But the reason is not, as some people say, that young Americans lack the smarts or the skills to succeed in those fields. Instead, it appears that longstanding U.S. policies have destroyed the incentives that used to attract many of the nation’s best young minds into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the so-called STEM fields). And that means that as the United States faces increasing technological and scientific competition from abroad, the country isn’t getting the full benefit of the brainpower it is paying to educate.

“It’s a labor market story,” not an education story, says one of the report’s authors, Harold Salzman, of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. Rather than staying with STEM for graduate studies or a first job, many of our most able college graduates are now opting out of the pipeline that the nation used to count on to carry gifted students into STEM careers.

The new findings contradict the argument that some high-tech employers have been putting forward for a decade now: that American education doesn’t produce enough high-quality science and math graduates. This purported talent deficit, they insist, means that the nation, to stay competitive, must import more technically trained workers and massively overhaul K-12 scientific and math education.

But the data suggest something completely different. They show no such deficit. Earlier studies by Salzman and B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University establish that American schools turn out very large numbers of students who score at the very top of international math comparisons (while also producing large numbers who score at the bottom, resulting in mediocre averages.). Statistics from the National Science Board indicate, furthermore, that the nation’s colleges each year produce several times as many homegrown holders of STEM degrees as can find work in those areas. And among the STEM graduates of former years, unemployment of American engineers is at historic highs.

But the new study reveals an ominous trend among the scientifically gifted. Although the numbers of young Americans studying STEM in high school and college are as strong as ever, the very best of those students, as indicated by their SAT scores and college grade point averages, are less likely than in decades past to stay in STEM when they leave college.

But the answer to the problem may not be complicated. Higher salaries and more stable career tracks have lured these grads away from scientific jobs, and those same incentives, an author of the study suggests, could draw them back into STEM fields.

A generation gap

In the new study, Lowell, Salzman, and co-authors tracked three cohorts of American STEM students through their educations and early careers. Using standard government data sets, they focused on what young people do at the crucial transitions of their lives. How many of those who study science and advanced math in high school proceed on to college and continue to study STEM fields when they get there? How many of those who earn a STEM degree get a job in a STEM field? How many are still in STEM fields ten or more years later?

The results show that young Americans are as likely as ever to major in science. “On average,” the new report states, “there has been no substantive change in the proportion of high school graduates who go on to complete or enroll in a STEM field of study.” And, encouragingly, “ the highest performers are significantly more likely to major in STEM than the lower performers.” But then, in the late 1990s, the percentage of the students in the top quintile of STEM ability who chose to major in STEM fields took a “striking” drop—from nearly 30 percent to under 15 percent, while the percentages of those in lower ability groups who chose STEM majors remained essentially unchanged. The percentage of the highest performers who earned STEM bachelor’s degrees fell from 43 percent in the classes of 1992 through 1997 to 29 percent in the classes of 2000 through 2005.

But if the drop in high-scoring STEM majors were not discouraging enough, the news from those who did get STEM degrees was even worse. The percentage of those holding STEM bachelor’s degrees who went on either to work in or study a STEM field rose steadily and sharply from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, from 31.5 percent of the 1977 through 1980 classes, to 52.8 percent of the 1997 through 2000 cohort. But, in the late 90s, the percentage begins to fall, particularly sharply among the most able, from 52 percent to 48 percent.

“Given what we know about the state of the economy and the exploding field of STEM occupations in the 1990s”—the period of the runaway tech boom—“it may seem puzzling to see a decline in retention,” the report states. “It is common knowledge that the STEM job market was expanding in the that period, so the drop in retention might seem surprising because the jobs were available for the taking.” And looking farther out along the career trajectory, the data show “declining retention among the top performers” in STEM careers ten years out from the bachelor’s degree. The late 1990s, they say, “marked a turning point…at least for the best students”—and the “decline seems to have come on quite suddenly.”

These results “strongly suggest that students are not leaving STEM pathways because of lack of preparation or ability,” the authors conclude. Instead, the data “suggest that we turn our attention to factors other than educational preparation or student ability” to explain what is going on.

The Rhodes advantage

And, as it turns out, STEM fields are not the only traditional employers of the nation’s ablest young people that appear to be losing their attraction. The Rhodes Scholarship is by far the most prestigious, and probably the most competitive, academic award that a young American can win. The winners, drawn from a broad range of college majors, study a subject of their choice at Oxford University and then return home “with virtually any job available to them,” writes the Rhodes Trust’s American secretary, Elliot Gerson, on the Washington Post op-ed page. For almost a century, these ultimate achievers “have overwhelmingly chosen paths in scholarship, teaching, writing, medicine, scientific research, law, the military and public service, [reaching] the highest levels in virtually all fields.”

In recent years, however, increasing numbers of the consummately accomplished Rhodes alumni have eschewed those traditional vocations in favor of “Wall Street, finance [or] general business management”—fields previously considered rather beneath the horizon of America’s most promising young leaders, Gerson continues. Only three of the 320 American Rhodes scholars chosen in the decade of 1970s, for example, opted for the world of commerce. But fully 6 of the 32 chosen in one recent year made that choice. “This break in an almost century-old pattern coincided with great increases in occupational earnings differentials, which have continued to grow, seemingly exponentially,” Gerson continues. “It seems quaint, if not unfathomable, that just three decades ago the differentials in earnings—generally two- to fivefold between business leaders and doctors or lawyers, or five- to tenfold with professors, scientists and public servants—were often rationalized by Rhodes scholars as reasonable additional compensation to balance the lower standing of business jobs among their peers.”

The Lowell-Salzman team doesn’t yet have complete data to show that many of the ablest STEM students who abandoned the pipeline have followed suit, but Salzman strongly suspects that Gerson has at least part of the answer. “Go to top level schools and they’ll tell you of a huge shift at the school level into finance” and related fields, he says. Elite colleges represent a relatively small proportion of the nation’s students, he continues, “but they pull disproportionately from the very top,” presumably many of the students capable of doing topflight science. Meanwhile, he adds, “everything shows that wages and working conditions and career prospects have stagnated and sometimes gotten worse” in STEM occupations in recent years, “and there are other job prospects” for students able to do higher math.

Mathematicians, physicists, astronomers and others with advanced STEM training have, in exchange for incomes many times those available to postdocs or professors, or even to industrial engineers and scientists, become the “quants” (quantitative experts) behind the many elaborate investment vehicles of recent years. The financial collapse may have reduced the number of the ablest students headed straight to Wall Street, but even so, “management, law, medicine, all those fields pay better than technical and science fields,” Salzman says. They also provide greater career security. Students aiming for STEM careers in academe now face daunting prospects. Qualified applicants vastly outnumber faculty openings, and in many fields, a would-be researcher must first spend an average of seven years earning a Ph.D. and several more as a low-paid postdoc before he or she can even apply for one of the hard-to-get academic posts. And in a number of high-tech industries, students worry about work being moved offshore or, in many cases, the need to compete here at home with often lower-paid foreign workers on temporary visas.

Stopping the talent drain

How great a threat to the nation’s innovative capacity—and to its competitiveness—does the loss of these scientifically able students to other occupations represent? It’s impossible to say, Salzman believes. “Innovation is not well understood,” and “no relationship” has been demonstrated between the number of a country’s scientists or engineers and its ability to make major breakthroughs. “Innovation comes out of a small group of people…. if there are small areas of innovative activity, then these broad trends may or may not make a difference,” he says. Some major technical advances have been made by people who would not show up in statistics as scientists or engineers—including college dropouts tinkering with electronic components in their parents’ garages and bicycle mechanics convinced that they could build a machine that would fly. But it’s very likely that at least some of the high-caliber brainpower lately devoted to devising elaborate investment models could just as well have created advances in various scientific or technological fields.

If the nation believes that this threat is real, the answer, Salzman says, appears to be simple market economics. Increasing the size of the scientific pipeline is a highly inefficient way of getting more STEM workers, because the best students are falling off right at the end, not dropping off the middle. “To the extent that they’re leaving the pipeline, they’re leaving when they get to the labor market. It’s not high school or college.”

“Imagine a manufacturer is able to get only 60 percent of this product to market because 40 percent falls off the assembly line,” Salzman continues. “If you know that you’re getting sixty percent off the line, you’d say, ‘Gee how could we get 70 percent?’ ….We’ve got to get more of them coming out of college rather than trying to double the numbers going in.”

And an effective way to do that, he says, is also simple market economics: improve the incomes and careers that STEM fields offer the best graduates. “If the nation really values these fields, show them the money, show them the stable careers,” he says.

“This is one of the areas where we should believe that markets actually work. Let’s be capitalists about this, free market capitalists, and understand that we need to provide market incentives to get the results we want.”

Beryl Lieff Benderly, a regular Science Progress contributor and prize-winning Washington journalist, writes the monthly “Taken for Granted” column about scientific labor force issues for Science Careers, a feature of the website of Science magazine.

Plaudits from a galaxy of research luminaries indicate that there’s a lot in the new administration’s statements and actions for senior scientists to like. But the strains of “Happy Days Are Here Again” are harder to hear among the people who do most of the actual labor of American science—the poorly paid post-doctoral researchers and graduate students putting in years of 70-hour-weeks at the bench. Despite the change in administrations, their future still looks bleak. The reason: Channeling substantially more money—as much as 100 percent more over the next 10 years—through the existing university-based research structure ignores the fact that in certain crucial respects this structure is severely dysfunctional.

This mismatch between effort and outcome is, according to leading labor force economists, the central obstacle discouraging many of America’s most talented young people from pursuing advanced scientific studies.

Labor market experts agree that without major structural reforms in how research is organized, additional funding will not remedy—and could substantially worsen—a central failing of the nation’s scientific enterprise. That failing is the dismal and worsening career prospects of young Americans who want to spend their lives doing scientific research. Like other students with the talent and drive to excel at rigorous studies, the scientifically gifted hope for a profession that will afford them at least a comfortable middle-class lifestyle and reasonable financial security. The current university-based research structure severely inhibits that quest.

Training as a research scientist takes a demanding decade and starting a real career today generally requires landing a faculty position. Such openings are so painfully few, however, and each one available already draws hundreds of qualified applicants. These days, therefore, the investment of time, effort and opportunity needed to prepare for a research career very rarely pays off in the desired result.

This mismatch between effort and outcome is, according to leading labor force economists, the central obstacle discouraging many of America’s most talented young people from pursuing advanced scientific studies. This problem is so grave and so intrinsic to the way America’s academic research system is now organized that fundamental reform is needed to fix it. Simply providing more funding for basic scientific research won’t solve this fundamental problem.

A Decisive Choice

For several decades now, the United States has in fact pursued policies that systematically destroy the incentives that could draw America’s best—and very plentiful—homegrown talent into research careers. Despite claims of a shortage of Americans capable of doing topflight science, education statistics clearly show that the nation produces an abundance of young people with the ability to do science and math at the very highest levels. But, in the words of a foreign postdoc who has spent years working in American university labs on a temporary visa, “no American in his [or] her right state of mind would get into a career in academia. You can end up very easily in your 40s without a future ahead of you.”

Today’s crisis is not accidental. It grew out of decisions made, with little thought about labor force consequences, in the years after World War II.

Bright undergraduates at the nation’s universities see the grad students and postdocs laboring in their professors’ labs and the lives of penury, toil, and insecurity that await those who follow in their footsteps. In response, many of our best math and science students chose medicine, law, finance, or other careers over scientific research. Rebuilding the incentives that can once again make research a career of choice for Americans with the potential to do outstanding science is essential to assuring the nation’s future as the leader in innovation.

Today’s crisis is not accidental. It grew out of decisions made, with little thought about labor force consequences, in the years after World War II. In that dawn of massive federal research budgets, policymakers chose to finance science by awarding grants for specific projects to university professors who would use their students and, eventually, their postdocs, to provide the labor. This system worked well for a while.

But it had a hidden—and ultimately fatal—flaw that in the end turned it into an intellectual pyramid scheme. In addition to a stream of new findings, these “self-replicating” professors also produce a constant stream of new PhDs seeking to start research careers of their own. As American higher education expanded rapidly through the mid-1960s, young scientists could generally find the opportunities they sought. But when the growth in faculty openings drastically slowed, the production of new PhDs did not. Universities continued to give fellowships and postdoc appointments based on the amount of research money they received, not on the career opportunities awaiting their graduates.

By the mid-1970s, PhDs seeking faculty jobs far outnumbered the available career opportunities. Where once scientists had generally moved into faculty posts by age 30, now they went in large numbers into low-paid, temporary, postdoctoral “training” positions while they searched for assistant professorships. Before long, five or more years as a postdoc became “normal” in many fields. But even as the typical postdoc period grew, the chances of getting that faculty post shrank and labor force observers began calling extended postdoc training “disguised unemployment.”

Smart undergraduates began noticing the poor professional and financial payoff from science graduate study, and their professors began importing large numbers of PhDs and graduate students from abroad to provide the highly skilled but low-paid labor that keeping their grants required. Today, the majority of the nation’s estimated 60,000 or more postdocs are foreigners on temporary visas.

A New Ladder Needed

Pouring more money into this same dysfunctional system will obviously do nothing to attract more young Americans to careers in science. It will only, as our foreign postdoc puts it,  “create more postdoctoral training jobs when we have thousands and thousands of people who have already been trained for many years under the present system” who can’t start careers. But don’t get me wrong. The nation needs increased research funding to meet our ambitious goals in health care, energy independence, green energy, and more. Doubling expenditures over a decade makes excellent sense.

But how the we spend that money is as important for the nation’s future as how much we spend. The last sharp hike in research funding, when the National Institutes of Health budget doubled between 1998 and 2003, produced some excellent research. But it also did real damage to countless careers because it led to a large number of new researchers who cannot get permanent jobs or grant funding.

This time, we must spend the increased funds in a way that builds, not destroys, long-term career opportunities for scientifically talented young Americans. Instead of the failed strategy of simply giving professors more money to pay more postdocs and grad students, we need to start constructing new career ladders that provide appealing long-term opportunities for large numbers of gifted young scientists. Small programs that provide special grants to a few hundred handpicked young investigators will not suffice, because the odds of winning them are too low to motivate people who have many options to persevere through a decade or more of demanding training.

Instead, we need to break from the present system of tying career opportunities in research to winning one of the tiny number of faculty openings available each year—a number that appears to be shrinking even further as today’s cash-strapped universities impose budget cuts and hiring freezes. In place of the old, counterproductive job structure, the nation needs a new one with plenty of solid, professional, career opportunities that offer young PhDs salaries, status, security, and chances for advancement that befit their long training and specialized skills. These jobs need not carry the title “professor” or to be at universities, but they must provide talented young Americans who choose graduate school in science, and hope to spend their lives doing research, a reliable chance of realizing their dreams.

Experts suggest various of ways of accomplishing this, all of which involve dismantling the current pyramid scheme. Instead of depending for labor on a constant stream of cheap, temporary students and postdoc “trainees,” labs need to establish many long-term positions that offer workers a realistic income commensurate with their education and experience as well as opportunities for advancement within predictable career tracks. A model that many experts favor is staffing labs primarily with bachelors- or masters-level career technicians and PhD-level permanent staff scientists while using much smaller percentages of grad students and postdocs.

Because these new-style labs would not depend on student labor, they would not need to be in universities. Rather than continuing to limit competitive research funding largely to university-based professors, major U.S. funding agencies would, like many European countries, encourage the development of freestanding research institutions based not around the teacher-and-disciple academic model, but around a staff of career scientists and technicians. The legendary Bell Laboratories, for example, supported for decades by the monopoly profits of the regulated U.S. telephone industry, worked on such a model and produced some of the 20th century’s major technological advances, as well as six Nobel Prizes for basic research.

In our own time, Janelia Farm, the Howard Hughes Research Institute’s innovative new research facility in Ashburn, Virginia, eschews university-style hierarchy and places a strong emphasis on employing long-term PhD staff scientists. These are only two of the possible arrangements that America should consider, experts say.

Building this new career structure will take bold thinking and strong leadership, but anything less cannot achieve President Obama’s goal of keeping American science pre-eminent in the 21st century. Our nation must do more than satisfy the clamor of today’s senior scientists for additional money for their labs. The time is overdue for the nation to recognize and take seriously the vital long-term challenge of ensuring the career opportunities that will motivate our best young people to make the commitment needed to do the great science of the future.

Beryl Lieff Benderly, a Washington journalist, writes the monthly “Taken for Granted” column on science labor force issues on the website of Science.

Across the nation, in hospitals, clinics, and doctor’s offices both military and civilian, health care providers are facing unprecedented challenges in dealing with these weapons’ results. Among the most puzzling is a set of injuries widely considered a medical “signature” of this conflict, and one that raises clinical and scientific questions thus far unanswered.

This is the combination of traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. TBI is a force to the head that damages the brain and impairs its function, with the extent and kind of harm depending on the exact location and scope of the injury. PTSD is a terrifying and often disabling anxiety disorder caused by the experience of violent trauma.

Any blast powerful enough to cause TBI is also powerful enough to cause PTSD, so a high—though unknown—percentage of the many exposed to blasts suffer from both. The scientific literature finds that “anywhere form 20% to 60%” of blast victims have PTSD, says Maxine Krengel, PhD, clinical neuropsychologist at the Department of Veterans Affairs Poly Trauma Network Site in Boston. “It’s huge.” The circumstances of the “event itself” indicate TBI, Krengel says. For example, “did the somebody have a loss of consciousness? If so, for how long?” At least mild TBI is therefore also very common.

Many Questions

A major clinical challenge is that the symptoms of the two conditions overlap—although the conditions are very different in their natures—making diagnosis often “very, very tricky,” Krengel says. TBI causes physiological damage to brain tissue that can result in cognitive deficits and reduced emotional control, among many other problems. PTSD is a learned connection between a traumatic event and a set of responses, which can include nightmares, flashbacks, and constant anxiety and can lead sufferers to alcohol, drugs, and even suicide. But the two conditions share many markers, including sleep disruption, irritability, personality changes, difficulty concentrating and remembering, depression, and more.

To add to the complication, the presence of one condition can interfere with the treatment of the other. And to make things even more uncertain, the type and extent of the brain damage caused by the compression wave of a blast appears to differ considerably from the injuries that form the basis of current scientific understanding of TBI.

“Most of the TBI research has been done in survivors of either motor vehicle accidents or sports injuries—a quarterback [who] gets knocked unconscious” or a driver who hits his head against the steering wheel, says Matthew Friedman, MD, PhD, Executive Director of the National Center on PTSD and professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth medical school. “But the real question that a lot of people are raising is, given the tremendous impact of an explosion, can it really compare to the impact of even a 350 pound defensive end knocking you to the ground? Even though that’s pretty bad, is it anything to compare to a bomb blowing up your Humvee and killing the person sitting beside you?”

Beyond a difference in strength of the impact, Krengel adds, the percussive wave of an explosion acts differently on tissue than an ordinary blow. “The blast impacts the air-filled cavities in the body, every air-filled cavity,” she says. “It’s different in different areas and also depending on how close you are to the blast.”

What is known about the impact of blasts on the brain essentially comes from animal models. “But in the animal literature there is a difference in what the connectivity looks like”—in other words, how the brain’s parts work together—“in blast injury versus traumatic brain injury, that we are typically used to seeing,” Krengel says.

“And then the second piece is that so many of these people have had more than one blast injury,” Friedman continues. So the crucial but as yet unresolved scientific question, he says, is “How generalizable is the sports injury or motor vehicle accident to what is coming into Walter Reed or VA hospitals these days?”

Figuring Out How to Help

The point is not just to study the problems with more science, but to find the best ways of helping suffering human beings, Friedman and Krengel emphasize. “We have two fabulous treatments for PTSD,” says Friedman. “These are evidence-based treatments and…vigorous review recently by the Institute of Medicine has verified their effectiveness.” One treatment, cognitive behavioral therapy, uses systematic, Socratic challenges to thinking about the traumatic experience to help patients restructure their thinking. The other, exposure therapy, breaks the Pavlovian connection between the event and the response with guided confrontation with the troubling memories. Beyond that, several medications help control the symptoms, though they do not resolve the basic issues. If medication is used alone, the symptoms return when treatment ends. Successful psychotherapy, however, permanently frees people from the terrors of PTSD. Which type of psychotherapy works better in a given case depends on the individual, but, Friedman says, in tests of otherwise normal individuals, both overall “perform extremely well and equally well.”

There are no drugs approved for TBI, although some appear to provide some benefit. They are not, however, the same drugs useful for PTSD.

But blast victims very often also have some degree of TBI, and depending where and how it damaged the brain, TBI can reduce the effectiveness of either or both of the two best PTSD treatments. Cognitive damage can impair the intellectual resources needed for cognitive behavioral therapy. The loss of emotional inhibition caused by brain injury can make a person unable to tolerate the emotional stress involved in exposure therapy. Mild TBI very often resolves over time, potentially allowing psychotherapy to work, but clinicians do not consider waiting a sound option because, as Friedman says, “six months is a long time to suffer.”

An additional potential complication is that a damaged brain may not tolerate medications very well. There are no drugs approved for TBI, although some appear to provide some benefit. They are not, however, the same drugs useful for PTSD.

A number of studies and proposals are underway, many of them sponsored by the VA or the Department of Defense, Krengel says, noting that, “The VA system is developing treatment modules or manuals to treat the pain issues, the PTSD, the depression.” Whether sufficient resources have been devoted to studying these conditions is a matter of opinion. But, Friedman notes, “It’s probably going to be a few years until we have definitive data. What I can tell you is that we understand the challenge and research is ongoing.”

Until the big questions get answered, “the challenge is to figure out what to do for these folks. We have some good stuff on PTSD, other [work] on TBI. The question is how applicable, how useful is it going to be for this more complicated situation. Can we utilize what works in the less-complicated cases and how much are we going to have to improvise?” At present, clinicians are improvising ad hoc modifications to treatments to make them more usable by individuals with impairments, while waiting for research to provide more answers.

Is It Enough?

Beyond these questions of basic knowledge and treatment are large issues of access to appropriate care. Although the VA maintains a number of specialized polytrauma centers in various parts of the country for dealing with complicated cases, for an unknown but undoubtedly large number of veterans distances can be large and waiting times long. People with mild TBI and PTSD can be “quite ambulatory and they’re going to walk into primary care clinics, psychiatric clinics” throughout the nation, Friedman says. They often show up with vague symptoms such as headaches or sleep disturbances. Many providers lack even the understanding of the conditions found in more specialized facilities. That’s why, he says, primary care doctors and mental health providers across the country need to be educated about these conditions and told that “anyone who has been in uniform should be asked about the different kinds of exposures they’ve had.”

For now, though, untold numbers of service members and veterans who have experienced blasts are suffering, often without knowing why. And PTSD can strike months or years after a traumatic experience. “You might be in a blast and you have to immediately go back to your job,” Krengel says. “You can sort of keep it together while you’re busy, busy, busy, but after you’re home for a while, people say, ‘Wait, I’m not functioning the way I should be.’”

The experience of a blast may therefore be a time bomb that goes off long after the traumatic event. Unless and until researchers and clinicians answer the crucial questions and effective care is readily available from military, veteran, and civilian providers, it should surprise no one that many who served in today’s wars continue to feel their effects long after the conflicts end.

Washington, D.C. science journalist Beryl Lieff Benderly contributes the monthly “Taken for Granted” column on labor force and early career issues to the website of Science magazine and articles to other major magazines and websites.

Prominent labor economists who have examined the problem from a different perspective argue that poor STEM education isn’t the problem at all. In fact, they believe there are far too many qualified student-scientists. Rather, it’s the perverse financial incentives that American society (and specifically the U.S. government) provide wannabe American scientists that lie at the heart of our nation’s science and technology competitiveness crisis.

At first glance, though, the scientist-shortage supporters make some valid points. It’s true that fewer top students from the demographic that long provided the bulk the nation’s technical and research professionals—native-born white males—are pursuing graduate studies in science. Ditto that a growing percentage of the scientists-in-training at the nation’s universities are foreign-born.[1] And the average performance of U.S. K- 12 students on international standards is indeed undistinguished.

It’s the perverse financial incentives that American society (and specifically the U.S. government) provide wannabe American scientists that lie at the heart of our nation’s science and technology competitiveness crisis.

But these facts do not add up to the crises that critics describe. Rather, according to a number of distinguished economists, they reveal a labor market gone seriously awry. In the first place, average test scores tell nothing about the supply of students capable of becoming scientists. Such youngsters are not average for their age group, but outstanding, and the U.S. produces them in large numbers. One frequently cited international comparison, for example, shows that the United States had far more top-performing science students than any other nation tested, as well as a big lead in the number of top-performing readers, according to Hal Salzman of the Urban Institute and B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University.[2] Americans also came second only to Japan in the number of top scorers in math.

What pulled down the U.S. average was not any overall deficit but the very poor performance of the students at the bottom, largely products of inferior schools serving poor minority communities. These disparities are a national disgrace that must be ended, which in turn would result in an even more qualified and more diverse pool of talent to improve our nation’s competitiveness. But our poor test scores say nothing about the quality of America’s best schools, which rank among the world’s finest.

An Enticing Promise, An Elusive Goal

The top performers from those excellent schools then proceed to study at some of the world’s best universities, also conveniently located here. Professors at these universities encourage the most promising to continue on for science PhDs, in preparation for careers as academic researchers. The students who take this advice hope for satisfying careers resembling those their senior professors have enjoyed, pursuing their best ideas as independent researchers, heading labs amply supported by federal funding, and enjoying job stability and comfortable upper-middle class incomes as faculty members in secure tenured positions.

But the world that nurtured today’s senior professors, with PhDs earned in four years and appointments as faculty members and lab heads in their 20s, has vanished. What the great majority of today’s young scientists find instead is a penurious decade or more working in university labs, first as graduate students and then as postdoctoral researchers earning a “trainee” wage comparable to what a new liberal arts BA graduate makes.[3]

Their search for the faculty post essential to starting their own academic research careers overwhelmingly ends in frustration, as they futilely compete for every advertised faculty opening against hundreds of other qualified applicants—all of whom sport good degrees and lists of publications from their graduate and postdoc years. The odds that a young PhD will ever land a faculty job at any four-year institution are now less than 25 percent, and at the kind of research university where big-deal science is done, well under 15 percent.[4]

Across the United States, therefore, professors are bemoaning the choice by many of their brightest undergraduates to eschew science graduate study in favor of medical, law, or business school. These students don’t reject science because they’re bad at math, but because they’re good at it. Anyone bright enough to get a science PhD is bright enough to run the numbers showing that an average of seven years of graduate school, followed by five or more postdoc years, followed by long odds against getting the job one was ostensibly preparing for, add up to a lousy investment.

For foreigners, however, especially those from developing countries, grad school or a postdoc in America is exceedingly enticing. Why? Because the virtually unlimited visas that universities can supply make such training an otherwise largely unobtainable ticket into the country.

Built-in Perversity

Labor economists including Paula Stephan of Georgia State University and Richard Freeman of Harvard University believe this excess of young American scientists unable to start their academic careers results from “the perverse funding structure of science graduate education,” as fellow labor economist Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation put it in congressional testimony last November.[5] Stephan adds that we “staff our labs primarily with graduate students and postdocs” who as a condition of participating in their educational programs, do the overwhelming bulk of the labor needed for the academic research that the federal government funds to the tune of more than $70 billion a year.[6]

Research grants to individual professors from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and other agencies finance the great bulk of graduate students and postdocs. To get the grants and renewals needed to keep their labs going, professors must produce steady streams of journal articles. That, in turn, encourages them to have as many grad students and postdocs as they can possibly afford to do the bench work. This highly skilled cheap labor makes American research very economical, but produces as a byproduct “so much pressure on the system to absorb the continual new cohort” into mostly nonexistent jobs, Stephan says. “We haven’t had much luck in absorbing it.”

Shortage proponents counter that low unemployment among early career scientists proves there is no glut. But in fact the postdoc pool, now numbering possibly 90,000, is more than half foreign-born (the actual numbers are unknown),[7] and functions as disguised unemployment, holding “trainees” off the market. The United States, meanwhile, annually produces 30,000 new science and engineering PhDs, about 18,000 of them American-born, although faculty openings at research universities in the most glutted fields number probably in the hundreds (again, the number is unknown).

The tiny minority who do land research-based faculty jobs have spent so much time “training” that, in biomedical science, for example, they average 42 years of age when they finally launch their independent research careers by winning their first competitive federal grant.[8] At that age, scientists of previous generations—Albert Einstein, Marshall Nirenberg, Thomas Cech—were collecting Nobel Prizes for discoveries made in their 20s.

“I try to keep my best undergraduates away from my postdocs,” one professor confided, because meeting them would reveal what really lies ahead on the grad school track. But talented young Americans would flock to science study if it offered them the kind of career opportunities that previous generations enjoyed. Instead of a needless general overhaul of K -12 education, or an increase in graduate fellowships, which would only make things worse, the United States needs to overhaul what Brown University biochemistry chair Susan Gerbi calls the “pyramid paradigm.”

Instead of paying universities to use grad students and postdocs as very smart migrant laborers, the U.S. government needs a funding structure that provides large numbers of them a solid career ladder into the life that so many were implicitly promised. The jobs on that ladder need not compete financially with corporate law, medical specialization, or investment banking, because science offers intellectual riches so much more dazzling than money that they long enticed the ablest young Americans to accept more modest remuneration in exchange for the chance to do great research. But the futures we provide to the young people we ask to devote their lives and talents to learning and doing science must match those other careers in providing at least a reasonable likelihood that hard work and devotion can attain their goal.

At present, the United States does not give them that opportunity. One way to start doing so could be to structure funding to encourage universities and lab chiefs to create jobs for permanent staff scientists who receive professional-level salaries, benefits, and status within the university and employ them rather than grad students and postdocs. Another could be requiring universities to limit the graduate student and postdoc positions they create to the number of people who could reasonably be expected to find career-level employment after they leave their professors’ labs. Another could be requiring universities and lab chiefs to track their grad school and postdoc alumni and report on their employment experience to new applicants, as professional and business schools routinely do.

When the nation once again provides its young scientists a decent shot at the life they hope for, our best youth will race to answer science’s call.

Washington, D.C. science journalist Beryl Lieff Benderly contributes the monthly “Taken for Granted” column on labor force and early career issues to the website of Science magazine and articles to other major magazines and websites.

Notes

[1] National Science Board, “Science Indicators 2008” (Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation, 2008).

[2]H. Salzman and L. Lowell, “Making the Grade,” Nature 543 (2008): 28-30.

[3] G. Davis, “Doctors without orders,” American Scientist 93 (2005) (3, supplement), available at http://postdoc.sigmaxi.org/results/.

[4] National Science Board.

[5] Michael Teitelbaum, Testimony before the House Committee on Science and Technology Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation, Committee, November 6, 2007, available at http://democrats.science.house.gov/Media/File/Commdocs/hearings/2007/tech/06nov/Teitelbaum_testimony.pdf.

[6] Intersociety Working Group, American Association for the Advancement of Science, AAAS Report XXXIII: Research and Development FY 2009 (Washington, D.C., 2008).

[7] National Science Board.

[8] Committee on Bridges to Independence: Identifying Opportunities for and Challenges to Fostering the Independence of Young Investigators in the Life Sciences, Board on Life Sciences, National Research Council of the National Academies, Bridges to Independence: Fostering the Independence of New Investigators in Biomedical Research (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2005).