Science Education Lays Another Egg

When the Third International Mathematics and Science Study found last winter that American 12th graders scored below the international average in physics and advanced math, there was a predictable outcry from politicians and pundits. But the finding came as little surprise to those who consistently track education in the United States. For years, blue-ribbon panels have been decrying the low quality of science education in primary and secondary schools and in colleges. Less well known--and potentially more troublesome--is the low quality of science education on the graduate level, which I recently observed as a doctoral candidate at a research-oriented American medical school. This surprised me because I had been led to believe that superb graduate training was responsible for U.S. predominance in the sciences. What problems did I observe? The funding crunch was seriously compromising student-faculty interaction. Professors, far from the absent-minded types of lore, were just absent, glued to their personal computers, as they composed one grant application after another. To some extent, they had no choice, since applications were usually rejected. (In 1996, the National Institutes of Health funded 19.4 percent of 12,720 new applications for the R01 grant.) Yet some professors seemed to use grant writing as an excuse for not becoming more engaged with their labs. They were either too introverted to be true advisors or too burnt out by the struggle to get a tenure-track job. Because of their disengagement, many advisors failed both as mentors and as managers of the day-to-day operations of their labs. Meanwhile, their students wasted months, sometimes years, making mistakes that reflected poor training rather than the uncertainties of experimentation. That may help explain why the registration time of doctoral candidates in the natural sciences increased from 5.7 years in 1970 to 6.5 years in 1993, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Once funding was secured, the most serious strain on graduate education was the explosive growth of knowledge. This left many senior scientists--those typically with money to support graduate students--out of touch with the latest developments. Biologists who had earned doctorates 20 years ago, for instance, often didn't know how to apply recombinant DNA technology to their work. Some professors tried to keep up with their specialties by chatting for hours each day with colleagues and by frequently attending conferences. Others made only token efforts to stay current. In either case, their students received little guidance. Most new faculty members, on the other hand, had survived a brutal job market by becoming super-competent in one emerging area of their discipline. (A few new hires were just good at faculty politics.) Yet research is so risky and competitive--academic biologists now compete with the biotech industry--that assistant professors couldn't just stick to their specialties; they had to expand into terra incognita . Other academic responsibilities, unfortunately, left them little time to grasp complex fields that were suddenly central to their research. The onus fell upon their inexperienced students. Course selection and quality were also problematic. Along with the thesis, courses are supposed to turn a doctoral candidate into an innovative, self-critical scientist. Yet many were so crammed with recitations of facts and techniques that they created technicians. Courses rarely critiqued the assumptions of a field or presented ethical views. Lecturing was perfunctory, as if the teacher's mind were on a looming grant-application deadline. Deficiencies of science education on the graduate level are especially troubling for the following reason: When science is poorly taught on the pre-baccalaureate level, graduate schools compensate by admitting the few Americans with a solid science background and by importing foreign students. (In 1995, foreigners received 35 percent of life-science doctorates, up from 19 percent in 1985, according to a National Academy of Sciences report.) Yet when graduate schools falter, compensatory adjustments aren't as apparent. What's worse, top American and foreign students may not keep applying. Talented Americans won't spend six or more years pursuing a doctorate if annual postdoctoral grants from NIH stay in the low-$20,000 range and if stable careers seem unlikely. Students from abroad, on the other hand, may soon be turned away by a U.S. government tightening up on immigration. Some may also be tempted to study in some European countries where a science Ph.D. can be earned in three to four years. Means of improving graduate science education aren't hard to imagine: Government grants could be awarded directly to students. Schools could hire writers to help compose grant applications. Professional societies could offer cheaper and more accessible seminars to bring scientists up to date. Tenure committees could credit junior professors for developing intellectually stimulating courses. Attitudes must also change. Many self-serving professors insist that graduate students do everything on their own, yet teaching them, not making them reinvent the wheel, will increase their productivity. School officials must also abandon their hands-off approach to the pace of graduate education, seeing to it that doctoral candidates finish within a reasonable length of time. After all, Ph.D. recipients are no longer immediately cast into the world as assistant professors. They undergo years of postdoctoral training and scrutiny by their academic seniors. Will the problems of graduate science education be addressed? In the humanities, graduate education has been in crisis for decades, but few reforms have taken hold. Biology, in contrast, is now very successful, thanks to powerful techniques, amazing machines, computerization, a huge pool of researchers, and historically generous funding levels, combined with bargain-basement wages for many workers. Success could breed either complacency or an appetite, born of confidence, for undertaking needed reforms. Tinkering with the system clearly won't be enough. Developing fresh talent will be key to deciphering how legions of newly discovered genes and proteins work. At best, such talent is rare. It will be rarer still if graduate science education keeps shortchanging students. * D.J. Steinberg received a Ph.D. in biology last year and has since written about science for various publications.

Science Education Lays Another Egg

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