B*M
发帖数: 1418 | 1 讲的很实际啊
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_i
Follow the money!” According to the film All the President's Men, this
advice from the shadowy informant known as Deep Throat guided Washington
Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in cracking the Watergate
conspiracy.
The strategy also serves Georgia State University economist Paula Stephan
extremely well in her illuminating and accessible new book, How Economics
Shapes Science. A leading expert on the scientific labor market, Stephan isn
’t looking to sniff out high-level government corruption. Rather, using the
“tool bag” economics provides for “analyzing the relationships between
incentives and costs,” she penetrates the financial structure of university
-based science, explaining the motivation and behavior of everyone from
august university presidents and professors to powerless and impecunious
graduate students and postdocs.
It's a remarkably revealing approach. Most of what the public hears about
the arrangements that govern research comes from reports by blue-ribbon
commissions, prestigious panels, and university-oriented advocacy
organizations. Such reports rarely use hard-headed economic analysis; rather
, the groups writing them tend to consist of top administrators at leading
universities, eminent faculty members in major science and engineering
departments, and high executives of large corporations -- “not,” Stephan
pointedly notes, “students and postdocs who could not find jobs.”
The documents that result from those high-end studies lean toward self-
congratulatory invocations of science’s role in advancing human welfare.
Their suggestions generally favor solving what ails universities by giving
them more of what they already have: funding, grants, graduate students, and
postdocs. But, warns Stephan with an astringency that she infuses
throughout the book, when “assessing recommendations, one should be leery
of those coming from groups who have a vested interest in keeping the system
the way it is.”
The consequences of cost and risk
The troubles plaguing academic science -- including fierce competition for
funding, dismal career opportunities for young scientists, overdependence on
soft money, excessive time spent applying for grants, and many more -- do
not arise, Stephan suggests, from a shortage of funds. In 2009, she notes,
the United States spent nearly $55 billion on university- and medical school
–based research and development, far more than any other nation.
The problems arise, Stephan argues, from how that money is allocated: who
gets to spend it, where, and on what. Unlike a number of other countries,
the United States structures university-based research around short-term
competitive grants to faculty members. The incentives built into this system
lead universities to behave “as though they are high-end shopping centers,
” she writes. “They turn around and lease the facilities to faculty in [
exchange for] indirect costs on grants and buyout of salary. In many
instances, faculty ‘pay’ for the opportunity of working at the university,
receiving no guarantee of income if they fail to bring in a grant.” Those
who land funding staff their labs with students enrolled in their department
’s graduate program, or with postdocs. Paid out of the faculty member’s
grant, both types of workers depend on the primary investigator’s (PI’s)
continued success in the tournament.
Universities, however, also face considerable risks. They must, for example,
provide large start-up packages to outfit new faculty members for the
competition. Newcomers generally have about 3 years to establish a revenue
stream -- to start winning “the funding to stay in business,” Stephan says
. The need to reduce risk explains universities’ growing penchant for
hiring faculty members off the tenure track and using adjuncts for teaching.
“Medical schools have gone a step further,” Stephan notes, “employing
people, whether tenured or nontenured, with minimal guarantees of salary.”
Where tenure once constituted a pledge to pay a person’s salary for life,
it now constitutes, in the acerbic definition I’ve heard from some medical
school professors, a mere “license to go out and fund your own salary.”
Risk avoidance has scientific as well as financial consequences. “The
system … discourages faculty from pursuing research with uncertain outcomes
,” which may endanger future grants or renewals. This peril is “
particularly acute for those on soft money.” Experimental timidity produces
“little chance that transformative research will occur and that the
economy will reap significant returns from investments in research and
development.”
As in all financial ventures, cost determines much of what goes on in the
laboratory. “Cost plays a role in determining whether researchers work with
male mice or female mice (females, it turns out, can be more expensive),
whether principal investigators staff their labs with postdoctoral fellows (
postdocs) or graduate students, and why faculty members prefer to staff labs
with ‘temporary’ workers, be they graduate students, postdocs, or staff
scientists, rather than with permanent staff.” Postdocs often are a PI’s
best staffing buy, Stephan writes, because their excellent skills come with
no requirement to pay tuition, which at top private institutions can run $30
,000 a year or more. Overall, the need to reduce risk and cost in the grant-
based system produces “incentives … to get bigger and bigger” by winning
the maximum number of grants and, because grad students and postdocs do the
actual bench work, to “produce more scientists and engineers than can
possibly find jobs as independent researchers.”
Many universities, meanwhile, took out large loans during flush times to
finance buildings and equipment intended to give them an edge in attracting
grants. They find their fiscal stability “severely threatened when funding
from grants plateaus, or does not grow sufficiently to keep pace with the
expansion. They face even more serious prospects when budgets decline in
real terms.” The nation’s enormous investment in biomedical research has
also “created a lobbying behemoth composed of universities and nonprofit
health advocacy groups that constantly remind Congress of the importance of
funding health-related research,” Stephan adds. This gives rise to
unceasing claims that no amount of science funding is ever enough.
Although one topflight report described this setup as “ 'incredibly
successful’ from the perspective of faculty,” Stephan observes, “it is
the Ph.D. students and postdocs who are bearing the cost of the system --
and the U.S. taxpayers -- not the principal investigators.” Undergraduates
also carry an increasing share of the load, she adds: Their tuition, often
paid with student loans, rises as more funds go to research. Their teachers,
meanwhile, increasingly are cut-rate adjuncts rather than the famous
professors the recruiting brochures boast about.
Finding solutions
Unsurprisingly, Stephan’s proposed solutions differ from those of the blue-
ribbon panels. She focuses not on the need to grow budgets or aggrandize
institutions but on the need to increase what economists call efficiency,
allocating scarce resources -- in this case, taxpayer money and the talents
and time of the nation’s able young people -- to produce the highest return
in desired goods: transformative science and sustainable, transformative
science careers.
Thus, she argues for producing fewer rather than more Ph.D.s, for requiring
all PIs to report the career experience of their Ph.D.s and postdocs as part
of “the outcome data for scoring proposals,” and for limiting the “
amount of faculty time that can be charged to grants, thereby dulling the
incentives for universities to hire faculty on soft money.” The latter
measure would have the added benefit of discouraging “universities from
putting up buildings on spec and filling them with faculty on soft money
positions.” Stephan also wants more attention paid to the potential
advantages and disadvantages of funding systems that support researchers
over time, as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute has done with great
success, rather than for specific, short-term projects. Importantly, she
notes, “universities and faculty members do not respond to recommendations
that lack teeth.”
The short space at my disposal allows me to present just a hint of the
penetrating discoveries waiting in this book: How and to what extent does
patenting enrich some faculty members and universities? What incentives
encourage universities to import increasing numbers of foreign students and
postdocs -- and to insist that there are shortages of both -- while a
growing surplus of native-born scientists struggle to find jobs that allow
them to pay off student loans? How do universities continue to attract
students into graduate programs despite poor odds of attaining the careers
they desire? Why does supporting scientists over time, rather than
individual grant-funded projects, appear to produce better science?
These and many other apparent quandaries yield to Stephan’s rigorous and
clear-eyed examination of the money trail. She conveys her findings in clear
, comprehensible prose. If you want to understand what is really happening
in American academic science today, here’s my advice: Read this
enlightening book.
Beryl Lieff Benderly writes from Washington, D.C. | T****i
发帖数: 15191 | 2 好文。顶！
isn
the
【在 B*M 的大作中提到】
: 讲的很实际啊
: http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_i
: Follow the money!” According to the film All the President's Men, this
: advice from the shadowy informant known as Deep Throat guided Washington
: Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in cracking the Watergate
: conspiracy.
: The strategy also serves Georgia State University economist Paula Stephan
: extremely well in her illuminating and accessible new book, How Economics
: Shapes Science. A leading expert on the scientific labor market, Stephan isn
: ’t looking to sniff out high-level government corruption. Rather, using the
| e*******e
发帖数: 1837 | 3 Which one makes you feel worse? There isn't enough money to go around or
there is enough money but just not for YOU?
isn
the
【在 B*M 的大作中提到】
: 讲的很实际啊
: http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_i
: Follow the money!” According to the film All the President's Men, this
: advice from the shadowy informant known as Deep Throat guided Washington
: Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in cracking the Watergate
: conspiracy.
: The strategy also serves Georgia State University economist Paula Stephan
: extremely well in her illuminating and accessible new book, How Economics
: Shapes Science. A leading expert on the scientific labor market, Stephan isn
: ’t looking to sniff out high-level government corruption. Rather, using the
| T****i
发帖数: 15191 | 4 The current system is not self-sustainable, due to the positive feedback
behavior of the research system. So there will never be enough money.
Also please think about this scenario:
In the old days, most PIs usually have small labs. 1 technician and 2
graduate students will do the job. Usually the job is one project. Then the
sizes of labs keep growing. Now it is rare to see 2-3 people labs, except
for those of new APs'. However, for big labs, there are multiple projects,
most time unrelated, albeit under the same umbrella. So we have to ask
ourselves, do we need those big bosses as middle men? Can the same big labs
be separated into smaller labs and each only work on one project? And if so,
can the smaller labs, collectively, be as productive as the big lab? I know
there is no easy answer, and it may vary from case to case. But I do know
that the golden age of basic biological research was from 60s to 80s, which
ironically coincide with the fact that most labs are small at that time.
【在 e*******e 的大作中提到】
: Which one makes you feel worse? There isn't enough money to go around or
: there is enough money but just not for YOU?
:
: isn
: the
| B*M
发帖数: 1418 | 5 The trend is to have bigger labs and collaboration, similar to business
Giants we call 托拉斯...
But the problem here is that PIs of big labs are not responsible for their
postdocs and graduates after their projects are done. Right now the PHDs are
oversupplied and flooded the job market.
One solution is that PIs create more long term positions for postdocs,
instead of temp.
Another solution is to have less PhD enrolled, to tight up the supply.A lot
of graduate schools don't like this idea of course...
the
labs
so,
【在 T****i 的大作中提到】
: The current system is not self-sustainable, due to the positive feedback
: behavior of the research system. So there will never be enough money.
: Also please think about this scenario:
: In the old days, most PIs usually have small labs. 1 technician and 2
: graduate students will do the job. Usually the job is one project. Then the
: sizes of labs keep growing. Now it is rare to see 2-3 people labs, except
: for those of new APs'. However, for big labs, there are multiple projects,
: most time unrelated, albeit under the same umbrella. So we have to ask
: ourselves, do we need those big bosses as middle men? Can the same big labs
: be separated into smaller labs and each only work on one project? And if so,
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