Graduate STEM Education Roundtable

Events

Earlier this week I participated in a roundtable event held by OSTP, the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. The event, which involved about 25 people, was organized by Sharon Hays, Deputy Director for Science in OSTP, and co-chaired by John Marburger, the President’s Science Advisor (and Director of OSTP). The other participants in the roundtable were major scholars, government administrators, and industrialists.

The purpose of the roundtable was to shed some light on the issues surrounding graduate education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematical fields (STEM). As Marburger explained in his opening remarks, there has been a lot of study of K-12 STEM education, mostly aimed at the issues of workforce development and maintaining our global competitiveness. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to graduate (especially Ph.D.) education. To open the meeting, Sharon Hays asked several specific questions, including the following:

• Data shows that academia is an increasingly uncommon career choice for Ph.D. students. Given that, why are doctoral students trained solely to be academic researchers?
• There has been a lot of study recently on supply not matching up with demand. In particular, in most STEM fields it appears that there may be an oversupply of Ph.D.s. Can we do a better job of predicting and managing supply and demand?

To my mind, these questions miss the mark. Graduate (Ph.D.-level) science education has never been about satisfying the workforce demands of academia and industry. Ph.D. STEM education is not some kind of zero-sum game in which the nation (or world) creates a “demand” for scientists and engineers which is then satisfied by the “supply” produced by the nation’s doctoral programs. If you want, you might say that’s the role of undergraduate and professional master’s programs, though even that is a stretch.

As David Skorton, the President of Cornell University, said so eloquently in his remarks to the roundtable, graduate education is not a zero-sum game. The world economy is expanding, and as our last 100 years have amply demonstrated, this expansion is fueled in large part by innovations in science and technology, many of which derive from basic research conducted at universities. As the economies of the world grow, the possibilities for new scientific discoveries and innovations grow. Indeed, I sense that we are in an era of enormous possibilities in the advancement of new knowledge and new technologies. So the key question isn’t one about supply and demand, but about whether and how our nation can match the investments in STEM education and research that other countries are making, and what this can mean for science and competitiveness.

It was striking to me that Dr. Skorton referred to his remarks as “contrarian”. Indeed, one major takeaway from the roundtable event is that the notion of supply-and-demand has taken a firm hold on the discussions about STEM in the minds of our nation’s policy makers.

So, where did the current supply/demand mindset come from? Well, it seems to be relatively new, having been sparked by a study report published recently by the Urban Institute, and then given tremendously influential media coverage by an editorial by Vivek Wadhwa published in Business Week. To quote the article:

“…a new report by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, … disproves many confident pronouncements about the alleged weaknesses and failures of the U.S. education system. This data will certainly be examined by both sides in the debate over highly skilled workers and immigration. The argument by Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG), Intel (INTC), and others is that there are not enough tech workers in the U.S”

Some of the key conclusions of the Urban Institute report directly contradict assertions made in numerous other analyses, perhaps most notably the Rising Above the Gathering Storm report, published by the National Academies. And, of course, they seem to contrast sharply with our own experiences here, where we see 100% employment of our undergraduate and graduate CS majors. In fact, there is a key point here: it is not valid to make general statements about all of STEM. The situations vary wildly from biology to physics to mechanical engineering to computer science. We know, from both hard data as well as everyday experience, that there is a shortage of computer scientists, for example.

While it is easy to blame the Urban Institute report, in fact we (the research community) are just as much to blame as anyone. Many of our own arguments for increases in science funding have been based on supply-and-demand workforce arguments. Sure we have a shortage of IT workers and so yes we need increases. But even if we didn’t have obvious shortages, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that we should curtail research funding. The point is that we are in an era of new opportunities, new paradigms, new industries, and these things require the ability to innovate. Jobs and workforce development are a part of innovation, but only a part — investing in basic long-term research is at least as important, particularly in areas that have such foundational impact as computer science.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the supply-and-demand concept will be going away any time soon. And I think it will be hard to keep people from pointing to the very large numbers of new life-science PhDs and then confusing matters by pointing to IT companies (as the Business Week editorial does). Some very thoughtful and influential people are, unfortunately, adding to the confusion. For example, at the roundtable event, Michael Teitelbaum, the Director of Research and Technology at the Sloan Foundation, presented his arguments for the supply/demand concept, based in large part of wage data in STEM overall. This was based on his recent (and also very influential) paper, “Do We Need More Scientists?” In terms of the politics of federal funding, what closed-system analyses like these do is provide a kind of top-cover for legislators who have been looking for reasons to oppose the key bills that call for increases in federal science funding, such as COMPETES. As you might expect, very few of his arguments hold water in the field of computer science.

So, what happens next? Well, for the roundtable event, there might be an opportunity for me to submit some written remarks for an event report. We’ll see. The CRA Government Affairs Committee is also actively discussing this issue and has prepared very useful talking points so as to help educate our legislators. These things will become very useful in further roundtable discussions.

The government has made tremendous progress on the American Competitiveness Initiative and is on the path to double the budgets of key federal agencies, such as NSF, over the next decade. It will take a concerted effort by many parties, but the most important thing is to not let the supply/demand concept derail the path we’re on.

Peter Lee @ November 8, 2007