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Fewer Grants For Young Researchers Causing Brain Drain In Academia
BarbaraHudson writes: Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels has written about the decline of research grants to younger researchers. "For more than a generation, grants for young scientists have declined. The number of principal investigators with a leading National Institutes of Health grant who are 36 years old or younger dropped from 18 percent in 1983 to 3 percent in 2010. Meanwhile, the average age when a scientist with a medical degree gets her first of these grants has risen from just under 38 years old in 1980 to more than 45 in 2013. The implications of these data for our young scientists are arresting. Without their own funding, young researchers are prevented from starting their own laboratories, pursuing their own research, and advancing their own careers in academic science. It is not surprising that many of our youngest minds are choosing to leave their positions."
When the distant future is only next quarter, this kind of thing happens. No one cares about consequences that will only happen after they have left the job... So, be ready to see basic research shift to another country in about 15 years.
When the public funds crappy studies that are designed to keep people employed at a University what do you expect?
Johns Hopkins has an endowment of about $3,000,000,000 (25th highest in the US). Instead of complaining about the lack of grants, the president of Johns Hopkins should be issuing grants.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Look, you brain-dead anonymous clown, without gov't money the entire modern world wouldn't exist. But I'm sure you'd be happy taking a horse to work and writing letters to communicate.
With 5+ postdocs for every position, .... now if they only had a postdoc in fear mongering maybe they could get some of the $500+ billion in government security spending in the US this year. Who needs medicine or basic research when there is terrists.
Illogical world - that's what this is.
This is really a general issue with our society right now. Young people can't be researchers because they don't get grant money, because no one trusts them to be doing research. Young people can't get jobs because everyone knows that you need at least 10 years experience to get a job -- never mind how you get 10 years of experience these days when no apprenticeships or similar seem to exist anymore. If you're lucky enough to find some job that doesn't make a big deal about experience, then young people aren't allowed enough pay to actually cover their bills and student loans. Instead of supporting educated young people and thinking of them as an investment that will bring us new ideas, new businesses, etc., I feel the elders tend to look at this young generation as lazy entitled bums (which is not true at all, at least not in general).
I was a young person college instructor for a few years before I quit. Why? Because pay is low as an adjunct, and the number of courses you can count on kept declining because I was continually at the mercy of what the elder teachers decided to do. (If one of them wanted a class, I was bumped and simply lost pay because I was contract and they could do that.). I had excellent ratings from all my students, many telling me personally that I was one of the best professors they had because I put effort into my lectures... and now academics has lost me, probably for good, because of how I was treated. (Not that I mean to be tooting my own horn here, but I hope you understand it as a situation that is probably being repeated across the country right now with people much more intelligent than I). There was a movement to form an adjunct union at one of my schools, and when I spoke up saying that we young professors need to be able to pay bills and given a chance to grow our careers, I was shouted down by elders saying I was entitled and need to go work a full time job and teach on the side if I wanted to be a professor and heaven forbid also be able to pay my monthly bills. I don't recall past professors having to do all that extra work, but it is expected of a young person now. So I took their advice and got a full time job... but left teaching entirely. I don't want to be in an environment like that, and it's not fair to my students to half-ass a class because I'm exhausted from my full time job. Most of those professors were at least in their 60s -- what will universities do in 10 years when they start to retire, and they've driven off of all the people like me that wanted to teach?
There just doesn't seem to be any opportunity left for a young person, especially in the technical fields. The older people are eeking out what they can until retirement, but at the cost of preventing younger people from having access to jobs where they can build their skills. I fear that in 10 years, our country will be in trouble as the Boomers retire for good and there will be no one left to replace them.
The article talks about the number of principal investigators with a leading National Institutes of Health grant and the average age of principal investigators who get these grants. To me, there is a very important missing data point; the age distribution of principal investigators submitting grant requests. This will show whether or not the age difference is due to the selection process or the age distribution of the grant requests. It is not a given that the age distribution of grant requests is the same year by year.
I just got a fairly substantial grant for a project from an external agency. However, as things stand, on this project I will not be the PI (primary investigator ) - that will be our head of dept. So why do I call it my grant? Because I wrote the proposal, handled all interactions with the funding agency, wrote the budget and arranged everything. My boss simply signed on a dotted line and shook a few hands. A symptom of the endless cycle of postdocs is that you don't have a permanent post until you're quite far on in your career. Therefore your own institution won't let you be the PI. The way around it is that you get a figurehead to be in charge, but you really end up running things.
This has its advantages and disadvantages. The big advantage is that you tend to have a fairly heavy hitter politically to back you up. He (and it's so often He that it's an insult to my female colleagues to pretend that they are equally represented) should have your back in exchange for drawing a fraction of his salary from your grant. The disadvantages are that you aren't officially PI for the sake of your CV - when you apply for jobs you are asked "Wasn't that X's grant?" when you talk about it - an it doesn't count as much for you. Likewise, they pay is miniscule. One of the things you learn writing a budget is just how much more a senior academic makes than a postdoc. It's depressing both how large the ratio is, and how relatively low the higher figure actually is.
Of course the whole process is a vicious cycle: You can't be PI, so you don't have PI positions on grants on your CV, so you have a hard time getting a permanent job, and so you can't be a PI... You just spend three of four months working on a proposal, sacrifice your dignity to the gods of the funding agency, ask someone else to take 90% of the credit, and prepare for hard work. On the plus side, you might just get paid enough to live and do what you love.
Supply and demand. The US elderly have voted themselves a limitless supply of funding for their medical care, so demand for doctors is very high and every other prerogative of our nation is pushed down the list. We've got Medicare paying for 74 year old gender reassignments. You want to know where they've spent your dreams?
So you take your little degree and your dreams of academic success and sod off. We have millions upon millions of knees and hips to replace. Find something that pays well too, mule; we're going to need you to cover that ACA mandate no matter how high it climbs.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!