3 ms·

Instead of reducing the number of trainees, how about we increase the number of faculty positions? Isn't research good for society?

lumost 4y ago
If the latter is possible, then yes - however in a society with a declining population and modest productivity growth increasing the number of faculty positions 3-5x to account for current PhD program capacity is likely infeasible. Even a massive increase in science budgets at the federal level would likely only yield 2x the positions. While Universities could cut administrative bloat to make way for faculty... they are unlikely to do so, and there are few levers to motivate them. With a looming student loan crises, they are likely to be forced to cut budgets significantly sometime in the next 10 years either through inflation or direct cuts. The number of PhD candidates is partially based on the way the federal government cuts grants, at a roughly flat budget the only way to create more faculty positions is to cut PhD student grants. From a very rough perspective, the government could create roughly one career track research position for every ~1.5-2.5 PhD/PostDoc position grants they cut. If you doubled the science budget, then the 3-5x cut would work out as 1.5-3x, However due to the expectation on the number of students each professor has.. doubling the budget in the current system would simply yield the same problem with twice as many people involved.
- queuebert 4y ago
  You make some good points and I agree with your ballpark figures, but you seem very stuck in a status quo mindset. The entire NIH budget is about what we are giving Ukraine in aid. High-frequency trading alone saps billions from the economy. We could easily find money to triple our science expenditures if we wanted to. And yes we'd need to evaluate faculty success differently so that we would no longer require each professor to run a lab of a half dozen grad students in order to have enough publications for tenure. But that's easily doable via a collective decision.
  - lumost 4y ago
    Fair, but we (hopefully) don’t need to fight the Ukraine war every year - and we have many more agencies than the NIH who need science funding. Choosing not to fund the military to support the NIH may directly translate to undesirable geopolitical outcomes.

lumost 4y ago

If the latter is possible, then yes - however in a society with a declining population and modest productivity growth increasing the number of faculty positions 3-5x to account for current PhD program capacity is likely infeasible. Even a massive increase in science budgets at the federal level would likely only yield 2x the positions. While Universities could cut administrative bloat to make way for faculty... they are unlikely to do so, and there are few levers to motivate them. With a looming student loan crises, they are likely to be forced to cut budgets significantly sometime in the next 10 years either through inflation or direct cuts. The number of PhD candidates is partially based on the way the federal government cuts grants, at a roughly flat budget the only way to create more faculty positions is to cut PhD student grants. From a very rough perspective, the government could create roughly one career track research position for every ~1.5-2.5 PhD/PostDoc position grants they cut. If you doubled the science budget, then the 3-5x cut would work out as 1.5-3x, However due to the expectation on the number of students each professor has.. doubling the budget in the current system would simply yield the same problem with twice as many people involved.

queuebert 4y ago
You make some good points and I agree with your ballpark figures, but you seem very stuck in a status quo mindset. The entire NIH budget is about what we are giving Ukraine in aid. High-frequency trading alone saps billions from the economy. We could easily find money to triple our science expenditures if we wanted to. And yes we'd need to evaluate faculty success differently so that we would no longer require each professor to run a lab of a half dozen grad students in order to have enough publications for tenure. But that's easily doable via a collective decision.
- lumost 4y ago
  Fair, but we (hopefully) don’t need to fight the Ukraine war every year - and we have many more agencies than the NIH who need science funding. Choosing not to fund the military to support the NIH may directly translate to undesirable geopolitical outcomes.