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."

Comments

A Word to the young bright kids out there

[Yergle143]

The science job system is broken. The main problem is the federal subsidy of Graduate Student Stipends and Postdoctoral Fellowship salaries from grants. This has led to the situation of an oversupply of bright people in what amount to full time jobs with no benefits with little chance to achieve a rare faculty post. The fix is to stop the subsidy. Institutions need to take on fewer graduate students, pay them more and train them fully. Bolster the Master's degree for the less committed. The Postdoc should be eliminated and replaced with the term Contract Researcher which should be treated like a job. These people should be paid market rates so they can move to whomever is smart enough to get a grant.
For the kids out there, the current system is a sort of feudal concoction built to maximize imperious egos and is fundamentally exploitive.
Advise: go into science if you have the desire. Go to a good undergraduate school but if you do not get into one of the best institutions for grad school DO NOT GO.
It's that bad out there and it's winner take all.

Re:A Word to the young bright kids out there

[ganv]

That advice makes sense. It will be very hard to implement though. Research grants pay graduate student stipends. I am not sure it is a subsidy. It is the way research work is paid for. The problem is that the work is done for depressed wages: the typical accomplishments of a grad student are much much larger than you could get with a similar salary offered to a non-degree seeking researcher, same thing for post-docs: they are paid less with the hope that they are preparing for a step up to a permanent position soon. So implementing your system is going to make research much more expensive to perform. If there are fewer graduate students doing research, then research becomes even more a winner take all because only the top professors will be able to support graduate students and maintain active research programs. That means even fewer faculty positions (without research funding, universities hire fewer faculty who teach more rather than more faculty who are also doing research). I think a better fix is to adjust the graduate programs so that they focus not on creating future researchers, but on creating experts prepared for a wide range of technical jobs that are not in research. Research would become a smaller part of these graduate programs and only the top few students who wanted to pursue a research career would continue for post-doctoral research.

Glut of postdocs

[Anonymous Coward]

This is really driven by the glut of postdocs. With half a dozen post docs per professorial position, there's no surprise that the average age of the professors is creeping up, and therefore the average age of the PI is creeping up.

Re:Quarterly forecast

[Aighearach]

So, be ready to see basic research shift to another country in about 15 years.

Despite the cuts, the US still spends more per capita on R&D than any other country except South Korea, and far more than any other in absolute terms. Source: List of countries by R&D spending.

This really makes me ask: Is there a real shift here that is problematic, or was there a bubble where research increased very rapidly in new fields, where older people didn't have right degrees to get the money, and so it started out with an unusually young group of people? Like in CS at the start of the modern research efforts the people had math and physics degrees. In medicine I'm assuming that wasn't done; they didn't just have veterinarians doing human studies because there weren't enough research doctors. There doesn't seem to be any closely related fields to draw people from either. So I would expect there to be research age bubbles whenever there is a major new round of medical tech.

A big question I don't know the answer to: What percent of NIH grants go to that sort of degree-restricted field, compared to degree-portable fields like CS? My initial guess is that most of the NIH grants would be degree-restricted and require a medical degree.

Just having 1983 and 2010 as data points, without anything farther back, seems dubious, even with the other data point in TFA using 1980 instead of `83.

If you were 36 in 1980 you were born in `44. So it may even just be as simple as, "baby boomer generation had a baby boom, news at 11." If the percent of young researchers had remained level, that would actually mean that researchers were getting younger, because there are a higher percent of older people with medical degrees now.