Where Are the Grad Students?
In An Economic Downturn, We Expect Their Numbers to Rise—But So Far, They Haven’t
SOURCE: flickr.com/limonada
Science and engineering will continue to play a key role in growing our economy and developing clean energy technologies. The government needs to enable more students to pursue schooling that contributes to our green growth.
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It’s a charming nugget of pop wisdom: At times of recession, young people say to hell with the job market and go back to school to improve their long-term career prospects. And sure enough, reports have been flying in lately from schools like UCLA, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Texas suggesting that business, law, and graduate school applications are on the rise. Conventional wisdom appears to be convening—or is it?
Science, Cultured
Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney surveys the interactions between science, politics, and culture from Los Angeles, California. He is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.” (Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity)
The truth is that during the current recession, some indicators don’t quite fit this predictable narrative. For instance, the Educational Testing Service, which administers the GRE (Graduate Record Examination), is actually estimating that fewer students (rather than more) will take the test by the close of this year. Similarly, the Council of Graduate Schools informed me this week that based upon an informal survey of its member institutions, there’s no apparent trend in the number of student applications. Some schools were up some were down, some were flat. “We have not actually seen the pattern we would have predicted,” explained council president Debra Stewart, “either in applications, acceptances, or enrollments.”
It’s worth pausing to think about the implications of this puzzle, because today’s economic downturn comes as the United States is scrambling to remake its energy system and deploy the clean technologies necessary avert the worst effects of climate change—a project for which we’ll need plenty of well-educated scientists, engineers, and other technical workers. Whether we’ll have them, though, remains to be seen. Certainly we can’t assume that the recession, like a bolt from the blue, will be the source of their delivery.
It’s enough to trouble anyone who thinks this country needs to be producing more scientists: The free market may well have other plans.
Typically, the growth of graduate students is a “lagging indicator,” following upon a recession rather than spiking right at its beginning. In 2002, for instance, graduate student enrollments went up sharply just after the last recession ended. However, the signs this time around suggest we’re not following that trend, and the possible reasons for that departure aren’t particularly pleasing to contemplate.
Stewart, of the Council of Graduate Schools, can think of three possibilities. Perhaps, she says, the credit crunch has hit the ability of students to obtain educational loans. Perhaps public universities, struggling due to the state budget implosions occurring across the country, are cutting back on teaching assistantships (which typically hold a graduate student’s body and soul together). Or perhaps young people fear this recession is so bad that they’d better cling to whatever job they currently have, lest there not be another. It’s all speculation, Stewart cautions—her organization plans to keep monitoring the numbers as more data emerges next year. But certainly it’s enough to trouble anyone who thinks this country needs to be producing more scientists: The free market may well have other plans.
Indeed, I couldn’t help thinking about the latest graduate student numbers in the context of another finding: In 2007, the last year for which figures are currently available, the total number of science and engineering PhDs produced in this country rose for the fifth year in a row. Since 2002, it has grown from 24,608 to 31,801, nearly a 30 percent increase. This might seem a hopeful development, but it’s important to note that it’s another “free market” result: According to Stewart, it largely reflects the fact that in the late 1990s, international student enrollment in U.S. universities boomed, and now many of those people are getting their degrees. And what the market gives, the market taketh away. If people are afraid to leap to grad school during the current severe recession, maybe a decade from now we’ll see a noticeable decline in PhDs.
The point is, if we really want to improve our scientific competitiveness and ensure that we can develop low-emissions energy technologies we can then share with less-developed nations, we need a concerted government effort. We need to fully fund the America Competes Act. We need the modern equivalent of the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which greatly spurred higher ed enrollments in science and engineering. We can’t just wait for it to magically happen on its own, or assume that it will emerge as a kind of silver lining from the current downturn.
My coblogger and scientific lifeline to pop culture, Sheril Kirshenbaum, likes to use a Simpsons clip to explain the meaning of higher education. Bart has just cut the ponytail off of the person seated in front of him in a movie theater, and is waving it around behind his head. “Look at me, I’m a grad student,” he says. “I’m thirty years old and I made 600 dollars last year.”
“Bart,” Marge scolds him. “Don’t make fun of grad students. They just made a terrible life choice.”
Or have they? It may well be that individual graduate students out there, or potential graduate students, are making very rational life choices in the context of the broader economic environment that they perceive. If we want that to change, or for them to move in a particular direction, we have to take steps as a society to make it happen.
Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”
Comments on this article
The first item to cut in a family budget during a recession is probably education?
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But, there is more…
Every year, maybe for 10 years, over 100,000 visas are offered to foreign Hi-Tech scientists and engineers, and the entire quota is taken in one or two days by the Hi-Tech companies that need them and sponsor them after selecting them.
These are very well qualified people that work hard and make good citizens and have a good work ethic but…
1. It seems as if American Hi-Tech companies have given up on American graduates that are not as well qualified, don’t have a good work ethic, change jobs too often and expect higher salaries.
Instead of pushing state universities to improve the technical standards and teaching quality, they have given up altogether.
2. In the last 10 years these people took over a million of the top jobs in High Tech companies, are there REALLY a million top jobs in High Tech companies?
3. Admission to the top univesities in India require a set of tests. Those below some number are not allowed to go to school there but they are readily accepted by MIT and other Hi-Tech Universities. If that does not prove our Tech edcuation is second rate, what will it take?
Many of the rejects that are accepted here are given scholarships, sorry, I have no numbers on that.
Do look into it, the problem is more serious anyone could imagine.
For example, a few years ago The University of California refused to list all the staff paid over $100,000 and had to be sued to make the list public.
The number was well over 100 and the maximum was over $200,000. More than the Governor is paid.
The U. of Calif., keeps a work station in Tahiti where many are rewarded with an assignment there for a couple of weeks or so.
They also, this is incredible, hired a recently retired Chief of Police with a bonus of over $2 Million and then was given a new high position security job. What they did was not only outrageous, it was forbidden and illegal by the existing school rules. The President said something like “I didn’t know!” And they a prestigious Law School.
Best if you cut some salaries before expanding the grad schools that may be partial playgrounds.
December 18th, 2008 at 12:59 am—————–
One would expect U OF Calif., would be leading the field in the use of the Internet for teaching. Not true, they probably see this a threat to ther cushy jobs.
The University of Phonix has a full curriculum that any qualified student can take and gradute in many fields,
more needs to be done on that.
Grad students are getting smart. Perhaps they are tired to pay unreasonable sums of money for competencies no-one is willing to pay for.
The US, as any developed country, may strategically depend on technology as a way of life. But getting companies to pay for what their success depends is an all different story, especially in a world where incompetent management is rewarded with juicy billions of tax-dollars.
Corporate America is taking disastrous management decisions and crony human resources decisions. They are private concerns, they have to right to have whoever they want (the incompetent nephew, if they choose to) take the most imbecil management decisions. That is a right of private entreprise that used to match the responsibility of share-holders: In america, as elsewhere, you used to be free to choose your nephew for CEO and you used to be responsible for the losses he might incurr too. It used to be your money to loose.
No longer in the brave new world of W’s crony capitalism. Share-holders are still free not to choose the most competent people for the job, they are still free to dismiss grad school as a curiosity, and they are still free to attribute more importance to «who you know» than to «what you know». And they are very free to so because someone else is picking up the tab.
Logically, they don’t care about corporate performance anymore.. as their neck is safe.. so why hire post-grads?
For «some of the time» corporate america fooled «some of the people» into heavy debt to get MBAs, masters’ and PhDs, but as it became evident that no job someone can possibly be hired on its competencies alone can ever pay for the heavy debt that results from a post-graduate degree, prospective students are holding back.
We, the 20s and 30s generation are slow to learn, but we have finnally understood that if ‘family relationships’ and golf club ‘references’ are the key to better jobs and better paying jobs, then there is no point in post-graduation.. is there?
December 18th, 2008 at 7:23 amnice piece. My point made otherwise, however, that we draw our scientific inspirations too much from CGI (namely Bart Simpson) instead of real-life heroes and heroines who utilize scientific advances as their superhero weapons for good. I hope that the trend you are advancing works and perhaps there will indeed be an entertainment market for science achievements in a way that future generations get much more biologic roles to model!
December 18th, 2008 at 3:07 pmIncrease the range of your vision to see more of the context. This isn’t the first year of a recession but the end of the 9th year of a shallow depression from which STEM job markets have never recovered.
Students and their families who may have had resources to postpone entry to job markets in 2000 — and choose a grad degree with its presumed higher job security — no longer have that option. It’s out of reach (as is a bachelor’s or even associate’s or specialized continuing training for many Americans). The shift to more grad enrollments (and professional certifications, for that matter) happens because near grads learn that the job markets have sagged, but they believe it’s probably very temporary — 1-5 years at most — and they have the resources to stay in the academic nest a little longer. The marginal value of more education is perceived to be less than the expected benefits, and the resources are available. That’s not the case this time.
The job markets have been sagging for a long time. The sag in STEM job markets goes back nearly 40 years, now, to the end of the “space race” to some extent. Evidence of problems back to 1990 is clear, with the lay-offs of STEM workers from defense industries (enough for articles in the late 1990s to note that many remained unemployed for the duration) and the near-simultaneous advent of the H-1B program, which has since been expanded several times (explicitly, and by addition of “exemptions”, and by de facto loosening of regulations, rolling over unused allotments to the next year and such). We now have significant numbers of capable US STEM workers who have been underemployed and others completely unemployed for 7-8 years.
Foreign enrollments continue to rise into the several hundreds of thousands, as the desire for cheap labor grows in academia just as in the real world, post-docs stretch on while contingent employment of all kinds has expanded (post-docs, adjuncts, OPS). At the same time, total compensation to executives in academe and the real world soar far beyond the pay of the production worker pay of students and most of their parents, along with increases in tuition and the increases and multiplication of mandatory and “optional” fees.
Most endowments have taken a hit this time around, though the headline that caught my eye when I was still half-asleep this morning was that Harvard’s was doing very well. In the previous round endowments were essentially unfazed.
December 22nd, 2008 at 5:17 pmI’m a recent PhD graduate (Aug’ 2008). I’m unemployed. I am valued at negative $75,000 as a result of my school loans. For an increasing number of PhD graduates, there is NO job at the end of the PhD tunnel, unless you opt for the path of the underpaid, undervalued limbo lifestyle of a postdoc. After seeing what my predecessors have suffered on that path (~10 years of postdocing, and STILL no tenure-track job?), I chose NOT to follow in their weary footsteps. I have found that I’m not only overqualified for many positions that I would be happy to hold, but I am also considered by recruiters to be very narrowly-qualified (despite my multidisciplinary interests and skills) for anything at all except being a lab monkey and working for $30,000 a year. Had I to do it over again, I would not choose a PhD, at least not a general science degree. I would have gone to medical or law school, or perhaps a PhD in public health (a very rapidly growing field). At least after training in these programs, your skill set is clearly defined, and you can be confident that you will have a job post-graduation.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:41 pm