Is American academia in crisis?

[Shalmanese]

Since 9/11, America has increased scruitiny on foriegn graduate students and many have claimed that this has lead to a decrease in the number and quality of graduate students applying to American universities. Since a large part of the research work is done by international students, some say that the era of dominance of the US in science and research is rapidly ending. Do you agree?

From a personal perspective, I’ve had the oppurtunity to talk to a graduate admissions advisor at a top tier Australian university and he is of the personal opinion that the quality of graduates seeking to apply to Australian universities has increased markedly in the last few years, especially from China.

[Bryan_Ekers]

You spelled “foreign” wrong.

Eh, I’m just bustin’ your chops.

[Fiveyearlurker]

I’ve said as much in other threads, but academic science is all but done in the US, it’s just such a huge bureaucracy that it hasn’t figured it out yet.

I doubt that 9/11 has much to do with it. Foreign students aren’t going into scientific graduate schools because promising Chinese and Indian students are likely to find better paying jobs within their own country than they will by going into science.

Let me explain the process of becoming a scientist (I graduated with my PhD from an ivy league school in the past year, to give you my cred to speak on the subject ). Generally one has to spend about 2-4 years after college doing research to garner enough experience to get into a decent school. Graduate school takes, on average, close to 8 years to complete (often considerably longer). You are being paid about 20K per year during this time. In other words, you are over 30 years old and living below minimum wage (remember, the best schools are in NYC, SF and Boston where cost of living is horrendous). Then, you get the big bucks, cause you’re a PhD, right?

Nope, you do a postdoc. This takes 3-4 years getting paid about 35K per year (limited, if any benefits). Then, you do another postdoc for 3-4 years. Then you quit science, because you realize that the tenure track professorship is never going to open up for you. Only 7-9% of postdocs ever get a tenure track position (and if they do, they are at the absolute earliest in the late 30s, but more likely mid-40s).

I can only tell you from my own experience, that the best graduate students are NOT going into academic science. They leave for industry (what I did), or get their MBA or go to medical school. I wish like hell that I could have stayed in basic science and done discovery for the sake of discovery, but I couldn’t afford to do it. And, frankly, the science that I’m doing at a company is so much more important than anything that I was doing at a university, that I can’t fathom why anyone would want to stay in academia.

An intelligent Chinese or Indian (the majority of the foreign grad student population) could certainly do better than this financially by going to business school, or frankly, staying in their own countries and going into telemarketing.

The difference between now and, say, 20 years ago is that graduate school used to take 5 years, and a postdoc was an optional additional year. Now, because there simply are no tenure track positions available, and graduate students/postdocs are cheap labor, universities continue to pump them out and keep them in a holding pattern until they finally give up. It’s terribly sad, but academic science is done in the US within twenty years.

[Shalmanese]

Graduate schools take 8 years? Full time? Since when?

Sure, the PhD->postdoc->tenure track is not very likely to succeed, but do many people go to grad school in the hopes of teaching in Academia? In computer science, the majority of people who I’ve met go to grad school with eventual work in the private sector specifically in mind. Companies like Google or Microsoft vacuum up huge numbers of grad students.

[aurelian]

@Shalmanese

Graduate schools take 8 years? Full time? Since when?
Companies like Google or Microsoft vacuum up huge numbers of grad students.

Sounds about right to me. I’m in Spanish - the average is 9 years, which I seem to be aiming for - started in 2000; MA in fall 02; prelims in summer 06; dissertation, I’m guessing another two years…? The vast majority of TA’s also teach introductory language classes. And yes, I’m a full-time student.

Cite on the jobs at Microsoft and Google? I had heard computer science/ IT jobs weren’t nearly so easy to come by, compared to a few years ago.

[aurelian]

Jobs in the US, I meant. Sorry.

[Shalmanese]

@aurelian

Cite on the jobs at Microsoft and Google? I had heard computer science/ IT jobs weren’t nearly so easy to come by, compared to a few years ago.

What exactly do you want a cite for? That Microsoft & Google hire PhDs? That PhD’s in CS mainly go into industry? That CS PhD’s have an easy time finding jobs?

From what I gathered, the demand for good PhD’s was rather anti-cyclical. During the heady early 90’s many smart people decided that it was more attractive to go straight off and earn $100,000 a year rather than slogging through a PhD. When the bubble burst, there was an undersupply of PhD’s which has only now started to correct itself.

[aurelian]

Numbers 1 and 3, thank you.
I have heard from my friends in CS that there’s not much reason to go past an MA if one is planning on working in the industry; according to them, advanced study can lead to over-specialization (from the company’s perspective). Just anecdotal experience, though.

[rjung]

In a related vein, the Department of Commerce is proposing that foreign students at US universities to apply for export licenses to use dual purpose technologies in the classroom.

“If I had to apply with the government every time I needed access to a cluster [a large set of computers used to run complex programs], it would be very painful,” says Ravi Kolluri, a 27-year-old Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley. He works with three-dimensional computer imaging, which has both military and civilian applications. He will likely have his doctorate before the new regulations take effect, but if such regulations had been in place when he applied to school in the U.S., he says, he “would have gone to school somewhere else.” Kolluri plans to work in the United States after completing his degree. Once in the workforce, he may have to apply to use equipment that he’s had open access to for the last seven years as a student.

nherent in the new rules is a discriminatory contradiction: Students from India, which has cordial relations with the U.S., will need licenses to study, but students from Saudi Arabia – home country for most of the participants in the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, and much of the financing and ideology behind Islamist terrorism – will not.

[Shalmanese]

@aurelian

Numbers 1 and 3, thank you.
I have heard from my friends in CS that there’s not much reason to go past an MA if one is planning on working in the industry; according to them, advanced study can lead to over-specialization (from the company’s perspective). Just anecdotal experience, though.

Heres a cite from Kevin Schoefield, Manager of Microsoft Research:

Q: in order to get a job in Microsoft Research do you have to have a PhD or be the inventor of something like a laser printer? Just curious as to what the “bar” was set at for entry in that area.

A: In general, you do indeed need to have a PhD or distinguished yourself in a research area. Lesser-qualified people can work in MSR, but they tend to be supporting developers, equivalent to grad students in academia. That’s not to say that the RSDE’s (Research Software Development Engineers) don’t do any research – they actually do get support for writing papers and so forth – but they fill more of a supporting role in the research organization.

Google seems to have a surprising dearth of true research jobs open at the moment, but here is a list of programming jobs. The OCR job is really the only pure research position I see open, the Keyhole ones are part research, part implementation.

In the end, it depends on what you want and are able to do. If you want to program backend databases for the rest of your life, then theres no need for a PhD. If you want to go into R&D, it’s practically mandatory.

[Fiveyearlurker]

@Shalmanese

Graduate schools take 8 years? Full time? Since when?

Sure, the PhD->postdoc->tenure track is not very likely to succeed, but do many people go to grad school in the hopes of teaching in Academia? In computer science, the majority of people who I’ve met go to grad school with eventual work in the private sector specifically in mind. Companies like Google or Microsoft vacuum up huge numbers of grad students.

The last NIH survey that came out (that I saw) was from data from 1991, which put the number at 7.8 years (biomedical sciences. Chemistry is often much faster, and doesn’t always require a postdoc) which was up about a year from the previous decade. I extrapolated (conservatively) to get to about 8 years. That’s only counting time spent actively persuing a degree; if you took time off as a few do, the clock stops. Keep in mind, that grad students don’t exactly get summer breaks, spring breaks or weekends, so that 8 years, is pretty solid work straight through. And, I would say that almost all graduate students (at least in the life sciences) hope to become academic professors. Even once they graduate, the vast majority stay on the tenure track by becoming academic postdocs. I was well in the minority by going to industry, and burned a lot of bridges by doing it; I sold out and wasted my training.

There are reasons other than that the best and brightest are fleeing the abuse in the system, that I could cite that science in the academy is going to die.

1. It’s becoming too expensive for universities to do science. At a company, I can run a microarray experiment (more and more a staple of life sciences) on a whim, obtaining vast amounts of data. Plus, I don’t have to actually run the experiment, as we have a microarray facility designated for this. I also don’t have to analyze the mountains of microarray data as we employ expert biostatisticians. No universities have this sort of capability.

2. Science is becoming more collaborative. I’m trained as an immunologist, but my work often crosses over into signal transduction and protein chemistry. So, I always have to knock on doors of people in other departments. In academia, scientists are often very solitary. Academic science seems to self-select people with, um, limited social skills. Plus, there is little incentive to share credit in academic science. You are rated by your ability to publish, and your ability to get grants. If you are sharing credit, both of these factors fall.

3. Science can go much faster at companies than in academia. If I need an antibody, I can either spend months making it, or spend 500 bucks buying it. In a company this is a no brainer; my time is more valuable, and no one would bat an eyelash at a 500 dollar purchase. Hell, at my relatively low level at the company (I’m still in my late 20s), I can purchase up to 5000 dollars on any single item without approval from above. An academic postdoc would end up spending months doing what I can do by placing an online order.

I have a few more minor reasons, but most of them are outgrowths of the above.

[furt]

I don’t know if the OP is looking just at science; in re: Academia in general I’ve opined before that the humanities are in the process of marginalizing themselves.

[Apos]

In a given peer-reviewed journal, roughly what percentage of the authors are academics and how many are employees of a for-profit firm? Anyone know? And has that changed over time?

[Fiveyearlurker]

@Apos

In a given peer-reviewed journal, roughly what percentage of the authors are academics and how many are employees of a for-profit firm? Anyone know? And has that changed over time?

I don’t have the numbers (if they exist at all), but if you do a pubmed search (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) and type in major company (pfizer, genentech, amgen…), you will get thousands of hits for any of them, and most of them recent; these guys publish very well and in very good journals. And that’s not even taking into account that these companies are not in business to publish, whereas that’s your bread and butter in academia. If you add the publishing of patents to the publishable equation, obviously the for-profits are way ahead.

The direct answer to your question is that academics probably still have the edge, but that’s simply because there are more academic scientists than industry. That’s changing dramatically. Not only that, but many academic labs NEED collaborations with companies to publish. Of my papers in academia, all had industry collaborations because in a university, we simply couldn’t produce the amounts of proteins that I needed to run experiments without a company giving it to us.

[Apos]

Now, see, that’s interesting. I wonder what sort of issues will continue to emerge as this trend picks up. Certainly, the life of an industry employee and an academic aren’t all that different when it comes to sitting down and actually doing research, but I wonder if their incentives and legal constraints are different in ways that will affect the character of scientific research more and more as industry takes over more and more of the share of things like biomedical research, not to mention ownership and control over journals.

[Quartz]

Perhaps a silly question, but do people actually have to do PhDs and post-docs at universities? Can they not do them in industry and be judged by Professors?

[Fiveyearlurker]

Phds, yes. You at least have to have some sort of university appointment, so you can’t just have your phd issued from Pfizer.

Postdocs you can now do in industry (which is what I’m doing). It’s not very common, and the positions are rare. Not only that, often companies use “postdoc” positions as a way of saving money as the postdocs are paid considerably LESS than a bachelor’s level position under the guise that it is a training position. Sometimes the trade-off is a good one, as you are actually being trained. Sometimes you are just a cheap pair of hands.

[ITR_champion]

Well, America has been successfully sucking up the best students from Europe and Asia for the last two generations because those students traditionally didn’t have good options in their home countries. Universities across much of Europe were underfunded, class sizes too large, research opportunities too few. Furthermore there weren’t enough job opportunities for those trained in science and math after graduation Now, it seems that other countries have caught on nad realized that a good system of universities is crucial to retaining and attracting top students.

I can testify, at least, that a math Ph.D. at a top American school still takes only five years, sometimes less. That’s not the issue. The issue is that schools in other countries are rapidly becoming competitive by offering better scholarships, smaller class sizes, and qualified professors as teachers.

[Busy_Scissors]

Your post (fiveyearlurker) is quite different to my experience of the current state of science in academia, especially the industry/academic dichotomy, its interesting to see how things go in different disciplines (I’m an organic chemist, tenured position in the UK).

Keep in mind, that grad students don’t exactly get summer breaks, spring breaks or weekends, so that 8 years, is pretty solid work straight through. And, I would say that almost all graduate students (at least in the life sciences) hope to become academic professors. Even once they graduate, the vast majority stay on the tenure track by becoming academic postdocs. I was well in the minority by going to industry, and burned a lot of bridges by doing it; I sold out and wasted my training.

I’ve heard anecdotally that the academic route is a more prominent goal in the life sciences, interested to hear you confirm it. Its categorically not the case in chemistry, relatively few US grad students at Penn (where I did my postdoc) wanted to teach. The ones that did were the elite. Average time for a PhD out of Penn in chemistry was probably 5-6 years, depending on supervisor.

There are reasons other than that the best and brightest are fleeing the abuse in the system, that I could cite that science in the academy is going to die.

1. It’s becoming too expensive for universities to do science.

2. Science is becoming more collaborative.

3. Science can go much faster at companies than in academia.

I have a few more minor reasons, but most of them are outgrowths of the above.

You bring up some good talking points, but you’re being way too broad, speculating on the death-throes of academic wrt industrial research. I can tell you without fear of contradiction that the above scenario is truly outlandish when applied to chemistry, no basis in reality whatsoever. Maybe it applies somewhat to the medical/clinical research fields, I don’t know, but my point is that a sweeping generalisation on the academic/industrial dichotomy is worthless.

I particularly liked the canard of academics having limited social skills, hence finding collaboration a challenge :rolleyes: How do you think academic scientists get grants, by lottery? Limited social skills doesn’t get you very far in the world of raising research income. You must know that articulating an original research proposal takes exceptional communication skills, literally, verbally, to the expert audience of your peers and to the general audience of the tax-payers who pay for government funded research. IME, successful academics “self-select” for their social qualifications.

[Busy_Scissors]

@Shalmanese

Since 9/11, America has increased scruitiny on foriegn graduate students and many have claimed that this has lead to a decrease in the number and quality of graduate students applying to American universities. Since a large part of the research work is done by international students, some say that the era of dominance of the US in science and research is rapidly ending. Do you agree?
.

No, completely disagree Or rather there is no way it is “rapidly” ending. British chemistry students are still queuing up to do a postdoc in the US, and the US is so far ahead in research in organic chem/biochem that it would take a truly draconian immigration policy to make a dent in their dominance. From what I’ve heard, the current policies are far from draconian.

A slowdown is certainly feasible over a longer timeframe. In the UK, less and less students want to study physics and chemistry at university for their first degree, to the point were it has got to crisis point with chemistry department closures making the national news. We welcome overseas students with open arms. If the US has a similar problem with undergraduate science recruitment, or if it develops one in the future, then shutting out foreign graduate students would be extremely damaging.