NRC Report: Cap Life Sciences Graduate School Enrollment

The stream of life science students entering the graduate school pipeline should be frozen to prevent researcher job applicants from flooding the market, according to a recent National Research Council (NRC) report. However, just who will control the valves regulating enrollment--government, universities, or some combination--remains to be seen. "I don't think the federal government alone can provide the answer to this," explains Shirley Tilghman, chair of NRC's Commission on Life Sciences, which drafted the report. "Change will require the actions of individual departments." However, Tilghman, a professor of life sciences at Princeton University, admits that voluntary change from departments won't come easily--especially if the mechanisms through which graduate students receive funding remain unchanged. Some universities have made those changes prior to the report. "What strikes me ... is that we're pretty much in line with what the recommendations are," says Jack E. Dixon, chair of the biochemistry department at the University of Michigan. He contends that his program has stayed about the same size for the past six or seven years, and he guesses that prominent life sciences departments across the country have followed a similar course. However, he believes that less established programs may be contributing to a glut. "There are an increasing number of institutions that are attempting to develop new graduate programs," maintains Dixon, "I wouldn't be surprised if some of the growth has taken place at those institutions." Sherrie Hans, who helped draft the report, suspects that real change will require government reform of the mechanisms that fund graduate students. "The driver of this problem is federal funding for research," the officer at the Pew Charitable Trust in Philadelphia adds. The present system awards principal investigators (PIs) RO1 grants. The PIs, in turn, use those grants to pay the stipends of their graduate research assistants and postdocs. The numbers of each has grown in recent years, partly because the National Institutes of Health's budget has grown. Hans, who joined the committee three years ago as a graduate student, recommends that graduate students get paid through training grants, rather than under a PI's RO1. Such reform would give the government greater control over the number of graduate students. It would also provide both graduate students and postdocs freedom from PIs tempted to keep the skilled, inexpensive sources of labor around their labs longer. Lack of reform, however, could mean an even tighter job market for recent Ph.D. recipients. According to the report, the number of doctorates awarded in life sciences by U.S. universities has risen 42 percent, from 5,000 annually in the mid-1980s, to more than 7,600 in 1996. Available jobs have not kept pace. Faculty jobs increased 2.5 percent a year since 1972, industry jobs have gained 7 percent a year during the same time period, and government jobs have shown only modest growth. Some exceptions to the NRC's initial recommendations complicate matters; for example, the report does not suggest capping the enrollment of minority students. That suggestion has been reinforced by a recently released American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) report that found that between 1996 and 1997, first-year graduate enrollments of African Americans in science and engineering programs decreased more than 20 percent, and first-year graduate enrollment of Hispanic Americans in similar programs slipped 16.2 percent. "We don't have a surplus of underrepresented minorities in the life sciences or in any of the other fields," says Shirley Malcom, director of the AAAS Directorate for Education and Human Resources Programs. "They aren't present in the proportions that they are in the graduate population, in the overall population, even in the undergraduate degree production." As to whether jobs will be available for these students, Malcom contends that the "whole issue of oversupply and undersupply" is not as relevant when dealing with underrepresented minorities. Future reports will, according to Malcom, determine whether the large 1997 decline in African American and Hispanic enrollment represents a growing trend, or an anomaly. For foreign students, who can't receive training grants, the NRC's recommendation would be of little benefit. "The recommendation that basically you should curtail funding on RO1 grants for students ... isn't universally going to be applicable," says Dixon. Tilghman also acknowledges that capping enrollment while encouraging minorities and getting the right balance of foreign nationals represents a tenuous juggling act. "The dynamics are difficult," she concludes.

NRC Report: Cap Life Sciences Graduate School Enrollment

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