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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.'"
...that someone is raising the real issue. I'm in the UK and studied for a science degree and from people I still know who graduated, only one of them is actually working in science now (5 years later). Of other friends I've made in the field most have left their science jobs. The most recent has just retrained as an accountant. She got made redundant from her previous job with a big pharma as they moved her whole lab out to china where they said they could have 6 equally qualified people for what they were paying her. People aren't stupid, they aren't going to study for something where there's no jobs, or what jobs do exist are all low paid rubbish with no chance of advancement. They'll all go become accountants and lawyers. Say hello to globalisation...
It is assumed (when asking for money from the government) that there is some terrible gap in education--that America is doomed because somebody's program isn't funded enough. But evidence of this is never given.
Are our universities bad? Obviously not, as foreigners do everything they can to get into them. Are our primary schools bad? Doesn't look like it; foreign students make cheating a science just to keep up at the university level.
If our science students can't find jobs, the problem is a GLUT of science education. Perhaps we should focus more on trade schools than churning out more unemployed bio and physics majors.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
For grad school in the sciences, loan debt is uncommon--- students typically get paid stipends as research assistants or teaching assistants, which cover full tuition plus a modest salary (~$16k-30k or so, depending on field and institution). Of course, students often have undergrad loan debt, but I don't think grad school makes it worse at least.
I think the biggest problem is, as you point out, post-PhD. There are too many PhDs being produced relative to good research jobs, so typically one has to do several postdocs, might have to take a lecturer position somewhere, etc., in hopes of eventually, maybe when you're 40 or something, getting a tenure-track faculty position. Oh, and that's a tenure-track position, which is basically 6-7 years of probation (but at least you're getting paid well at that point).
Not entirely sure how to fix that. Making PhD studies themselves more attractive won't fix the problem, I don't think; if anything, it'll make it worse, by encouraging the production of even more PhDs who there aren't research jobs for. Somehow the post-grad-school part has to be fixed. There have to be more research positions, either in academia, in industry, or at government labs. Or, if we aren't going to open up more of the top-level (tenured-faculty-tier) types of positions, at least there have to be more attractive lower-level ones, something better than a post-doc. Maybe one where you still work in someone else's lab (i.e. you aren't the lab head), but you get paid better and have somewhat more research freedom. But that requires funding, too.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
While there is always much waving of hands and gnashing of teeth about it, the reality is that the USA by far leads the world in science. And speaking as a science grad student, it's much easier to get into science here than anywhere else in the western world. I know plenty of foreign grad students in the US, but almost no US students that had any motivation to study overseas. Personally, even though I'm originally from Canada, I have no plans to go back, because it's so much easier to get funded as a scientist here.
It seems to me most of the of the people who complain about the "science gap" are those who aren't actually working in the field...
Where shall we have lunch?
Just an idea from the outfield: maybe an added reason is that it's so much harder to make a contribution these days? We've gone from "Ow! Fire hot!" to needing a PhD or more just to achieve parity with the state of the art in some fields of science.
Engineering isn't much better- from spark gaps to iPhones in about a century.
We might need to start kids down the science path as early as the first grade, or come up with some radical new method of teaching/learning.
Ah, I'm just babbling. Ignore me.
When you have a educational system and culture that shields people from the effects of their bad decisions, even refutes the notion of causality, why would kids be encouraged to enter a field where causality is king? Isn't Obama going to pay their mortgage for them? Won't Al Gore save them from Global Warming? Won't giving $10 to a church save them from hell?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
My wife got a Ph.D. in molecular biology. She did a postdoc and NIH and then started to look for job. She wanted to be a professor at a University. After talking to some of the recruiters at Universities we found out they were getting hundreds of resumes for each position. In addition as the parent post points outs research is brutal. You constantly struggle for grant money and tenure is pretty much a thing of the past. Universities want you to come in with grants, they take half the money, then they boot you out if you lose your grants. It's a very stressful environment to be in. Another thing I ran into while doing research was that the number of teaching positions at Universities has gone up about 50% since 1960, however the number of Ph.D.s has gone up 10,000%. Of course there are commercial research positions as well, but at least in biotech there is a lot of turn over as companies come and go. She has friends that get laid off every couple years and spend six months to a year looking for a new job. There were also a lot of sales jobs where you go around and sell equipment to companies, which she didn't want to do. My wife eventually ended up with desk job with Genebank at NIH and no longer does research. Note that she was 31 by the time she got her first real job. That's a lot of time to put into education for not much reward. She is especially annoyed that she will never make as much money as I do in IT even though she has a doctorate degree and I have a master's in CS. We have encouraged our son not to into science.
The IEEE points out that, at present, only about 1/3 of electrical engineers have electrical engineering jobs. They also point out that in 1970, electrical engineers and doctors made about the same amount of money.
Lawyers, though, are starting to get hit. Outsourcing of legal work is now available.
I agree.
Assertion: history shows that using cheap labor stifles scientific development. Here are some examples:
What do we learn from this? That using cheap labor is short-termism at the expense of our development. Three of my four examples use the extreme examples of slavery, but the principle is the same. If anybody has counter-examples, I'd be pleased to see them.
--- "We've always been at war with Eastasia."
We used to have an economy that wasn't so beholden to quarterly earnings reports that businesses actually invested in technologies that couldn't reasonably be expected to bring profits for a decade+.
Gone are the days of Bell Labs.
I have a degree in engineering and worked in a R&D department of a company who not only built it's (now fading) empire on pure science. In reality, they had been cutting their R&D budget for decades, and the corporate demographic is extremely bimodal with experts with 30+years of experience who are set to retire at one end and newbies with 10- years experience with no loyalty (like me) at the other, and nothing in between. When the boomers finally start retiring en masse so much institutional knowledge will be lost I don't think this 200 year old company is going to make it through the next 30.
Add to that the prevalent corporate notion that only PhDs can do research and I can easily see that structural problems will handicap the US' continued scientific ascendancy.
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".
I don't know. I've seen some of these sales people, and listening to them, *I* was getting excited about their software and services - until I remembered that I was actually providing the customer support or had to install them, and knew exactly how much of what they were saying was utter crap. And yet, for a split-second, they had me going.
That's the skill of a good salesman, and that's why they will always be more important than engineers to the bean counters. There's no product that will sell itself - but a good salesman can sell even a turd. And in the end, that's what's on the balance sheet: Salesman Slimeball added $1 Million to the bottom line this quarter, while Gearhead Gearloose cost the company about $200k.
Is that kind of revenue analysis dangerous? Yes it is. Does it happen more often than it should? Yes it does. And the payout is the reason why so many people go into sales instead of engineering.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Outside of computing related technologies it seems that science has really slowed down to a crawl. We haven't invented any new significant sources of energy since Nuclear fission was first developed in the 30s. We have actually gone backwards with regards to space travel, and no longer have the capabilities we once had. Lately, all the drug companies have been panicking because their best drugs are going out of patent and they don't have any new ones to replace them.
Even simpler answer: the South was highly productive as agricultural land, while New England was (mostly) not. The South could produce cotton, which was incredibly valuable, while the Midwest - while very fertile land - produced mostly food crops that couldn't be turned into portable wealth. So the North had some incentives to industrialize that weren't present in the South.
On top of that, the North had the ability to industrialize. The early Industrial Revolution depended on water power. North of New York, the fall line extends almost to the coast - so that good sources of water power were available within a short distance from the great harbors. Northern forests were mostly hardwood, not pine, suiting them for study machinery. By comparison, the comparable areas of the South were hundreds of miles from water transport. Finally, the coal and minerals were almost all in the North.
In short, the South barely industrialized because the return on investment was considerably higher for agriculture than for industry in a place where all of the components of the industry would have to be imported. Even today, the industrial parts of the South are mostly the ones where there are resources to be exploited: oil refining and chemical manufacture on the Gulf Coast, along with chemical and manufacturing in TN/KY.
As for slavery, after a while, Southerners started believing their own lies about slavery being good for the Negroes, and found themselves riding the tiger: when an oppressed people constitutes as much as 50% of the population of an area, it's hard to figure out a way to set them all free without the whole thing going to hell. This was gotten around in Reconstruction by having the place go to hell first, so that freeing the slaves couldn't make it much worse.