CHAPTER 10
Is Our Scientists Learning?
IN LATE 2005, THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES ISSUED ONE OF THE MOST influential studies in its history. Entitled Rising Above the Gathering Storm, the report sounded the alarm: The United States, it warned, wasn’t producing enough scientists and engineers to keep us competitive for the long haul. Or as the study’s authors put it: “The scientific and technological building blocks critical to our economic leadership are eroding at a time when many other nations are gathering strength.” Looking worriedly at the emerging science superpowers China and India in particular, the NAS committee, comprising top scientists, university presidents, and industry leaders, called for a large increase in the “number and proportion” of U.S. students who earn science and engineering degrees. The committee also recommended dramatically bulking up K-12 science education.
The American scientific community has long ranked educational change as a top priority, but perhaps never before had it so effectively paired that message with one about the future of the U.S. economy. In a bipartisan way, Congress lurched into action, delivering the America COMPETES Act of 2007 (short for “America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science”), designed to reinvest in research and science education at all levels. Since then, there have been ongoing struggles to ensure that COMPETES gains adequate funding, an important push and one that continued through the economic stimulus battle of early 2009, which resulted in large and very welcome increases for the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, and other science-related agencies.
We take no issue with the scientific community’s focus on shoring up our economic competitiveness or stoking the engines of innovation. Producing a more scientifically literate workforce can only benefit this country, and elementary and high school science education does need vast improvement. Yet it will be apparent that the Gathering Storm- inspired reforms largely neglect the kinds of problems discussed in this book. After all, America doesn’t merely need non-scientists to better understand the details of science, or the nature of the scientific method; we need them to see why science matters to their lives and their careers, whether they’re working in politics, the media, the corporate world, or some other sector. And we don’t merely need the United States to produce more scientists: We need it to produce scientists who have a better understanding of other disciplines, and who are trained in (and value) outreach to the rest of society.
It’s certainly wise to keep our eyes on the rearview mirror, and the competitors—most centrally, China—that appear to be coming up fast. But let’s not forget that the U.S. science establishment remains the envy of the world. We’re producing more Ph.D.s in science and engineering each year. We spend more than any other nation in the biomedical research arena, and in total government-funded research and development. We employ the most scientists, are the chief source of valuable new patents, and publish vastly more peer-reviewed research than all of our competitors (and nearly four times as much as our nearest rival, Japan). None of these facts, however, have helped science garner more serious media attention, or better treatment in Hollywood, or a fairer shake in churches. None of them help bridge the science-society gap.
That’s why we must broaden our conception of science education and even, perhaps, of “competitiveness.” In truth, there may be as much wrong with the high-level education of scientists as there is with the high school science education of the public. Simply producing more scientists won’t solve our cultural problems—or at least, not if we produce them in the same way that we have always done.
 
The Gathering Storm reforms seek to repair the nation’s so-called science-education pipeline, which sucks in young students and spits them out at the other end as minted scientists. Yet a survey of this human assembly train shows that those reforms are, at best, only a partial salve for its many miles of corrosion and poor engineering.
The science pipeline’s gaping maw is primary school, where far too many students never grasp what science actually means as they zoom in on equations and formulas. They memorize quite a lot of science (Periodic Table of the Elements!), but do their studies resonate for them? Do they see how science will transform the future world they will inhabit? Not according to the National Academy of Sciences, whose 2005 study America’s Lab Report laments: “Neither . . . scientific literacy—nor an appreciation for how science has shaped the society and culture is being cultivated during the high school years.” Too many high school students instead wade through chemistry and physics with their heads down, uninspired by their teachers, never seeing that science’s most profound implications reach far beyond the facts they must recite and the chore that is homework.
The media understand this. When the producers of ABC’s The Wonder Years wanted to cast Kevin Arnold’s science teacher, Mr. Cantwell, for instance, they called on Ben Stein. Stein’s own words, explaining why he got the part, say it all:
I am not an actor. I got called by ABC to play the same kind of person I have always been—a big, monotoned nerd, exactly what I was in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and what I am in real life when I teach at Pepperdine or UCLA or give expert testimony in securities law cases. I was drafted to play the kids’ slightly scary, extremely pessimistic science teacher, Mr. Cantwell, whose slide shows and lectures have often paralleled what was going on in Kevin’s life.
Such depictions make it plain why scientific luminaries aren’t today’s popular role models. For young people who have never met a real scientist, Hannah Montana’s Miley Cyrus probably seems a lot more relevant to their lives, and she gets to go on tour.
So, our high schools turn a lot of smart people off science—smart people who instead go on to study law, finance, or business. Yet many students do pursue scientific degrees at the university level, where they embark on a rigorous curriculum that sets them on course to develop a highly rarefied set of skills. They brave the introductory courses deliberately engineered to weed out those lacking the “drive,” and persevere through hours of lab work. Many complete honors theses, publish their own research, and come to know the Krebs cycle better than most graduate students.
By the time they obtain their bachelor’s degrees, however, many aspiring scientists will already have noticed something troubling. As they toil away, their friends are finding employment in fields like law, sales, and marketing, with high salaries in big cities. In contrast, their certificate can begin to feel much like its title: B.S.
Here in the pipeline is where leakage, or attrition, starts to occur. According to a 2007 study by the Urban Institute, within two years of graduation, 20 percent of students who earn bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering have remained in school, but no longer find themselves in a science or engineering field. Another 45 percent have gone out into the world and found jobs, but they’re not science- or engineering-related. Who are these lost scientists? Possibly the students who aren’t sure they can carry on when the future promises more long hours, teaching and research responsibilities, and an annual stipend as low as $12,000-$35,000 in graduate school.
More attrition occurs between the receipt of a graduate degree in science and the decision to enter a Ph.D. program: 7 percent of students who obtain a master’s degree in a scientific field subsequently move into a different academic area, and 31 percent move into the job market in a non-science or non-engineering position. And given that the median time spent getting a Ph.D. is 7.9 years and the median age at the time of doctorate receipt in a science and engineering field is 32.7 years, who can blame them? For those supporting young families, caring for ailing parents, and carrying heavy student loans, pressing on can become a heavy financial burden.
And yet despite such realities, American universities are currently awarding a record number of science and engineering Ph.D.s. From 2002 to 2007, the number of doctorates in these fields grew from 24,608 to 31,801, representing five straight years of increases. These young experts leave their institutions with a firm grasp of experimental protocols and a devotion to statistical rigor. They are fluent in the passive-voiced language of the science world, one that generally lacks metaphors and adjectives and is wholly distinct from the writing style of those trained in the humanities. They are now fully minted scientists , and what they have been through to get there—intellectual rewards notwithstanding—has left them worlds apart from those friends who long since departed to work on Wall Street, in Hollywood, on Capitol Hill.
But wait: It’s not actually over yet. Those scientists who earn Ph.D.s and are intent on a professorship face a sometimes multiyear probationary period. There are some 48,000 such “postdocs,” or post-doctoral fellows, spread across the United States, according to the National Postdoctoral Association. They spend an average of 1.9 years in this very challenging role, which entails the further immersion in research in the interest of someday earning a true faculty job. Fifty-eight percent of postdocs are between thirty and thirty-five years old—right around the age when many people begin families—and 69 percent report being married, with 34 percent having children. Yet average salary is low, in the neighborhood of $40,000 per year; work hours are long, and there is tremendous pressure to publish—or perish, as the saying goes. And then the faculty search begins.
It, too, is brutal. Between 1972 and 2003, the percentage of recent Ph.D.s attaining full-time faculty posts declined dramatically, from 74 to 44 percent—even as, of course, postdoc numbers rose. According to pre-recession figures, the chance of a Ph.D. recipient under age thirty-five winning a tenure-track job has tumbled to only 7 percent. In other words, we’re producing more Ph.D. science graduates than ever, yet the traditional academic trajectory affords fewer and fewer job opportunities.
So who remains at the end of pipeline, gets the academic science jobs, runs the labs, and teaches the courses? Those scientists who make it will be the smartest, most motivated, and best equipped, and will probably have benefited from a bit of luck along the way. They will also have developed perspectives and worldviews based on life experiences, sacrifices, and decisions that are vastly distinct from those of the public at large.
 
The tribulations of the science pipeline explain why today’s youngest scientists—who hold in their hands our future, for innovation and for the place of science in American society—might not look fondly on talk of dramatically ramping up the production of U.S. researchers. These young minds are at a time in their careers when Einstein was having his miracle year, and Darwin was aboard the Beagle. Yet today they see a dwindling number of academic jobs, and vast numbers of their fellow aspiring scientists in postdoc holding patterns. To quote a painfully eloquent recent blog commenter:
I’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.
This commentator’s frustration underscores a troubling reality: Even as university opportunities are dwindling, the excess in the non-academic job market for scientists and engineers once again appears to lie on the supply side. Every year, according to the Urban Institute, we produce more than three times as many four-year college science and engineering graduates as there are corresponding science and engineering job openings.
Nor does American graduate science education adequately prepare students for scientific jobs outside of the academy—or at least, not if it only provides technical scientific expertise. Bill Bates, vice-president for governmental affairs at the Council on Competitiveness, explains that the United States can probably never hope to produce as many total engineers and scientists as India and China, given their vastly larger populations. Our advantage, then, will lie in producing scientists with “soft skills,” such as in writing, speaking, and task management, which are what companies really want.
And yet instead of realigning scientist education to produce more such talents, we’re sending today’s young researchers into situations of ridiculous competition for traditional positions and grants, far beyond what’s healthy to ensure excellence. Our current model does not allow many of our nation’s most gifted and dedicated minds to fulfill their potential to become tomorrow’s leaders. It trains vast numbers of them in scientific and technical skills, but all too seldom ensures that they gain adequate interdisciplinary, communication, writing, and speaking experience—abilities that not only would help them in the non-academic science job market, but would also make them far better ambassadors, for science, to the rest of society.
 
So isn’t the solution obvious? On the one hand, we need to relieve pressure on the scientific pipeline, create more opportunities for younger scientists, liberate postdocs from holding patterns, and train newly minted scientists to better compete in an uncertain job market. On the other hand, we need to encourage the scientific community to engage in more outreach and produce scientists who are more interdisciplinary and savvy about politics, culture, and the media.
These goals ought to be one and the same. Why not change the paradigm and arm graduate-level science students with the skills to communicate the value of what science does and to get into better touch with our culture—while pointing out in passing that having more diverse skills can only help them navigate today’s job market, and may even be the real key to preserving U.S. competitiveness?
Meanwhile, let’s encourage public policy makers, leaders of the scientific community, and philanthropists who care about the role of science in our society to create a new range of nonprofit, public-interest fellowships and job positions whose express purpose is to connect science with other sectors of society.
How does all of this square with oft-expressed concerns about the United States falling behind in science? If anything, it’s more deeply germane to these concerns than the “more is better” clichés that we often hear. Particularly if we, as a nation, are going to be training even more scientists than in the past, then we’ve also got to create more interdisciplinary opportunities for them and nurture broader sets of abilities among them. Mostly, this will make them better, more productive scientific workers; but some of these young interdisciplinary scientists should be tapped as “ambassadors” to our broader society. It won’t take that many: As Carl Sagan’s example shows, when it comes to the media, a single individual can have a dramatic impact. So if we’re increasing our scientist ranks anyway, surely there’s ample room for training a cadre of communication and outreach experts, and creating subsequent public-interest-oriented jobs for them.
Young scientists already have the minds—and can easily develop the skills—that will allow them to succeed at bridging the science-society gap. The problem is that they rarely get the training. Yes, they receive intensive instruction in their respective fields—but do they learn to tell stories about what they do through narrative, and thereby appeal to the interests of audiences much broader than their group of lab mates? Can they speak in sound bites when necessary? Do they understand the different needs of politicians, journalists, and entertainers for scientific information, and are they prepared to convey their knowledge in that appropriate form?
To create such Renaissance scientists, we must fundamentally change the way we think and talk about science education—and that means rethinking scientist education as much as education for high school students or college undergraduates.
One crucial aspect of the endeavor will be making sure that the current trend toward university-level interdisciplinary education not only continues, but comes to encompass far more real risk-taking than it currently does. Graduate programs have been touting their “interdisciplinarity” for decades, and yet in truth, these bridge-building attempts still meet with considerable entrenched resistance. Merely straddling the line between physics and chemistry can pose risks for a student contemplating a career in academia—the traditionalist physicists won’t get it on their side, and the traditionalist chemists won’t on theirs, either—so just imagine how science communication and media initiatives are likely to fare in most university science departments. To truly set change in motion, we need a dramatic increase in funding for initiatives like the National Science Foundation’s IGERT (Integrative Graduate and Education and Research Traineeship) program, a decade-old interdisciplinary endeavor that is clearly ready to be taken to the next level.
If American science truly fears for its competitiveness in the global marketplace, it ought to be expanding and reinventing itself to incorporate new opportunities for young American scientists. The scientist who can write, or design a Web site, or understand patent law, or speak Spanish will be better equipped to face the competition than a scientist who only knows his or her discipline—not to mention a better science communicator. And in the context of the science-education pipeline, these alternative valves will alleviate pressure by opening new pathways for pent-up scientific talent to filter out into society.
 
Pace the National Academy of Sciences, then, more is not necessarily better. We wouldn’t go so far as to suggest—as some have—that producing more scientists is unethical in light of current job prospects; it’s too difficult to try to time what the market needs. Rather, we’ll take a stand on this point: What America requires isn’t necessarily more total scientists—or at least, not in isolation. Rather, we need more well-rounded scientists.
So as we embark on a course of training more U.S. scientists, let’s also seek to ensure that they learn more about politics and the media, that they develop communication skills, and that some proportion of them will leave their universities ready to serve as culture-crossers who engage in outreach to the rest of our society. And let’s create jobs, positions, and incentives that will encourage them to do so—stimulating not only scientific innovation, but scientific outreach as well.
The fact is, we don’t merely need a smarter population that can regurgitate what’s in the textbooks. We need one that cares about science, has it on the radar, sees it as salient and relevant. And we don’t simply need a bigger scientific workforce: We need a more cultured one, capable of bridging the divides that have led to science’s declining influence.