America’s Broken Brain Trust

A few days ago, I had the opportunity to to read a small publication that I had been carrying around with me for weeks - perhaps even months. It was a small paper published by Harvard Business Review, by Paul Krugman with the compelling title “A Country Is Not a Company.” the paper points to the major differences running a large company as a CEO and the stewardship required to guide a national economy. Krugman was pointing out why CEO’s think that they are uniquely qualified to shape public policy during an economic crisis, and why the correlation between country and company is not as linear as they assume.

In the subsequent pages Krugman goes on to describe a national economy as a “closed system” while individual companies are more “open systems.” By analogy he described the garbage collection system in his township. The town had decided that it didn’t want its own land fill. Although it collected the garbage, the ultimate disposal was outside the town. Thus, garbage dumps and land fills are “open systems” with respect to the township. But garbage disposal in the United States as a whole - is a closed system. The trash has to go somewhere and moving it from place to place doesn’t change the total volume of landfill that we use as a country on iota.

I see a similar analogy in how the training of scientists was managed in our country over the past 20 years or so. I came up in the era where everyone was anticipating the great scientist and Ph.D. shortage. Articles appeared willy-nilly in the journals Science and Nature. The Scientist wrote of dire predictions if the problem wasn’t addressed. Qualified students were encouraged to enter the sciences and seek higher degrees because surely as surely as the sun rises, there would be a crying need for new investigators and there would be plenty of work in industry if Academe didn’t suit us.

The early 1990s saw a bolstering of the NIH and NSF budgets - particularly once Clinton was elected. This allowed established investigators to expand their labs and add more graduate students and post-docs to their budgets. This in turn led to a greater demand for student’s and an increased number of visas being granted to those who wished to study in the US. Investigators and universities saw no problem in this. After all each investigator’s laboratory represented and “open system” into which graduate students and postdocs flowed in and out. The same held for each university. If there wasn’t room in one lab for a student once they graduated, there was a whole country full of labs, both industrial and academic, that would surely employ the student or post-doc. In the meantime no one was factoring in the impact of all this foreign labor on the so-called scientist “shortage.”

Most investigators continued to see science as a field of infinite possibilities and projects. The trouble is that there are just so many labs and so many companies - the number of student’s and post-docs that can be absorbed into the entire system as fully employed scientists is quite finite. The Krugman analogy here would be the parking lot at the train station. Most train stations in the Tristate area have parking issues. Prof. Krugman found that he could get a space when he arrived early enough. But he secured his spot at the expense of others who would arrive later and find no spot. The system was “closed” and getting what you needed meant someone else had to go without.

For scientists and engineers this means that finite funds prevent infinite avenues of investigation from expanding indefinitely. At some point - saturation is reached and the spill-over (no matter how marvelously qualified) is left in the lurch. At best they are left in a perpetual no-mans land of indentured servitude as post-docs for years and years.

Now we see the darker side. As foreign-born scientists supplanted Americans, remuneration became more and more problematic. This created a vicious circle in which Americans fled science. But the glut continued unabated. Now it has come to the point where even foreign nationals are disgusted with the long hours and poor pay. They are looking towards “home” for a better life. So eventually we will truly have a shortage - a shortage that was fueled by a monster glut and rampant exploitation.

So the question remains….in the present state of affairs - how will America ever be able to compete again? It takes years to train a scientist or engineer. It’s nothing like the 2-year M.B.A. or a 3-year J.D. We ought to congratulate Academe though….they managed to create a future shortage out of a glut all while providing a top-notch education for our competition in the global market. Good going guys.

© 2010 - Ruthmarie G. Hicks - http://Americasbrokenbraintrust.com - All rights reserved.

The protests from college students across the country hit a very personal chord with me. Having been through the “academic mill” I sympathize deeply with these student’s who are attempting to do. They see education as their ticket to a middle class - or even upper class life. However, I had to wonder when I saw the protests, will the education that they are protesting for truly result in a higher standard of living for these young people?

My concerns are based on personal experience. As someone who holds a Ph.D. that I hardly use, the question above is far from moot. Ask anyone who has a degree is science, math, computer programming, engineering and the like. Many underwent extensive educations which were taken with the idea this would pay off in the form of increased remuneration for years to come. When I was an undergraduate, I had a job in a graduate school working in the registrar/bursar’s office. The specialized in engineering and computer science. The students flooded in each semester. The classes were held from 6 PM to 10 PM Monday through Thursday. Some students were on campus every night - others were around twice a week. This went on for years. Even in the mid to late 80s, it was expensive and certainly intellectually demanding and very time consuming. It’s been about 21 years since I worked in that institution. But these days I often wonder about the fate of the students who came through those doors. Are they still employed? Have they been outsourced? Did someone with an H1-B replace them with a lower salary? Given what happened to the monetary value of my own Ph.D. , these questions aren’t idle musings.

Many academics and business people a like now say that such education should be a lifetime effort. That fields of work will come and go - but that re-education into new fields every decade or so will be the norm. That this is not necessarily a bad thing. Really? To these notions I say BULL$%#$!

Why? The time and expense makes such an on-going educational imperative is wildly impractical and of dubious financial benefit. Degrees are expensive and time consuming undertakings. Even back in the 80s and 90s the cost was far from trivial. What made the time and expense worthwhile was the belief that once completed, the graduate really “had something” worthwhile - that would pay off for years to come.

Now, entire career paths and the courses of study required for admission are being created and commoditized with alarming speed. The hapless student chasing these degrees often finds their “cheese moved” before they even come out of the education pipeline. Going in - the student sees this as a viable career with high demand - this creates a flood of people chasing the same dollars. The flood creates a glut and industry adds salt to the wound by importing “cheap labor” from abroad. This scenario appears to be repeated over and over again throughout many industries and fields of study.

But how practical is this for the average worker? The answer is that it isn’t. We are getting to the point where a Master’s degree might get about six years of milage out said degree. Then the cycle has to restart when “retraining” becomes necessary. How many degrees are we going to have to take, in order to stay viable? Does it even make any sense to take theses degrees? I don’t know, crunching the numbers, it doesn’t seem to be very practical. For anyone taking a Ph.D. the stakes couldn’t be higher. The pipeline to graduation is so long that a student entering a Ph.D. program is more likely that not to be seeing a very different employment market when they emerge.

My point is this - education is valuable - however, if there are no jobs going with these degrees - people are simply going to truncate their educations. Resulting in a further dumbing down of our society. The brain trust we are counting on is being eaten alive by academia and industry alike. No one has clean hands on this one. Academia certainly aided and abetted the situation with respect to biomedical science. Breaking the American brain trust ? It’s already broken.