Chemists Anxious About Discipline's Fate

Academic and industrial researchers hold differing views on whether--and how severely--the chemistry profession is suffering Talk to academic chemists these days and they're likely to tell you they're worried. The anxiety they feel doesn't concern a difficult experiment; rather, they fear for the future of their profession. They see fewer United States college students majoring in chemistry. But they also see diminishing quality in the current crop of doctorates. They see unfilled job openings for chemistry faculty at their universities, and they feel threatened by an increase in the number of foreign chemistry doctorates vying to move into these positions. They worry that the U.S. will fail to attract the young scientific hopefuls needed to replace the chemists who will be either retired or deceased by the end of the 1990s; they add muscle to their warning with the prediction that if academic chemistry falls, so will American industry. They support their prognostications with the observation that America's chemical industry is one of few having a positive trade balance--$15.7 billion in 1989--in the world economy without the help of a government subsidy. But this is the voice of the academic scientist. Talk to industrial chemists and you're likely to receive a different message. Yes, they are concerned about the quality of chemists coming out of the university. But many industrial chemists don't accept the negative prognostications of the academic chemists. And they suggest that even if the predictions come true, the industry can deal with the situation. Year No. Ph.D. Percent No. U.S. chemists foreign Ph.D.'s 1970 2,223 15.2 1,885 1975 1,762 19.4 1,420 1980 1,538 21.8 1,203 1985 1,836 22.7 1,419 Both sides hurl accusations at each other that their complaints of a shortage or their denials that one exists are motivated by self-interest. Industry types contend that academics fear that funding for chemistry departments will be cut to the bone if they don't say there is a shortage. Academics say that those in industry want fewer chemists in order to keep salaries high. Clearly, accepting one or the other point of view has implications for governmental and industrial policymakers. One of the most outspoken among those concerned about an impending shortage of qualified chemists is Paul Gassman. Gassman, immediate past president of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and now a professor of chemistry at the Univeristy of Minnesota in Minneapolis, says that "by the end of the nineties, many current academic and industrial chemists will be retiring and there will not be enough chemists around to replace them. But it isn't just the quantity issue, it's the quality of these chemists I am concerned about, as well." A hint that the shortage is beginning to be apparent today, according to Gassman, is the fact that there are about 380 openings for chemistry faculty at universities granting Ph.D.'s in the U.S. And as applicants get scarcer, standards for hiring are likely to be lowered, compromising the education of future generations of chemists, he says. Figures from U.S. public schools indicate that this quality decline has already begun, Gassman maintains. In 1988, he says, a study ranked American high school seniors 11th among their peers in 13 countries in chemistry aptitude. Meanwhile the numbers of college students graduating with a bachelor's degree in chemistry has been decreasing, he says. From 1984 to 1988, the number went down from 9,819 to 8,271, a reduction of 15 percent. In addition, Gassman points out, although the total number of Ph.D. chemists that graduate from U.S. institutions has remained steady at 2,000 for the last five years, the percentage of all Ph.D.'s awarded in the U.S. to foreign-born students rose from 15 percent in 1970 to 22.7 percent in 1985 (see table). Gassman's statistics and arguments don't impress John Connolly, a chemist with the Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, Colo. He says he doubts there will be a major shortage of Ph.D. chemists in the future if projections are based on today's supply. In fact, says Connolly, the former chairman of the ACS committee on economics, the field could use a shrinking, since there's an oversupply of chemists today, as evidenced by current starting salaries that have only kept pace with inflation. These salary figures imply a large pool of applicants, he says. Connolly also suggests that if more chemists are out of work, for whatever reason--be it because of mergers or because of recession--that again indicates not a shortage, but a glut. "The older chemist who was laid off but left the profession and is currently employed selling real estate in his community because he wasn't going to relocate his family may not be captured on the ACS surveys," he says. The president of the ACS, S. Allen Heininger, also believes that the current situation is not a crisis. Heininger, formerly a vice president for research at Monsanto Co. in St. Louis, says, "If there is shortage, industry can and will take their research where there isn't a shortage, such as to Japan, Germany, or Europe. Industry looks at global markets." Even without moving overseas, says Heininger, problems like a shortage are often self-correcting in the industrial sector: "Corporations have a broad product line," he says. "Many chemists who are employed are not involved in research but are involved in applications work. Numbers of individuals in industry are more important than the single chemist represented by the star professor bringing in grants in academia. [If there is a shortage] it becomes an issue of managing the people who you do have." Heininger even suggests that the current and projected chemistry faculty vacuum can be filled with industry people. As for chemical industry recruiters, they say it is an employer's market for hiring today, seeming to concur with Connolly's and Heininger's position. Yet the recruiters also seem convinced that shortages will be coming in the future. "We are not really hiring today to meet future needs," says Thomas Burke, technical recruiter for chemical company Rohm and Haas Co., in Spring House, Pa. "We will wait and see what happens to the market." Connolly alleges that Gassman's concern about the shortage is politically motivated, so that funding agencies will continue to "throw money at academia." Connolly also contends that "Gassman tends not to take into consideration the needs of industrial chemists." Resources should not only be spent in academia but also on programs that could help industrial chemists, according to Connolly. One such program, says Connolly, could provide continuing education for older chemists so they can compete more readily with the lower-salaried, newly trained younger chemists. Gassman denies that his interest in academic chemists precludes his support of industrial chemists. In fact, he says, he is in favor of many industry-wide programs under discussion. One such initiative, Gassman says, is the portable pension plan, which would allow a chemist to transfer his or her pension benefits from one job to the next. "This is a very important issue for chemists these days because they tend to have five or six jobs in a lifetime," says Gassman. Anne O'Brien, the 1991 chairwoman of the ACS committee on economics, contends that Connolly and Heininger's view of the shortage is motivated by economic concerns. "It is shortsighted. They aren't looking at the need for a healthy supply of chemists as good for the welfare of society as a whole," she says. "They think that if there are too many chemists, individual chemists can't command high pay." Moreover, as companies go offshore, she says, the U.S. loses its technological base and the U.S. chemical job market will wither away. While some acknowledge that Heininger's idea of using industry people to fill academic positions is a possibility, they say getting funds to set up labs at the universities is difficult for even the most established academic scientist. "Nor will they necessarily be good teachers. The skills for an educator are different from those of a bench-top scientist," says Michael P. Doyle, professor of chemistry at Trinity College in San Antonio, Texas. Many chemists concur that for the U.S. to compete in a global market, chemistry education needs to be improved. Ted Logan, manager of worldwide Ph.D. recruiting for Procter & Gamble Co., Cincinnati, says: "If there aren't changes in U.S. policy on funding to support graduate and undergraduate education we can't compete in a world economy." And they would like to see a career in chemistry more financially rewarding. Says Connolly: "There has to be something we can do to make chemistry as attractive a career as those 70,000 people feel about getting their MBA." Trinity professor Doyle calls getting undergraduate students involved in research a high priority for educators. Although the National Science Foundation supports about 3,000 chemistry undergraduate students in nonclassroom, individual research projects every summer throughout the U.S., Doyle says that isn't quite enough, given there are about 8,000 students who graduate with degrees in chemistry yearly. To foster college research, the 14-year-old Council on Undergraduate Research started an industry-sponsored program two years ago that provides undergraduates with a stipend of $2,500 each to do lab work at their home institution for a summer and then offers them the opportunity to work at an industrial lab before they enter graduate school. "This summer we have 26 students enrolled," Doyle says. To meet the demand for what is becoming a dwindling supply of precollege science teachers, Gassman favors laws that create alternative teaching certification programs that would allow people with noneducation degrees to teach. New Jersey enacted such a program in 1986, and 98 percent of the teachers hired by it have remained in the school system, according to Gassman. He has been lobbying to put this kind of alternate certification onto national education legislation. While both sides disagree about the future of U.S. chemistry, they acknowledge that the public has a poor opinion of it. "It is a pity that advances in chemistry aren't presented in the media," says Gassman. "Good things aren't news, say media representatives I have spoken to. But the media provides continuing education for the public. If the media only gives a negative image of chemistry as causing pollution, it is not giving a fair picture." ACS hopes that an exhibition, "Science in American Life" at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., may polish chemistry's image in the public's eye. ACS is providing $5 million, the largest single grant in the Smithsonian's history, for the 12,000-square-foot exhibition that will have as a major focus chemistry and other physical sciences and will have a hands-on interactive component. "This exhibition will be the crown jewel of a series of major ACS public outreach programs aimed at improving science literacy in this country," says Joseph Dixon, chairman of the board of ACS.

Chemists Anxious About Discipline's Fate

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of