Pundits Foresee Stiffer Job Competition In Academia

Countering the widespread predictions of a future scientist shortage, several analysts predict a crisis in quality, not quantity WASHINGTON--The idea of an upcoming massive shortage of scientists and engineers is now being assailed and discredited on many fronts. But that doesn't mean that labor economists and statisticians are anticipating only bright skies ahead for scientists entering the job market. What is emerging is a more limited assessment of employment prospects and the economy that could ultimately result in increased competition for talented faculty among United States universities. This shift in thinking away from the shortage theory is sketched out in a recent paper by labor economist Joe Baker of the National Research Council's Office of Science and Engineering Personnel. Baker points to contradictory signals coming from the scientific community about future market conditions. On the one hand, he says, there is the view that declining student interest in science, growing industrial demand for scientists, and an aging academic faculty will all contribute to a shortage. At the same time, he notes, the widespread complaints about a lack of adequate funding and evidence of a growing disillusionment among young scientists with future funding prospects suggest that there are more scientists than the market can bear--in effect, that there is a surplus. "Will there be enough Ph.D.'s in the year 2000? The answer is yes," Baker said last February at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). According to Baker and other economists, job shortages exist only at a particular salary level. In most cases, Baker says, any potential shortage would disappear if salaries are raised sufficiently. At the meeting Baker identified significant flaws in four leading models that have tried to predict future supply and demand for scientists and engineers. These models include two that focus only on supply. One foresees a huge scientific shortfall throughout the economy because of a shrinking pool of college-aged students and a declining interest in science among this population, and a second study predicts faculty hiring shortages based on rising retirement rates. The other two economic models try to forecast demand for scientists after making assumptions about the supply. Half The Story Baker argues that each model he examined ignores or discounts critical factors that play an important role in setting appropriate levels of future scientific supply and demand. A 1989 study on job prospects in academia, by William Bowen and Juliann Sosa of the Andrew Mellon Foundation, relies too heavily on the number of new Ph.D.'s being produced for its projections of a shortage, says Baker. As a consequence, he says, it fails to take into account the growing pool of scientific talent that went into industry in the 1980s and that could be tapped if faculty vacancies begin to pile up. Baker finds that a 1990 study by the National Research Council on biomedical and behavioral research scientists, the ninth in an ongoing series of such analyses, suffers from a similar overdependence on the number of new Ph.D.'s and ignores how institutions react to changing markets. A 1989 National Science Foundation working paper by Peter House based on declining college enrollments, especially in the sciences and engineering (The Scientist, April 29, 1991, page 1), doesn't account for the fact that faculty-student ratios can be adjusted to take into consideration rising or falling enrollments without the need to hire or fire faculty members, he says. And an econometric model developed last year for NSF by the consulting firm of DRI/McGraw-Hill, which indicates demand being strongly affected by wages and productivity rates, contains data that are outdated and imprecise. Despite the weaknesses of each model, all the models, in the opinion of Baker and others, agree on a point of great interest to the scientific community: If current trends continue, U.S. research universities may soon find it more difficult to recruit and retain key faculty. "Even though none of the models is correct by itself, their bottom lines are similar," says Daniel Melnick, a senior policy adviser at the National Science Foundation. "We may well be facing a tightening of the academic job market by the end of the decade." Melnick works for Luther Williams, assistant NSF director for education and human resources, and was previously director of NSF's science resources studies division. For Melnick and other federal officials, such a trend points to two, equally unattractive, outcomes for scientists. For one thing, says Melnick, "it suggests that the cost of attracting scientists will go up." Such an outcome, says Melnick, could lead companies to hire fewer scientists, or to replace Ph.D. scientists with those holding lesser degrees, who command lower salaries. In addition, Melnick says, rising salaries "could produce a situation in which top universities will continue to attract the best, but second-tier institutions will find it much more difficult to compete for this top talent." Neither development, according to analysts, would be good for U.S. science. Either would subvert the federal government's mandate to strengthen the scientific enterprise in all areas of the country and among all populations, they say, and weaken the country's ability to compete with foreign nations. Labor market analysts agree with Baker's emphasis on the importance of understanding the many variables that shape the supply of, and demand for, scientists. Previous models, say these analysts, may have read too much into the data to make a broad statement about the future job outlook for scientists. Some analysts also believe that predictions of shortages are popular among administrators at academic institutions because they can be used to pressure the federal government to beef up its support of graduate education. "We're beginning to realize that we don't understand the factors involved in measuring supply and demand," says Judith Liebman, vice chancellor for research and dean of the graduate college at the University of Illinois. Liebman is chair- woman of a panel advising NSF on its data collection and policy analysis efforts (see accompanying story). Liebman says that internal reports such as House's "may have led NSF to assume that it was getting a handle on the problem" when, in fact, "there are still many important issues to be addressed." Adds Melnick, "understanding relationships [between supply and demand] is more important than any single, overarching analysis." NSF has recently awarded a $125,000 contract to the Bureau of Labor Statistics to develop a supply model that incorporates alternative projections of the demand for scientists and engineers--for instance, by using different scenarios for possible levels of military spending over the next decade. And the Division of Social and Economic Studies, a subdivision of one of NSF's five research directorates, has received money from Williams's education directorate to make a handful of grants. The grants will go to individual researchers who seek to understand both the level of certainty in such projections and which factors are most likely to alter the results. While these studies are expected to offer more details of likely employment prospects for scientists, they are not expected to provide a radically different view of the topic. The phenomenon of unrequited demand in a particular field is not a new one for scholars. Traditional economic theory predicts that such demand will be met initially by heightened competition for trained workers and rising salaries. Those factors will trigger an infusion of workers into the field who, eventually, will cause wages to drop. Such an influx would be healthy for the U.S. economy, notes Melnick, because it would raise the nation's overall rate of scientific literacy. At some point, say economists, those additional workers will cause the market to "clear," leaving supply and demand once again in balance. For those reasons, say analysts, it's almost meaningless to talk about a shortage without also looking at related cost factors. "If NIH paid people $200,000," Baker says about the government's current problem of attracting top-notch biomedical scientists, "I think they wouldn't have any trouble attracting enough good scientists." But salary adjustments are not always the solution to a problem in the labor market, cautions Neil Rosenthal, an economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. "If there is a shortage of workers at McDonald's, you raise salaries and fill the jobs," he says. "But with rural physicians, you can only attract those people with an M.D. And there may not be enough of them for every vacancy." He adds: "Engineers and scientists fall somewhere in between. There are people trained in engineering who aren't currently working in the field, and there are crossovers from other fields. If you raise salaries, then you're likely to attract those people. But it's not a simple equation." Baker emphasizes that this analysis is highly dependent on such variables as overall research and development spending in the economy and the size of future military budgets. "If R&D spending continues to grow at the rates seen during the 1980s, then there will be a tremendous strain on the system," he explains. "If, on the other hand, it drops sharply over the decade, then we may not really need to do much of anything to keep supply and demand in balance." Another unknown, say economists, is the quality of that future scientific work force. Employers could substitute master's-level people for Ph.D.'s, they say, or upgrade existing technical staff, or draw on people trained in nonscience fields. But few analysts have much confidence in their ability to quantify such behavior, much less to predict how those changes would affect the scientific enterprise. "You can't model those factors very well," says BLS's Rosenthal. "You can try to monitor where these workers come from, and the quality of the education they've received, but it's hard to track them." Like many of his colleagues, Robert Dauffenbach sees the rate of R&D expenditures as the leading measure of whether job markets will be strong or weak. Dauffenbach, who is director of the Center for Economic Management Research at the University of Oklahoma, is convinced that the end of the Cold War has removed most of the impetus for the increased demand that was generating predictions of impending scientist shortages. He believes that the U.S. needs more scientists to keep the country competitive with its international trading partners. But he's not sanguine about the prospects for such growth. "There are two type of forecasts in this business, positive and normative," he says. "The first offers what you think will happen, the second what you'd like to happen. If we don't have high demand for scientists in the 1990s, I have little hope for the health of our economy and our ability to compete. So I hope that we do [generate more scientists]. But, realistically, I doubt that we will." This is the second of a two-part series exploring the controversy surrounding the number of future scientists and engineers in the United States. Part I appeared in the April 29 issue.

Pundits Foresee Stiffer Job Competition In Academia

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