Pernicious Progress

Well, everybunny is waiting for the real IPCC WG1 report to come out, and Eli has to amuse himself with a number of hobbies, one of which is bedeviling a certain poor Thoreau about the structure of STEM education in the United States.

It is, indeed, a bundle of we want this, so we ask for that that, which is, surprise, not what we wanted.

Let Eli start with a simple observation:  Since the time that the US stole the secrets of the Awkwright thread making machinery the US has always imported scientific and technical talent.  It's a tradition.  The American way as it were.

To beat another drum, Thoreau and his friends constantly bemoan the sorry situation with hiring of STEM graduates.  They can't understand why the various funding agencies are tearing their hair out about getting more kids into the pipeline when they and their friends are going crazy finding a job.

From Eli's point of view, and the Rabett has been viewing the farce for many a year now, since the last good year for hiring, 1968, or was it 69, the answer is structural.  US STEM education is based on a pyramidal system, with a small number of research universities at the top that feed new faculty to wanna be research universities, non-research habituated teaching institutions and community colleges.  Of course, there are also industry, Wall Street, national labs and natural migration out of the pipeline elsewhere, including rock bands.  Everyone has to run harder to keep up.  It's classic capitalism, grow or die.  In cartoons, this is the Mickey Mouse version of the sorcerer's apprentice.




The research universities each have major and expensive infrastructure needed to support modern research and the accounting that the federal government demands of how grant money is spent.  Each faculty member is expected to bring in grants and contracts to support the infrastructure, it ain't cheap, which requires that the faculty member have a large research group composed of graduate students and post docs to do the work on several grants.  Groups of more than ten are common, and some exceed twenty.  Each person is expensive to support.  Graduate students with tuition, fees and stipends are of the order of $50-75K per year, post docs are probably on the level of $75-100K per year when you consider salary, fringe benefits and overhead.  That is without equipment, materials and supplies.   Maybe it includes travel.

As bad as this is for the physical sciences, it is much worse in medical schools because of the fall in NIH support.  Medical schools have been habituated to hiring increasing numbers of faculty on a partially funded basis with the faculty expected to bring in the rest of their support.  As grants become harder to get these faculty are increasingly stressed, the medical schools are less able to keep feeding new bodies into their maws because overhead is falling and not generating enough set up money and the number of jobless trainees in holding positions (permadocs) is growing by leaps and bounds.  (see Drug Monkey for discussions).

US colleges are not graduating enough STEM majors to fill the research university groups.  Therefore the research university departments recruit a large number of international students.  Anybunny can see this by looking at the number of international students in research groups and departments.  The number of graduates from these groups including the international students overwhelms the job market and today, with decreasing support from grants, has begun to overwhelm the ability of the R1 schools to support them.

While some of these students return home after earning their doctorates, many international students  stay in the US producing an oversupply matched against STEM position openings. However, this pleases the educational nomenklatura as it allows them to have a large group and maintain a jet set life.

It pleases Deans at all levels , because they can low ball hires (an Asst. Prof. position is a giant step to a green card) and it pleases industry, because it keeps costs down. And, of course, once the international students become immigrants they compete for the other types of jobs.  While international students have contributed mightily to US science, thee numbers staying have increased steadily since 1980 and  (see immigration debate), an obvious consequence is that currently their larger number are overwhelming the STEM job market.

Without international students there are not enough US citizens to fill the tree and that is what NSF/NIH are trying to work on. The second order effects are more subtile. The large number of international students allows R1 professors (the nomenklatura) to maintain large groups. Of course to have a large group, you need a lot of support, which starves those lower down the tree. And then, of course, there is the third order effect, since for an international student a faculty position in any tertiary institution is the ticket to immigrant status, and they have a hard time getting a visa which allows them to work in industry/national labs, so there has been over the last 50 years an imbalance in faculty hiring with the faculty of many not R1 places being predominantly (maybe too strong, but you better bring data) from former international students.

But wait, there is more.  and this is an increasing problem in many other countries (UK for example), universities pursue international students at the undergraduate level because they pay full tuition and fees as well as housing and meals. This is similar to what has happened in the US in state universities where out of state students have an advantage in admissions. It can be traced back to a fall in government support for the universities. So yes, there is an advantage to international students in admissions at the undergraduate level. Second, departments need majors to stay departments, and there are not enough US students majoring in physics, so there are Departments of Physics and Chemistry, Departments of Physical Sciences, Departments of Natural Sciences and so on.  So, yes, one purpose of recruiting international undergrads is to maintain faculty slots and departments.

Third, those from elsewhere are depressing the standard of living of US citizens in STEM fields because while there are more than enough jobs with a smaller number of international students staying on, the large number who wish to overwhelms the number of openings.

And finally, the major over-representation of new immigrants on university faculties brings a role model issue, that, some, not all US students can’t see themselves as being in the mold of the faculty and thus are alienated from STEM departments and majors.

It's a bitch all around.