Getting rich in graduate school
The New York Times has an interesting article in today’s paper by Mary Jenkins covering a new federal program set to provide substantial raises in funding for a minority of graduate students in the sciences. The Pell-Mell Grants, a joint venture of the Federal Government, Pell Grant program, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is projected to cost 8 billion dollars over the next twenty years. Needless to say, with that amount of money on the table, you’re going to see some strong opinions put forward about the program’s merit. The basic gist of the NYT’s article is that (not surprisingly) graduate students love it; established faculty members, not so much.
The really striking thing about the program is the sheer amount of money it throws at a select number of students—a projected 8,000 in 2014, with the number of awards gradually increasing over the next six years. It funds graduate students in natural science and engineering disciplines at a level up to $60,000 annually for three years, with applications renewable up to four times. Why the dramatic increase in funding over such a protracted period? From the article:
Critics complain that allowing graduate students to secure major funding for up to 12 years of predoctoral work will encourage complacency and clog up universities with ‘lifers’. Others see it is a necessary step if the US wishes to remain competitive with emerging Asian countries. Dr. Ron Sekubus, chair of the department of public policy at George Washington University, notes that without the funding, American universities would be forced to admit an ever-increasing number of international students in order to buffer against the loss of American students to more lucrative fields such as medicine and law. When international students complete their degrees, they are almost invariably unable to find legal work in the US, leading them to return to their home countries. The long-run outcome of this perpetual ‘brain drain’, Sekubus suggests, is that the US will fall in scientific productivity relative to rapidly-developing countries such as India and China.
When I ask him whether the government couldn’t just solve this problem overnight by allowing more trained foreign scientists to stay in the US once they’ve completed their doctorate, Sekubus’ responds aggressively. “Immigration is not the solution,” he says. “Increasing funding for American citizens via merit-based and non merit-based programs is the solution.”
The reasoning seems pretty straightforward. But as always, the story isn’t as clear cut as the above quote suggests. Here’s another relevant bit from the article:
Tovaz Shikarti, a program officer at the NIH, points out that high levels of predoctoral funding in the sciences make sense within the current cultural context:
“When we sat down to look at it, we couldn’t really understand why the top 5% American graduate students are getting paid less than the bottom 1% of American faculty. American culture is built on the promise of potential; it’s a foregone conclusion that this generation of top students is going to do some pretty remarkable things in a few years. The Pell-Mell grant program is our way of equalizing the situation by honoring the American tradition. You could think of this as an NBA draft for scientists.”
Others don’t see it that way. John Jacobson, a professor of history at The College of Wooster, complains. “I certainly don’t object to students making a livable wage. I was a graduate student once too. But when a first year physics graduate student at Wisconsin makes more than I do as an Associate Professor of Historical Arts at Wooster, I don’t think that’s right. My wife and I are giving serious thought to respecializing in materials science just so we can get a piece of the pie. It’s almost like the government’s goal is to get rid of the humanities and social sciences altogether.”
One of the caveats to the program is that the awards are highly selective–more so than existing NSF and NIH fellowships. There’s a three-stage selection process. The first two are fairly standard: First, would-be Pell-Mell grantees send in an application similar to the one required for the current NSF predoctoral fellowships. In fact, applicants to the NSF program are automatically entered into the Pell-Mell competition if they fill in several new fields on the NSF forms. Second, successful first-stage applicants are subjected to a still more rigorous screening, including close scrutiny of applicants’ transcripts, letters of recommendation, and current institution.
But it’s the final stage that sets the Pell-Mell grants apart from other programs. Successful applicants must not only demonstrate their academic prowess, but must also pass muster in the eyes of a newly-created Human Excellence Review Board (HERB). One of the novel requirements implemented by HERB is that applicants must designate a non-academic hobby as their “special skill”. The goal of this requirement is to encourage applications from well-rounded students with broad interests, instead of automatons who spend all day in the lab living and breathing one narrow discipline.
“What you list as your special skill is flexible,” says Tovaz Shikarti. “There’s no strict criterion our applicants have to live up to.” He notes that when the NIH conducted a limited test run with graduate students at Darthmouth College and the University of Pennsylvania, it received applications from people with skills like lizard hunting, karaoke, and cheese making. “There was even one trapeze swinger,” he says.
If this all sounds a little bit cock-eyed, don’t worry, the government is on top of that too.
When prompted as to whether the Pell-Mell program might not produce bad press for the NIH and NSF at a time when American scientists are complaining about flatlining funding, administrators demur. “We had a serious discussion about that at HERB,” says Aashish Patel, a board member. “Some people wanted to kill the program, to stub it out. But it’s not like we’re sitting around smoking up when we come up with these ideas. They’re serious policy proposals.”
April 29th, 2007 at 8:28 am
I’m having trouble finding the article. The link is broken and nothing is showing up for Mary Jenkins, April 1, 2007. What was the title? Thanks.