In June 2012 a distinguished
committee headed by Princeton President Shirley Tilghman reported to the NIH
Director regarding issues in biomedical workforce training. The report
indicated that conventional modes of graduate training were not adequately
preparing students for the realities of the current job marketplace and
suggested a number of approaches to improve the situation [1]. The report advocated
increasing the proportion of graduate stipends based on competitive training
grants versus those supported by research grants, but did not advocate reducing
the total number of students.
While there are many good
things about the Tilghman report, to this observer it failed to confront the
most basic issue- that we are training far too many biomedical PhDs! The need
for biomedical ‘birth control’ is implicit in some of the verbiage in the
report’s Executive Summary. “Although the vast majority
of people holding biomedical PhDs are employed (i.e. unemployment is very low),
the proportion of PhDs that move into tenured or tenure-track faculty positions
has declined from ~34 percent in 1993 to ~26 percent today. In contrast the
proportion of non-tenured faculty has stayed relatively constant during the
same period, while increasing in absolute numbers. The percentages of
biomedical Ph.D.s in industry and government have remained relatively constant.
The categories that have seen growth are science- related occupations that do
not involve the conduct of research and occupations that do not require
graduate training in science.“ Thus the data in
the report show that approximately 30% of PhD graduates are in positions that do
not involve research. Therefore they have no need for the years of
intensive research training involved in a PhD. What a waste of the time and
energy of those people!
About 43% of PhD graduates
are in academia; however, an increasingly large proportion of those are in
unstable, largely grant-funded, non-tenure track positions. The research
associates, research track faculty and postdoctoral fellows in these unstable
positions play a vital role in contemporary biomedical research. Yet no
university has found an effective mechanism to introduce some stability and
clarity into their career paths.
If one counts tenure track
academics (26%) and government and industrial scientist (24%) as individuals
who have launched successful careers based on their PhD training, then 50% of
trainees have not. This seems a dismal failure of the training system.
The traditional system of
graduate training in the US is based not on the needs of the students, but
rather on the need of professors for inexpensive, relatively skilled labor to
keep their research programs running. It is really farcical to call this
graduate education; rather it is better styled as graduate exploitation. The
current economic malaise further compounds the situation. The lack of jobs for
people with bachelor level credentials pushes more young people into graduate
school. However, on the other end of the process the same economic problems
have reduced the number of opportunities for PhDs.
Despite all this gloom there
are some relatively straightforward ways to improve the situation.
1. All graduate stipends
should be based on competitive institutional or individual training grants.
This would improve the quality and reduce the numbers in the PhD training pool.
2. To replace graduate labor
more emphasis should be placed on postdoctoral fellows and PhD level research
staff. Complementary to this, universities need to (or be forced to) set up
mechanisms so that some grant funds are sequestered to provide stabilization of
non-tenure track research positions. This is not to suggest some form of tenure
for these positions, but rather to make sure the career of a staff scientist is
not totally dependent on the renewal of a single grant (as is so often the case
now).
3. To provide a cohort of
scientifically sophisticated, but not research intensive, personnel for various
tasks in industry, there should be increased emphasis on Master’s degree
programs (as suggested in the Tilghman report).
Unfortunately, the NIH’s
implementation of even the limited recommendations of the Tilghman report are
feeble at best, as revealed in a recent article in SCIENCE [2]. For
example, even such non-controversial items as having students and their mentors
prepare ‘Individual Development Plans’, having universities to track careers of
graduates, or asking universities to develop new curricula more suited to
industry needs are to be done on a voluntary basis. Thus the new policies lack
teeth.
Another sad episode in the
history of biomedical graduate training- when will we learn!
[2] J. Kaiser. NIH Offers to
Help Universities Improve Training, Boost Diversity. SCIENCE 338: 1405
(2012).
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