didn't know about them. The answer, to Lewis, was obvious: Help universities do a better job of training and informing students about non-traditional careers. Or, as Bill Rundell of Texas A&M University in College Station puts it: "VIGRE makes us do what we should have been doing all along."
The program is not without its critics, for example
If anyone seems disgruntled with VIGRE, it is faculty members at top-tier schools. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, has failed in repeated attempts to get a grant. [And] after a scheduled third-year review... the University of California, Berkeley [did not have its grant renewed]. The rebuff to Berkeley, America's largest producer of mathematics Ph.D.s, came as a shock to many mathematicians.
Berkeley's chair, Calvin Moore, struck a defiant note, saying that mentoring isn't everything. "One of our goals is to cultivate self-reliance," he said. "Berkeley is a tough place. Berkeley is not a warm and fuzzy place. Students react to this atmosphere: Some thrive, and others don't." At the same time, he acknowledged, VIGRE has made a difference: The number of undergraduate math majors soared from 170 to 475 in 3 years.
Peter Hall, Professor of Statistics at the ANU also has reservations concerning VIGRE and is against trying
to set up a clone in Australia. However, he stresses that a well resourced,
carefully designed program to foster
mathematics
is long overdue in this country. He notes that,
One of the nice things about the NSF is that it develops products to solve specific problems in particular disciplines, and does not try to apply the same solutions across the board. Science is too varied for the latter approach to work well, but nevertheless that is the way things are done in Australia. This is a good lesson to learn from VIGRE. The VIGRE program is purpose-built for the NSF's Division of Mathematical Sciences. But it does not work equally well for all parts of mathematics.
In my own discipline (statistics) VIGRE postdoctoral fellowships can be rather unattractive, because they offer low postdoc-type salaries for positions that involve a fair bit of teaching. There is no shortage of tenure-track positions in statistics in US universities, and statistics salaries (even at the assistant professor level) are relatively high. They have to be, to compete with attractions outside the academic sphere.
The specifics are something like this. VIGRE postdoctoral fellowships offer 12 month salaries of less than US$50,000. There are teaching duties of around two courses per year. At the end of two or three years, the fellowship holder has to apply for other support, probably at another university. By way of contrast, a good young PhD graduate in statistics can readily get a tenure track position in a good university, probably earning more than US$60,000 for nine months, with a fairly good prospect of summer support. Teaching loads vary, but the equivalent of three courses per year is not uncommon, perhaps with two courses in the first year. If individuals are good, they will get tenure, five or six years after starting. So, the attraction of a VIGRE grant is not high. (Incidentally, the competitive advantages of standard tenure-track posts at US universities also make statistics appointments in Australia unattractive.)
Moreover, VIGRE grants are restricted to US citizens (or permanent residents), but the top cohort of PhD graduates in statistics contains relatively few such individuals. As a result, the VIGRE program is not seen as a way of attracting the best graduates to to research careers in mathematical sciences. Rather, it is a way of attracting US citizens and permanent residents to such careers. These two goals overlap, but are far from being identical.
Nevertheless, VIGRE has other important aspects, for example through its attempts to integrate teaching and research early in young people's careers. However, overall it is not having nearly as much impact as one might expect in attracting good statistics PhDs to undertake research in US universities.
Professor Hall has recently made a
submission
of his views
with regard to the state of mathematics research and teaching in Australia
to the Department of Education, Science and Training's "Higher Education
at the Crossroads" review.
Alex Reisner
The Funneled Web