Recruitment Wars: Grad Schools Battle For The Best And Brightest

In the fall of 1986, Will Talbot was just another college senior nervously applying to graduate school. He knew his credentials were good. As an ambitious high school junior in Gainesville, Fla. he had talked his way into an immunology research laboratory to begin hands-on training at the lab bench. And as a student at the University of Florida, he had compiled an outstanding academic record. But he figured that the competition for top programs in molecular biology would be stiff. “I applied to seven or eight schools,” he recalls, “hoping that I would get an offer from one, or maybe two.” Surprise. Just a week or two after he mailed his applications, the phone began to ring. Stanford was interested. So were Harvard, MIT, Caltech, and the University of California programs at Berkeley, San Francisco, and San Diego. Suddenly, Talbot found himself flying from city to city and campus to campus, being wined, dined, and wooed as if he were A visiting celebrity instead of a lowly college senior. “I didn’t really anticipate benig such a hot item,” he says. SCIENCE FIELDS The demand for good graduate students is intense, not only in biology, but in engineering, computer science and chemistry as well And as soon as one department raises the ante in terms of recruitment, others are forced to follow Randy Kate, a professor in electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley for example says his program had to beef up its to keep up with the efforts of MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and Cornell. Now, the top 50 appli cants get personal phone calls from prestigious faculty members, and an invitation to a recruitment weekend of sorts, an expense-paid trip . to Berkeley during the derpartments industrial liaison. The prospective students get to listen in when faculty and students present their research to the departments industrial sponsors. Berkeley’s chemistry department has also established "visting days" for applicants to its graduate program. The department pays part of the students’ travel costs and arranges for them to meet with faculty and graduate students. “The tradition has developed for students who wan t to come visit,” says Berkeley chemistry professor Robert Bergman. “All schools are recruiting more than they used to" Forget the conventional picture of students fiercely competing for acceptance to the nation’s premier graduate programs. These days, as Will Talbot discovered (see story, page 5), it is a seller’s market for the upper echelon of students, and universities are vying with each other in a genteel but spirited battle to entice the best and the brightest into their fold. The phenomenon is appearing in all areas of science, from chemistry to physics (see story, page 4). But the competition may be the most visible and intense in biochemistry and molecular biology. Over the last eight years, a dozen or more of the top graduate programs have all adopted a version of the most potent weapon in the battle to lure talent. It is the recruitment day (or days)—an all-expenses-paid courtship ritual at which prospective students are lavished with atten tion by everyone from eminent scientists to current students. Officially, of course, these visits are supposed to allow universities to grill prospective students, and to give the students a chance to leam about the various programs universities offer. In fact, however, recruitment days are well-orchestrated affairs designed to show the departments off to their best advantage. “The visit enables us to convince [the best students] to come,” admits Elliot Meyerowitz, chairman of admissions in Caltech’s division of biology. And with half a dozen or more top universities clamoring for their services, students can’t help but feel wanted. “My professors said, ‘You’re going to feel like a football star’ “ says biology student Wes Miyazaki, who was wooed by MIT, UCSF, and Harvard. “And I did.” Miyazaki may be exaggerating. No scientists currently make personal visits to prospective students’ homes to win over their families. None of the dozens of graduate students contacted by The Scientist was offered under-the-table inducements or anything more than standard stipend (see story, page 5). But the battle to land the best graduate students has escalated so much that some scientists and university officials are beginning to worry that the whole thing is getting out of hand. “It’s amazing how this has grown from just bringing out the students and showing them the place, to this incredible competition,” says Harvard microbiolo- gist Roberto Kolter. So why have the good biology and biochemistry graduates become such prized commodities? It’s not because numbers of applicants to graduate programs have dropped appreciably, although some faculty members say the quality of the applicants is down. One reason may be that increasingly popular M.D./Ph.D. programs are skimming some of the cream off the applicant pool, thus shrinking the number of top students available to regular graduate programs in biology. More important, say department heads, may be the decade-long boom in molecular biology, which has rejuvenated many areas of biology. As a result, departments have expanded, and new ones, like Harvard Medical School’s genetics department, have sprung up. UCSF’s faculty in biochemistry, microbiology, pharmacology, and physiology, for example, has increased from 60 members in 1979-80 to 80 members in 1988. THE FINANCIAL LURE At nearly all the top biology students stipends are paid to graduate students for their work as research and teaching assitants. The money typically comes out of a department pool of research and teaching funds, as well as out of training grants from the National Institutes of Health. Almost everyone receives approximately the same stipend—about $11 ,OOO per year at most programs and must both . teach and do research. This egalitarian approach, biologists say, the equalities that can plague students in other fields. In English history, or even chemistry for example, graduate students with teaching assitantships are burdened with heavy teaching loads in addition to their thesis work. while their peers with research assitantships or special fellowships need only concentrate on their research. Certainly the stakes in this game of “snare a graduate student” are high. Top-quality students are prized assets; their skilled bench work can greatly increase lab productivity. Not only will a graduate program that draws the best students probably do the best research, but good graduate students are essential for attracting the best young faculty. In fact, the group of people with the poorest grasp of the value of good graduate students may be the prospective students themselves. They are by and large an astute bunch, and most have heard stories of how they will be romanced on recruitment day. But fears of not being accepted are still hard to banish. Take the case of Linda Huang, a UCLA biology major who never quite believed that her acceptance at Caltech was a forgone conclusion. When she visited the university, “the graduate students said, ‘Don’t worry, this is your chance to look them over,’ “ she recalls. “But that was easy for them to say. I still worried.” (She needn’t have. She was accepted, and eventually chose Caltech over Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and UC, San Diego.) By most recollections, the recruitment day concept was born in 1980, when the biochemistry department at UCSF began one-day visits in February and March for choice students. The visits included a reception and meals with faculty and students, faculty interviews, and a party. What followed was an academic “keeping up with the Joneses,” as other departments and other universities followed suit. The most elaborate event is now probably held by the tri-departmental genetics, microbiology, and biochemistry program at Harvard Medical School: a weekend retreat on Cape Cod that mixes seminars with informal gatherings where “prospectives,” as they are known on the circuit, are given every opportunity to discover that Harvard is an irresistible choice. It is an impressive show, says Aaron Neiman. “You hear that Harvard is not very interactive,” he says, “but those myths were definitely dispelled by the retreat. Five or six of the students decided that weekend that Harvard was where they were going to go.” Not Neiman, though. As impressed as he was by the interactiveness, he preferred the West Coast. At UCSF, where it all began, recruitment day now starts with a coffee and rolls breakfast with faculty and current graduate students. Each prospective is greeted by his or her faculty host and given a short tour of the department. Morning and afternoon are filled with faculty interviews. The prospectives eat lunch in small groups with several graduate students, and, at the end of the day, they scuttlebutt on each department. One year, UCSF’s graduate students were disgruntled over a poorly organized course, and the word spread quickly among those considering coming to the university. Graduate student recruitment plummeted to half to its normal levels. “Happy students are the best selling point,” says UCSF’s Adams. So how does a university department win the recruiting war? The answer doesn’t seem to be just the thickness of the red carpet or the lavishness of recruitment day. Instead, say students, the real draws are still the quality and type of the graduate program. The majority of today’s college graduates, for example, seem to lean toward programs with a certain amount of required course work. And in fact, the two departments that consistently pull the best students are biology at MIT and biochemistry at UCSF, both of which require a year of course work. “I was looking for a rather structured program, with top faculty,” said Wes Miyazaki, who chose MIT. “I wanted to learn what they had to teach.” Classmate Charles Yokoyama agrees. “I had a lot of lab experience, but I felt I needed course work to help me decide which research direction to take.” Still, there are plenty of prospectives who prefer schools such as Caltech and Rockefeller, where courses are optional and students go straight into their thesis research. “I didn’t apply to MIT because they don’t let you into the lab for a year, and you have to take courses,” says Caltech’s Kellie Whittaker. “I wanted to get right into the lab and do research.” Another key factor influencing students’ decisions is the size of a department. “I wanted a huge choice of people to work with,” said Jeane Harris, who chose UCSF. “I didn’t want to go to a place where there was only one person I was interested in, in case we didn’t get along, or they didn’t have space that year.” Janet Carminati thought she wanted to work on viruses, but she chose MIT over Har- vard’s virology program because MIT offered a chance to work in other areas of biology. “People always warn you that although you think you know what you want to study, it’s probably going to change,” she laughs. “And it’s true.” Carminati is now working in a lab that studies gene expression in the fruitfly. Other schools have been quick to notice the success of the large biology departments at MIT and Caltech, and have rushed to enlarge their own programs. In five years, Harvard Medical School’s microbiology department has gone from sifting through the rejects of other Harvard departments to being a serious contender for top students. The secret of its success: it formed an alliance with genetics and biochemistry. Meanwhile, Berkeley has dismantled its archaic department divisions, creating one 90-member cell and molecular biology department. And the Stanford Medical School is about to launch a new graduate program, called “combined admission mode,” which will allow its students to work in any lab on the entire Stanford campus. Such changes are creating tough competition. Says Harvard’s Kolter, “Three years ago, when Berkeley was still scattered all over the place with 20 different departments, we never lost a student to Berkeley. Now we’re losing students to Berkeley.” The quality and breadth of its research programs, it seems, are still a department’s best advertisement on recruitment day. Marcia Barinaga is a freelance writer based in Berkeley, Calif.

Recruitment Wars: Grad Schools Battle For The Best And Brightest

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October 1988

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