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The Almighty Buck Science

Fewer Grants For Young Researchers Causing Brain Drain In Academia 153

Posted by Soulskill from the funding-our-future dept.
BarbaraHudson writes: Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels has written about the decline of research grants to younger researchers. "For more than a generation, grants for young scientists have declined. The number of principal investigators with a leading National Institutes of Health grant who are 36 years old or younger dropped from 18 percent in 1983 to 3 percent in 2010. Meanwhile, the average age when a scientist with a medical degree gets her first of these grants has risen from just under 38 years old in 1980 to more than 45 in 2013. The implications of these data for our young scientists are arresting. Without their own funding, young researchers are prevented from starting their own laboratories, pursuing their own research, and advancing their own careers in academic science. It is not surprising that many of our youngest minds are choosing to leave their positions."
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Fewer Grants For Young Researchers Causing Brain Drain In Academia More

Fewer Grants For Young Researchers Causing Brain Drain In Academia

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  • Quarterly forecast (Score:5, Insightful)

    by houstonbofh ( 602064 ) on Friday January 09, 2015 @04:11PM (#48777557)
    When the distant future is only next quarter, this kind of thing happens. No one cares about consequences that will only happen after they have left the job... So, be ready to see basic research shift to another country in about 15 years.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 )

      So, be ready to see basic research shift to another country in about 15 years.

      Despite the cuts, the US still spends more per capita on R&D than any other country except South Korea, and far more than any other in absolute terms. Source: List of countries by R&D spending [wikipedia.org].

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by peragrin ( 659227 )

        Microsoft spent more on r&d than Apple for the last decade.

        Which company spent it better?

        Spending matters little if you don't do much with it. Even pure research while costing a lot for little return can have benefits. (See HP and mem resistor )

        The USA doesn't do much of either type any more.

        • Re:Quarterly forecast (Score:4, Informative)

          by ColdWetDog ( 752185 ) on Friday January 09, 2015 @05:27PM (#48778159) Homepage

          The USA doesn't do much of either type any more.

          I don't really think that is true. Just read Science and Nature on a regular basis. Lots and lots of new insights and discoveries by mostly US centers. It can and should be better - we're on a Red Queen type journey and much of our problems can be solved either by dropping us back into the Bronze age or moving forward understanding our world and how to live in it. Standing around staring at the scenery isn't going to get society very far.

          But despite all attempts to the contrary, we haven't fallen off that cliff just yet. We're getting closer and it takes multiple generations to really effect a useful turn - our decreasing literacy is very, very concerning. It would be wonderful if the US could come up with stable funding for STEM (and general) literacy from childhood to post doctoral level and we need to push and squeal for the limited resources available to us, but one needs to understand how large and robust the system really is.*

          * Assuming general social stability. If the Doomers are correct then we're in a heap of trouble and the next age will be the 'Recycled Plastics' Age.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by ponos ( 122721 )

            I don't really think that is true. Just read Science and Nature on a regular basis. Lots and lots of new insights and discoveries by mostly US centers. It can and should be better - we're on a Red Queen type journey and much of our problems can be solved either by dropping us back into the Bronze age or moving forward understanding our world and how to live in it. Standing around staring at the scenery isn't going to get society very far.

            Although I don't doubt for a second that US centers produce first-tier research, I am also inclined to believe that publishing in Nature is far easier when you come from a big US center. So, it is, in a way, a self-sustaining situation. Friends who have been to famous US centers (Dana-Farber, NIH, MIT), find it far more difficult to publish when they come back to Europe, and that is even after having established connections around the world.

            With respect to TFA, I would just like to add two parallel phenomen

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bengie ( 1121981 )
        We have companies like Intel that spend a ton on R&D and are leaders, then we have some companies that spend money on R&D for patenting business methods, like how to communicate with your team.

      • Re:Quarterly forecast (Score:4, Insightful)

        by houstonbofh ( 602064 ) on Friday January 09, 2015 @05:16PM (#48778057)
        But they are spending in on older and more established researchers, (sure bets) which will eventually retire. Then what? If all the young guys go elsewhere for jobs, in 15 years there will be no one to give the money to.

      • Re:Quarterly forecast (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Friday January 09, 2015 @05:40PM (#48778271)

        So, be ready to see basic research shift to another country in about 15 years.

        Despite the cuts, the US still spends more per capita on R&D than any other country except South Korea, and far more than any other in absolute terms. Source: List of countries by R&D spending [wikipedia.org].

        This really makes me ask: Is there a real shift here that is problematic, or was there a bubble where research increased very rapidly in new fields, where older people didn't have right degrees to get the money, and so it started out with an unusually young group of people? Like in CS at the start of the modern research efforts the people had math and physics degrees. In medicine I'm assuming that wasn't done; they didn't just have veterinarians doing human studies because there weren't enough research doctors. There doesn't seem to be any closely related fields to draw people from either. So I would expect there to be research age bubbles whenever there is a major new round of medical tech.

        A big question I don't know the answer to: What percent of NIH grants go to that sort of degree-restricted field, compared to degree-portable fields like CS? My initial guess is that most of the NIH grants would be degree-restricted and require a medical degree.

        Just having 1983 and 2010 as data points, without anything farther back, seems dubious, even with the other data point in TFA using 1980 instead of `83.

        If you were 36 in 1980 you were born in `44. So it may even just be as simple as, "baby boomer generation had a baby boom, news at 11." If the percent of young researchers had remained level, that would actually mean that researchers were getting younger, because there are a higher percent of older people with medical degrees now.

        • What percent of NIH grants go to that sort of degree-restricted field, compared to degree-portable fields like CS? My initial guess is that most of the NIH grants would be degree-restricted and require a medical degree.

          I don't have hard numbers on this, but my guess would be a lot. Many people getting NIH degrees do not have a medical degree. You have people studying stem cells (biologists and physiologists), people studying drugs (chemists and pharmacologists), people studying public health (epidemiologists), people studying radiation therapy (physicists and engineers), imaging and medical informatics (computer scientists) and so on all drawing funding from the NIH.

          So it may even just be as simple as, "baby boomer generation had a baby boom, news at 11." If the percent of young researchers had remained level, that would actually mean that researchers were getting younger, because there are a higher percent of older people with medical degrees now.

          It might be, but my gut tells me that it isn't. There wa

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mc6809e ( 214243 )

      When the distant future is only next quarter, this kind of thing happens.

      I don't think this is a business issue. This is really more about one especially self centered generation looking out for itself and controlling most of the funding mechanisms.

      If it were a race or ethnicity or religion it would be an obvious example of favoritism.

      But they're the baby boomers so they get a pass, mostly because the people in a position to call out such BS are themselves baby boomers.

      • When the distant future is only next quarter, this kind of thing happens.

        I don't think this is a business issue.

        Never said anything about business. Government does the same thing but worse. They only care about the quarter before the election cycle.

    • Glut of postdocs (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This is really driven by the glut of postdocs. With half a dozen post docs per professorial position, there's no surprise that the average age of the professors is creeping up, and therefore the average age of the PI is creeping up.

  • Research grants are still there (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    You just have to be researching solar panels.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      in China

    • >The number of principal investigators with a leading National Institutes of *Health* grant
      When they figure out how to research global warming they will have funding running out their ears.

  • Bad research (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    When the public funds crappy studies that are designed to keep people employed at a University what do you expect?

  • Hypocrisy. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by msauve ( 701917 ) on Friday January 09, 2015 @04:23PM (#48777643)
    Johns Hopkins has an endowment of about $3,000,000,000 (25th highest in the US). Instead of complaining about the lack of grants, the president of Johns Hopkins should be issuing grants.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Wouldn't that cut into sports team funding?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Perhaps he is writing this paper in order to point out a problem with the field, as part of a broader plan to do exactly what you mention.

      I know researchers who have followed a similar plan before (in Computer Science education), to great success:
      1 - Publish paper pointing out and systematically describing a problem.
      2 - Write a research proposal citing an existing problem with the intention of fixing it.
      3 - Implement intended fix while measuring results. Write paper reporting results.
      4 - Attempt to affect

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by forand ( 530402 )
      Not sure why this is modded so highly or if you were just trying to troll but I will bite. One main reason to not do what you suggest is that the institutions with large endowments provide a lot of financial support to their undergraduate students. They are also able to maintain their infrastructure without increasing costs for their students. Finally while 3 billion is a big number for one University for one year it isn't much if you are planning out several decades. If you assume a very high ROI on their

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by msauve ( 701917 )
        But sucking at the government teat and driving even more deficit spending is OK? I proclaim you King of Rationalization.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by forand ( 530402 )
          I see it was the latter. Regardless, the government should be funding pie in the sky academic research. Currently the push is to fund marketable research. How does that benefit society? We all pay for the development of some clearly marketable product and don't actually retain any of the monetary benefit. If the government funded ONLY pie-in-the-sky research that was vetted by scientists we would be close to where we were in the 1950-1960s where dramatic increases in technology were occurring due to funding

  • postdoc slave labor (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    With 5+ postdocs for every position, .... now if they only had a postdoc in fear mongering maybe they could get some of the $500+ billion in government security spending in the US this year. Who needs medicine or basic research when there is terrists.

    Illogical world - that's what this is.

    • 5 postdocs per research position is great, compared to the number of potential candidates per tenure-track professor position. Getting rid of people at the postdoc stage means they're not stringing them along pretending there's an upward career track in academia, and means they'll be less tempted to take an adjunct job while waiting for the real thing. (And yes, it sucks.)

    • Simple solution. End your proposal to investigate the mating habits of the pygmy snipes of Upper Volta with "we must secure this information vital to national security before the terrorists do."

  • Indicative of General Attitudes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mx+b ( 2078162 ) on Friday January 09, 2015 @04:33PM (#48777721)

    This is really a general issue with our society right now. Young people can't be researchers because they don't get grant money, because no one trusts them to be doing research. Young people can't get jobs because everyone knows that you need at least 10 years experience to get a job -- never mind how you get 10 years of experience these days when no apprenticeships or similar seem to exist anymore. If you're lucky enough to find some job that doesn't make a big deal about experience, then young people aren't allowed enough pay to actually cover their bills and student loans. Instead of supporting educated young people and thinking of them as an investment that will bring us new ideas, new businesses, etc., I feel the elders tend to look at this young generation as lazy entitled bums (which is not true at all, at least not in general).

    I was a young person college instructor for a few years before I quit. Why? Because pay is low as an adjunct, and the number of courses you can count on kept declining because I was continually at the mercy of what the elder teachers decided to do. (If one of them wanted a class, I was bumped and simply lost pay because I was contract and they could do that.). I had excellent ratings from all my students, many telling me personally that I was one of the best professors they had because I put effort into my lectures... and now academics has lost me, probably for good, because of how I was treated. (Not that I mean to be tooting my own horn here, but I hope you understand it as a situation that is probably being repeated across the country right now with people much more intelligent than I). There was a movement to form an adjunct union at one of my schools, and when I spoke up saying that we young professors need to be able to pay bills and given a chance to grow our careers, I was shouted down by elders saying I was entitled and need to go work a full time job and teach on the side if I wanted to be a professor and heaven forbid also be able to pay my monthly bills. I don't recall past professors having to do all that extra work, but it is expected of a young person now. So I took their advice and got a full time job... but left teaching entirely. I don't want to be in an environment like that, and it's not fair to my students to half-ass a class because I'm exhausted from my full time job. Most of those professors were at least in their 60s -- what will universities do in 10 years when they start to retire, and they've driven off of all the people like me that wanted to teach?

    There just doesn't seem to be any opportunity left for a young person, especially in the technical fields. The older people are eeking out what they can until retirement, but at the cost of preventing younger people from having access to jobs where they can build their skills. I fear that in 10 years, our country will be in trouble as the Boomers retire for good and there will be no one left to replace them.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If there wasn't enough work to keep you busy as a teacher, then leaving is exactly what you should have done. Too much labor supply always results in some kind of barrier-to-entry, and you were bumping into it. This, however, is not indicative of the old people doing it wrong, it is just a consequence of economics. If too many young people are driven out of teaching...when the old people start retiring demand will pick up and incentives will be put in place to get more young people to apply (not that thi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mackil ( 668039 )

      The older people are eeking out what they can until retirement, but at the cost of preventing younger people from having access to jobs where they can build their skills. I fear that in 10 years, our country will be in trouble as the Boomers retire for good and there will be no one left to replace them.

      So what you're saying is, we need "Carrousel"?

    • It happens in both directions. There is a "Goldilocks age" of between about 7 to 17 years of experience (varies per industry). If you are young, the profiling is that you don't have enough practical experience; and if you are old, the profiling is that you don't adapt to new technologies and trends.

      When the economy is tight and international competition strong, then companies can pick and choose who they hire, and they prefer the Goldilocks age range.

      The profiling may not be accurate for any given individua

    • The Big Crunch by David Goodstein (from 1994!) etc (Score:5, Informative)

      by Paul Fernhout ( 109597 ) on Friday January 09, 2015 @09:12PM (#48778629) Homepage

      I agree with another comment that what you are experiencing is a consequence of supply relative to demand for academic labor. This reflects a "big crunch" in the words of Dr. David Goodstein from 1994, then vice-provost of Caltech. He testified to Congress about this then too. Essentially, US academia had been growing exponentially since around 1900, but that era of exponential growth stopped in the 1970s, yet the production of PhDs continued at an exponential rate. There are other consequences of this trend, including "creeping credentialism" in all areas of US American life, including the social need for a college degree (or even sometimes masters now) as screening for the most basic entry-level jobs. I feel one answer to the pyramid scheme nature of all this is a "basic income" for all, because then anyoen who wanted to research or teach could live like a present day graduate student, but without the new to kowtow to a specific academic hierarchy just to survive economically (publishing in prestigious journals or getting access to expensive lab equipment might be a different issue...)

      From the Goodstein article:
      https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d... [caltech.edu]
      "The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. The impressive successes of scientific projects during the Second World War had paved the way for the federal government to assume responsibility for the support of basic research. Moreover, much of the rest of the world was still crippled by the after-effects of the war. At the same time, the G.I. Bill of Rights sent a whole generation back to college transforming the United States from a nation of elite higher education to a nation of mass higher education. Before the war, about 8% of Americans went to college, a figure comparable to that in France or England. By now more than half of all Americans receive some sort of post-secondary education. The American academic enterprise grew explosively, especially in science and technology. The expanding academic world in 1950-1970 created posts for the exploding number of new science Ph.D.s, whose research led to the founding of journals, to the acquisition of prizes and awards, and to increases in every other measure of the size and quality of science. At the same time, great American corporations such as AT&T, IBM and others decided they needed to create or expand their central research laboratories to solve technological problems, and also to pursue basic research that would provide ideas for future developments. And the federal government itself established a network of excellent national laboratories that also became the source of jobs and opportunities for aspiring scientists. Even so, that explosive growth was merely a seamless continuation of a hundred years of exponential growth of American science. It seemed to one and all (with the notable exception of Derek da Solla Price) that these happy conditions would go on forever.
      By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service, and service industries like banking and insurance don't support much scientific research. To make matters worse, the country is almost 5 trillion dollars in debt, and scientific research is among the few items of discretionary spending left in the national budget. There is much wringing of hands about impending shortages of trained scientific

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cjb658 ( 1235986 )

      Was this university public or private, profit or nonprofit?

      I went to a private nonprofit university and had some really good adjuncts teaching computer science.

  • Missing data (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jklovanc ( 1603149 ) on Friday January 09, 2015 @04:35PM (#48777731)

    The article talks about the number of principal investigators with a leading National Institutes of Health grant and the average age of principal investigators who get these grants. To me, there is a very important missing data point; the age distribution of principal investigators submitting grant requests. This will show whether or not the age difference is due to the selection process or the age distribution of the grant requests. It is not a given that the age distribution of grant requests is the same year by year.

  • A Word to the young bright kids out there (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Yergle143 ( 848772 ) on Friday January 09, 2015 @04:45PM (#48777803)

    The science job system is broken. The main problem is the federal subsidy of Graduate Student Stipends and Postdoctoral Fellowship salaries from grants. This has led to the situation of an oversupply of bright people in what amount to full time jobs with no benefits with little chance to achieve a rare faculty post. The fix is to stop the subsidy. Institutions need to take on fewer graduate students, pay them more and train them fully. Bolster the Master's degree for the less committed. The Postdoc should be eliminated and replaced with the term Contract Researcher which should be treated like a job. These people should be paid market rates so they can move to whomever is smart enough to get a grant.
    For the kids out there, the current system is a sort of feudal concoction built to maximize imperious egos and is fundamentally exploitive.
    Advise: go into science if you have the desire. Go to a good undergraduate school but if you do not get into one of the best institutions for grad school DO NOT GO.
    It's that bad out there and it's winner take all.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ganv ( 881057 )
      That advice makes sense. It will be very hard to implement though. Research grants pay graduate student stipends. I am not sure it is a subsidy. It is the way research work is paid for. The problem is that the work is done for depressed wages: the typical accomplishments of a grad student are much much larger than you could get with a similar salary offered to a non-degree seeking researcher, same thing for post-docs: they are paid less with the hope that they are preparing for a step up to a perm

    • I got free health insurance and several minor fringe benefits in graduate school. As a postdoc, I get a number of subsidized benefits. The details of the benefits vary from program to program. The thing that early career scientists do not get in my experience is a retirement benefit. Graduate students also do not get social security.

  • Colleges and Universities compete with one another for grant getting researchers as much as they do for enrollment. From my vantage point, college today is big business with posh offerings for both faculty and students while being short on rigor and learning. What the article doesn't say is that there are more grants available now than at any time. The fact that older researchers are getting them may point to the fact that young people simply aren't being trained in grant writing techniques or they are bein

  • From experience (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bjorniac ( 836863 ) on Friday January 09, 2015 @04:52PM (#48777871)

    I just got a fairly substantial grant for a project from an external agency. However, as things stand, on this project I will not be the PI (primary investigator ) - that will be our head of dept. So why do I call it my grant? Because I wrote the proposal, handled all interactions with the funding agency, wrote the budget and arranged everything. My boss simply signed on a dotted line and shook a few hands. A symptom of the endless cycle of postdocs is that you don't have a permanent post until you're quite far on in your career. Therefore your own institution won't let you be the PI. The way around it is that you get a figurehead to be in charge, but you really end up running things.

    This has its advantages and disadvantages. The big advantage is that you tend to have a fairly heavy hitter politically to back you up. He (and it's so often He that it's an insult to my female colleagues to pretend that they are equally represented) should have your back in exchange for drawing a fraction of his salary from your grant. The disadvantages are that you aren't officially PI for the sake of your CV - when you apply for jobs you are asked "Wasn't that X's grant?" when you talk about it - an it doesn't count as much for you. Likewise, they pay is miniscule. One of the things you learn writing a budget is just how much more a senior academic makes than a postdoc. It's depressing both how large the ratio is, and how relatively low the higher figure actually is.

    Of course the whole process is a vicious cycle: You can't be PI, so you don't have PI positions on grants on your CV, so you have a hard time getting a permanent job, and so you can't be a PI... You just spend three of four months working on a proposal, sacrifice your dignity to the gods of the funding agency, ask someone else to take 90% of the credit, and prepare for hard work. On the plus side, you might just get paid enough to live and do what you love.

    • It's amusing that academics complain about the salary differentials in the private sector, then do the same thing in their universities. Change yourself first, then agitate for change in the outside world.

      If you aren't willing to eat your own dog food why are you trying to get someone else to eat it?

    • And, to add to the perverse outcomes, when you move on to another place, the one you just left gets the renewal/continuation grant instead of you and the funding agency wonders why it doesn't produce anything.

  • I know the solution... (Score:3)

    by middlemen ( 765373 ) on Friday January 09, 2015 @05:00PM (#48777913)
    Make all the young researchers play football.
  • Scientists typically do their most creative work before the age of forty. With the average age of grant recipients being over 45, I'd expect to see a drop off in breakthroughs.
  • Back when I was in school (1980's), the NSF recognized this problem and had a special grant ("NSF Young Investigator Award") that would issue small to medium sized grants to faculty under a certain age. I took a quick spin on Google, couldn't tell if the program (or something similar) still exists. Even though the grants weren't large, it enabled junior faculty to get a "Principle Investigator" line on their CV, hopefully enabling future funding.
  • In the physics and engineering proposals I have reviewed, it seems that young researchers still get a significant preference in the distribution of grants. But there is a problem that the proposals from young researchers are often much weaker. It is really hard to write a great grant proposal and new faculty members usually struggle long and hard to get good at it. You have to have great ideas, preliminary work, and a great presentation. And you have to know how to market your ideas to the diverse set o

  • Oh, I don't know. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The NSF budget has gone from $3.2 Billion in 1998 to $7.1 Billion in 2014. A bigger issue might be that demographics of native born Americans shows there are many more 40 somethings than 20 somethings. America is making up this deficet of young people by allowing a lot of immigration. The possibility is that many 1st or 2nd generation immigrants are not taking enough school to become researchers.

  • Perhaps building your career around a model that assumes that someone will simply give you money to do what you want is a foolish choice? Is it unsurprising in a country that is trillions of dollars in debt, that there seems to be less interest in continuing to do that?

    There's however a reasonably successful model close to that, where they give you money to do what THEY want - it's called a JOB. Of course, then there are things like expectations and consequences if you don't, usually stopping the flow of

  • In the 60's all you needed for brain drain was a six pack and a lid. Now get off my lawn!

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