America’s Broken Brain Trust

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.

I haven’t done much teaching lately. Budget cuts have pretty much killed off adjunct positions and I have not sought a full-time position. So my exposure to undergraduates over the last two years has been limited. When I held such positions, students would often ask my advice about the realities of a career in science.

When I had such encounters I answered honestly that being a successful scientist was about as practical as trying to become a movie star or professional athlete. Further, there was no striking it rich for the few that “made it.” Income prospects for even the most successful in the field were moderate at best. At worst, they were consigning themselves to a life of poverty.

Last night I went to a “State of the Union” party where supporters of Obama got together to discuss the issues of the day and watch Obama’s address to the nation together. Although most of us were 40+ with a smattering of 30-somethings, there was one student from Stamford who happened to be a biology major.

We watched the State of the Union and amid the encouragement that Obama offered would be scientists and engineers - I had to advise caution to this student. Not surprisingly, he agreed with me. He felt that mid the grim statistics, the post-doctoral logjam, and literally piss-poor pay for the “successful” that you would have to be crazy to pursue a career in science.

Unfortunately for Obama and for the country as a whole, all the grant money in the world for education is pointless unless there are well paying jobs at the end of the educational pipeline.

But more important, what this type of encounter show us is that there truly are young people interested in pursuing science and engineering as career paths. The difficulty is that these careers are just not viable from a practical standpoint. So they turn to other fields such as law, finance, banking and sales. One has to wonder just how many people can be sustained in these fields.

It is this narrowing of viable income producing fields that has our country on the ropes. There are precious few places for people to go in order to earn a viable living. Everyone is flooding into the few niches that will actually produce the “green.” This is exacerbated by the fact that there are no more safety nets. The widening income gap has created a society of rich vs. poor. The poor are truly becoming POOR. The best and the brightest of our youth have a choice: they can choose to pursue their dreams and end up poor - or set them aside and end up rich. More and more, they are choosing money over dreams. From a practical standpoint - this is the right choice for the individual - but the wrong one for society. However, will society treat these people any better for doing the right thing? No, it won’t.

A few years ago a headline appeared in the journal The Scientist:  On the cover there was a picture of a 30-something “homeless” man holding up a handwritten sign on corrugated cardboard which read something along these lines:

• I have a Ph.D.
• 10 publications
• 6 review articles
• 7 years post-doctoral training
• Will work for food!

The fact that such a photo actually appeared on the cover of such a well-read journal should be evidence enough that the system of training and compensating scientists is in serious trouble.  The cover coincided roughly with the time that I had decided to throw in my lab coat for a career in sales.  Having taken a critical look around me about twelve months earlier I saw nothing but a future of indentured servitude and poverty.  It was time to move on.  The cover article was a grim confirmation that I had done the right thing.

If anyone had lingering doubts about the seriousness of the situation - opening the cover and actually reading the article should have caused most of the optimists arguments to R.I.P.  Inside the journal there were a few scientists who made light of the situation and sighted single-minded “dedication” as a sure path to success.  They even likened the dedication required to a career in the arts…think acting, music, dance, and the fine arts.

I have some notion of the daunting hurdles that those in the arts face.  My late mother was a professional singer and radio interviewer.  I also studied music seriously in college and as a result, have several friends from college who tried to break into careers in acting and music.  The odds against success are simply staggering in any of the arts.  If the criteria for success is a full-time job, success in the arts is far more elusive than success in the sciences and engineering.  But if the goal is to make a livable salary that actually pays the bills, puts the kids through school and provides for retirement, the similarities become obvious.  In fact, I would submit that it is the full-time work requirement for the scientist that creates far greater financial risk to the scientist than to the artist.

How can that be true?  I admit the statement is counterintuitive.  But artists have one strong advantage.  They have the ability to develop complementary “day jobs.”  A couple of musicians that I know actually created ancillary careers for themselves.  They were able to build something to fall back on if things weren’t working out for them in the arts.  The fact that a career in the arts is generally defined as part-time until there is significant success makes these back-up careers possible.  But for the scientist that is not the case.  There is no part-time option for the aspiring scientist and no way for the fledgling scientist to supplement the pathetic income they are given for 60-80 hours of grinding labor that is expected of them weekly.

The financial risk for the scientist arises from the following factors:

• The length of training required.
• The amount of compensation offered.
• The number of working hours required.

In biological and biomedical fields, you are looking easily at a 6-9 year period of pre-doctoral training.  Few make it out in less than seven years.  The average is about eight years.  This is full time training with no ancillary employment for supplemental income allowed.  Since you are looking a 60-80 hour week the potential- so unless you are robbing banks, the time constraint alone places a heavy constraint on creating additional income.

Throughout the nineties and until about 2002, many new graduates were counting on leapfrogging into a nice industry job.  Most have been living in grinding poverty for about eight years so they are pretty hungry for a good paycheck.  Since that time, we’ve had a major glut of doctorates coming out of the pipeline in the midst of a contracting economy for biotech.  The dreaded “Post-Doc” has become the new holding pen for those caught in the Ph.D. logjam.  Initially, the post-doc was meant to be a short extension of the Ph.D. training period and was not intended to extend beyond 2-3 years.  This “extension” now seems to meander on indefinitely.  Most graduates do at least two post-docs, many do three before they can find a “real job.” Each position lasts a minimum of two years and some can stretch on for six years.  The pay is generally under $40k with the hours are similar to that of the Ph.D. candidate.   Most graduates are looking at 6-10 years in the holding pen.

For who lost track - you are looking at a 12-19 year “training” period where supplemental compensation is largely impossible.   Small wonder that I have dubbed this prolonged training period  -  “the endless indenture.” Most graduates  are realistically looking at 15 years in the pipeline.  This means that most  Ph.D.’s are sliding into their first “real job”  when they are approaching or in middle age.  38-42 years of age is a good benchmark.

Common sense dictates that the jobs had damn well better be there or these highly trained, very educated people are off a financial cliff.  They have undergone a grueling process of specialized training all of which is full-full time such that lateral movement to another field is well nigh impossible.  In the process they have also lost 15 years of valuable time in building a nest egg for a home, a college education for their children and a retirement fund.  The training process eliminates the flexibility that is badly needed in an economy where the sands shift rapidly under everyone’s feet.  The price tag for extending education into mid-life is too high for most individuals to bear.

Bottom line - its all well and good to say the world is “flat” and that this is a necessary “adjustment.”  But don’t sit and complain (like Thomas Friedman does) about the lack of interest in the sciences on the part of Americans.  We have enough critical mass of interest and ability to produce the next generation of scientist.  Our graduate institutions are world renowned - so I would submit that education is not the issue.  The issue is one of risk and compensation.  The risk has to be mitigated and the compensation increased to a level commensurate with that of other professionals.   The training period also needs to be reduced.  If we don’t do these things,  the best and brightest will continue to flock to the 2-year MBA or the 3-year J.D. and shun the Ph.D.