The Real Science Gap

walterbyrd writes "This article attempts to explain why the US is struggling in its competition with other countries in the realm of scientific advancement. 'It's not insufficient schooling or a shortage of scientists. It's a lack of job opportunities. Americans need the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career.' I can hardly believe that somebody actually understands the present situation. It continues, '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 US research establishment. For generations, that establishment served as the world’s nimblest and most productive source of great science and outstanding young scientists. Because of long-ignored internal contradictions, however, the American research enterprise has become so severely dysfunctional that it actively prevents the great majority of the young Americans aspiring to do research from realizing their dreams.'"

Comments

Wage Gap

[Anonymous Coward]

The youngest and brightest are being sucked up by the field that pays: structured finance. As a country you've put financial innovation ahead of scientific and this is the natural outcome.

Re:Wage Gap

[egandalf]

Sad but true. Even so, look where financial "innovation" got us... we crippled the global economy with our "innovation" (read: creative bookkeeping by large, powerful finance firms).

Re:Wage Gap

[Trepidity]

That's true, but it's still possible that the relative values to the company are being miscalculated. If you fired that sales guy, could some other sales guy paid half as much sell the product just as well? My guess is that often the answer is "yes".

Similar with management. Yes, you need good management, but if you were only offering half of what you currently offer for senior executives, how big would the difference in company performance going forward be? I think less than the senior executives would like you to believe.

And while it's true that it doesn't matter if your product sucks as long as you can sell it, there are plenty of industries where it at least helps sell it if your product isn't total crap, if your engineers have a reputation for quickly solving issues that arise, etc.

Money, Career, and Life

[TheMeuge]

Let's not kid ourselves - the real reason those gifted enough to excel shy away from science is that this path is not conducive to having a life. It requires working long hours, frequently 7 days per week, for little pay (NIH stipends for graduate students are around $20'000), and in a highly stressful environment (those who've done research know how emotionally crushing doing scientific research can often be), just to become a sub-$40k post-doc for another decade thereafter, and then desperately search for a faculty position, to spend the next 20 years stressing over grant deadlines that threaten to destroy whatever little autonomy you've managed to gain, in an environment where something like 5% of the projects get funded.

In an environment, where most work to the limit of their bodily ability, and get paid less than their intelligence and time commitment would yield them elsewhere, young men and women find it difficult to acquire and hold onto a mate, and those who want to have families find themselves unable to support them, as well as spend adequate time with them.

And people wonder why in many top-tier institutions 75% of the graduate students in science are foreign-born?

Re:One of the most un-American things I've ever re

[freejung]

This is a rediculously over-simplified misunderstanding of how society works. How do you propose "making" a job doing basic research? Research has to be funded, that's how it's done in our society. I'm afraid you're living in a fantasy world. This has nothing to do with anyone being "owed" a job. It has to do with setting priorities as a society. We've set up a system in which the priority is short term quarterly gains, and that's what we get. If you want a viable society in the long term, you have to invest in basic research.

Re:NASA shutting down manned exploration doesn't h

[NeutronCowboy]

Robots are fuckin' boring.

I found the Mars Rovers a million times more fascinating than the ISS. It might have had something to do with the Rovers actually doing stuff, rather than hanging out in space, swapping out CO2 scrubbers.