More money, fewer PhDs
At the recent annual meeting of the AAAS a panel of experts
on the scientific workforce severely criticized NIH’s wimpy reforms on graduate
and postdoctoral training in biomedical fields. Several prior studies including
a recent report to the NIH Director from a panel led by Shirley Tilghman
(http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2012_06_22/caredit.a1200069)
have advocated reducing the number of graduate students supported on research
grants and increasing the number supported on competitive training grants. The
net impact of this would likely be to reduce the total pool of biomedical
graduate students but increase the quality. No doubt this would be beneficial
to PhD career opportunities, especially given the current scaling down of
research in pharmaceutical and biotech companies. However, the NIH failed to
take this step and only provided some cosmetic changes to its policies on
funding of graduate students and postdocs, as discussed previously on this Blog
(NIH’s Feeble Response to Problems in Biomedical PhD
Training. Jan 11, 2013).
At the AAAS panel additional measures were discussed
including drastic increases in salaries for students and postdocs. This would
serve to make scientific career paths more attractive and would also force senior
investigators to use their resources wisely, rather than ‘burning’ students or
postdocs on impossible projects as is now sometimes done. Gregory Pestko, one of
the AAAS panelists, stated "I would ratchet up the salaries for postdocs
and for graduate students by a lot,
and I would do it as a cold-blooded, deliberate way of shrinking the pool of
manpower." Good for you Dr. Pestko. It’s about time that somebody was
brave enough to really get to the nitty-gritty on this issue! Given the current
status of the job market, as well as any reasonable future projections, it is
clear that academia needs to engage in some scientific birth control.
Interestingly, a number of my local colleagues read the
account of the AAAS discussions. While some were sympathetic, many were
outraged, being concerned about how they were going to support enough students
to keep their labs running smoothly. Once again this shows that some professors
are more concerned with cheap labor than with training.
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