I managed to somehow end up at a roundtable discussion recently on the topic of funding reform and the future of science. Of course there was some of the usual clamor for more funding, as there has been and always will be. There was also some productive discussion of reforming scientific funding in the biomedical sciences, particularly scientific training.
Many opinions were aired, but there were a few insights that I thought resounded most clearly above the hubbub of what is, of course, a very political question.
1) Cull the herd: Do not allow students to continue Ph.D. degrees if they are unlikely to be successful. There was one individual who offered a clear comparison between what is done in the biomedical sciences and what is done in economics. The benefit of this are, at the very least, less delusion from students thinking that they might be able to go on in academia and less crush for grants when Ph.D.'s go on to apply for faculty positions. The cost is less cheap labor available to PIs in the biomedical sciences.
2) Numerator vs. Denominator: How do we avoid the simple problem of increasing Ph.D.s and constant (or decreasing!) funding. Are there operational efficiencies that can be achieved or some kind of restructuring of granting mechanisms that allow for continued scientific output, career stability, and stable costs? Interestingly the fundamental nature of this question was often overtaken by discussions of how nice individual programs might be in terms of some elements of this equation (e.g. a career track for core lab administrators might permit both continued scientific output and career stability... but at what cost?)
What is the cost, what is the return? In the end, this is an economic question. We in science are at risk of confusing the return to ourselves as the return to the investor. As academics, perhaps this is forgivable. We are, after all, obsessed with the deep questions of science. How does the cell work? How does the genome lock in a frozen, endlessly replicated organic molecule, the blueprint of life? How does cancer evolve? How can we better treat disease? What is good for us in our quest must be good for society, should we successfully answer these questions.
But the fact of the matter is much more complex. Graduate school is not a zero sum game, nor is economics. But the allocation of federal funding, sadly, is. The questions above are never fully answered, they are only answered in part. An attention to yield is paramount. As should be obvious, the yield equation is not the sum of impact factors of all the papers written by a set of investigators. It is the sum of the benefits to the individuals of the nation (the world?) over the centuries.
Whether or not we have stable careers is irrelevant latter sum of benefits, except inasmuch as stable careers allow researchers to do fundamental work (I think that they do, but to less extent than we might claim). What is more relevant, as far as federal funding is concerned, is the fact that a Ph.D. that is underutilized may be a wasted investment. In addition to the costs of funding the Ph.D., society has lost the other work that that presumably intelligent and capable individual could have achieved in that time in another line of work. Depending on the person, this may represent hundreds of thousands of dollars of loss. If they by exiting the academic track in fact exit the job market completely, the loss may even reach the millions.
The fact is, academic departments have become poor arbiters. They are loathe to say no to a student's progression, in part because the student is a low cost laborer for an investigator in the department. Until the departments bear some of the cost of this training, they will not be good stewards of federal training dollars.
The NIH would be right to try to clamp down on Ph.D. training funding at the federal level (among other poorly optimized investments). In the global perspective a Ph.D. pipeline of a bore so vastly wider than the R01 funding pipeline is a low yield investment to society at large. I say this as someone who, as a future investigator who came through in the time of high funding of trainees, will be hurt by the loss of cheap labor welling up below me. However this affects much more than any future lab bottom line, it also influences the credibility of the scientific enterprise as a whole. It is an incredible privilege to do what we do, and to keep doing it we must be good stewards of the public's trust.
As a postscript, should I mention that I don't really believe in the Ph.D. as a degree anyway? Degrees end up being carrots or sticks that PIs can wield against their trainees when they have already become excellent candidates on the job market. Viable Ph.D.s will already have publications and poster presentations to prove the merits of their productivity. The Ph.D. defense has become a formality that we should abolish. Degrees in general, and the Ph.D. in particular, too often become a tool to preserve privilege of elites, and become a dangerous replacement for real competence.
