Scientists Try Chicken Little Again

I get very tired of these clarion calls for the production of more scientists and engineers:

The proposed actions include creating scholarships to attract 10,000 top students a year to careers in teaching math and science, and 30,000 scholarships for college-level study of science, math and engineering; expanding the nation's investment in basic research by 10 percent a year for seven years; and making broadband access available nationwide at low cost.

"America must act now to preserve its strategic and economic security," the panel's chairman, Norman R. Augustine, retired chairman of Lockheed Martin, said in a statement. "The building blocks of our economic leadership are wearing away. The challenges that America faces are immense."

The underlying goal, the panel said, is to create high-quality jobs by developing new industries and new sources of energy based on the bright ideas of scientists and engineers.

History repeats itself again (and again and again and again). In the early 90's, Leon Lederman made exactly these same points, calling for the creation of more scientists and engineers, callously ignoring the inability of the economy to absorb these new highly-trained workers and the inevitable disillusionment that settles in when the new highly-trained workers end up selling shoes or driving taxis instead. Before Lederman, there was a host of others saying exactly the same thing, in the 80's, the 70's, the 60's, the 50's, etc.

Each university researcher requires a steady stream of new recruits, and when the stream seems to turn into a rivulet, that's when the call goes out. There are more students than ever, but if the pool of researchers is growing even faster, then each researcher gets proportionately fewer students. It looks like a drought of students, but it isn't so!

Our big problems don't have to do with too few scientists, they have to do instead because we are governed by idiots. Science education could surely help in the idiot department, of course, but reflexively increasing the number of students is the wrong approach.

Cruel as Lederman's call was in the early 90's, Lederman himself was no fool: he clearly realized the paradox the scientific community found itself in then - and now - and wrestled with it as best as he could. Are today's leaders as well-informed? (from an interview with Lederman, in 1996):

We are told that science and technology are important for the future of the nation's competitiveness. The real managers of the economy think otherwise, however, as the great corporations (including AT&T and IBM) have either scaled back or shut down entirely their central laboratories. The economy has gradually shifted from manufacturing to service industries such as insurance and banking, which do not support very much scientific research. ... Finally, the academic expansion that transformed us from a nation of elite higher education to a nation of mass higher education is clearly over forever, with more than half of our kids already going on past high school.

... In this country we have what I call the paradox of the scientific elites and scientific illiterates. The Golden Age of science produced genuine excellence in American science. As a result, we have without any question the very finest scientists and the very finest science in the world today. On the other hand, the U.S. has the most poorly educated and scientifically illiterate public in the Western World by any rational measure....

I think this paradox springs from the nature of science education in the U.S., which is not a pipeline as portrayed in the earlier metaphor, but really a kind of mining-and-sorting operation. We, the existing scientists, search through the humans that come our way, looking for "diamonds in the rough" that can be cut, polished and cleaned into glittering gems just like us. But we have no interest at all in all of the rest of them, who we throw on the "slag heap." The mining-and-sorting model of science education explains, for example, why there are so few women and minorities in science: we white male scientists who are doing the mining and sorting do not realize that they will look just like us once they are cut and polished and cleaned. It also accounts for the exponential growth, because exponential growth is what occurs when the number of scientists we turn out is proportional to the number of scientists there are for recognizing new ones. Above all, it accounts for the paradox of scientific illiterates and scientific elites, which occurs because the entire system of education is designed to produce exactly that result, i.e., we pick out the people who are going to be the scientists and ignore everybody else.

... Every professor in a research university turns out something on the order of 15 graduate PhDs in the course of a career. You really cannot get very far away from that number 15. If you have a career spanning 30 years and have an active research group, somebody is bound to graduate every couple of years, making about 15. Everyone of those 15 students, given their inherited aspirations, would like to become a research professor just like their professor and turn out 15 more PhDs. You must realize that in a "steady state" world of science the only reproductive responsibility of a research professor is to turn out one professor for the next generation. Therefore, so you can see the engine of exponential growth right there.

Whenever the leaders of American science seriously try to come to grips with this problem, which does not happen very often, they come up with some variant on what I call the "Harold Brown" solution. ... It was around 1970, when the "Crunch" started, and I had noticed that things had changed in some way. I began to do some research to figure out what had changed and why, when I read Price's book and realized what had really happened: We had saturated the exponential expansion, changing the world in an irreversible way. I wrote a memo which I passed around among my colleagues at Caltech explaining the situation and saying that we at Caltech ought to set a dramatic example for everybody else by reducing radically the number of graduate students we were training for PhDs....

Harold Brown's more creative solution was that everyone should be required to get a PhD in physics before starting any serious career, just as classical Latin and Greek had once been required for the British Civil Service. That would at least put the problem off until the middle of the next century, when we would have more PhDs in physics than we have people....

...Graduate students in science are a source of cheap labor. ... By their second year, graduate students are doing demanding and technically difficult work at salaries lower than those of entry-level clerical help. On the one hand, we really need them if we are to keep up the machinery of the research university. On the other hand, from the point of view of the students, it is a kind of genteel poverty: They are, after all, young enough to survive on beer and pizza. Nor is it an embarrassing kind of poverty, since they have not lapsed into poverty as a result of a failure, but are preparing for a better life in the future. Therefore, it is respectable poverty, for nobody holds it against them and it is not such a terrible time.

We have been told in the past that the increase in efficiency due to automation and so on would lead people to have more leisure time, that the work week would reduce from 40 hours to 30 hours, and so on. We all know that that has not happened. Instead there are permanently unemployed people, and others who work harder than ever. Perhaps, though, this is part of the solution to the problem. If everybody had to get a PhD and do a post-doc or two before starting any other career, while it would not reduce the work week from 40 hours to 30 hours, it might reduce the work life from 40 years to 30 years, which might have the same effect.

It is true that, during this period of being a graduate student and then a post-doc, one is unencumbered and free to do research without all of the responsibilities that come during later portions of one's career. As a matter of fact, it may be much more extreme than that. There are some people who think that scientists today are much like professional athletes: They get all of their real science done before the age of 35, after which they go into some other line of work. Or if they stay in science, they really become science managers, fund-raisers whose activity allows younger people to continue doing research. In this view, the difference between the scientists and the professional athletes is that the athletes understand that, once they get to be 35, they no longer belong on the playing field. The scientists have not figured that one out yet.

It is certainly true that having these young people come up through the ranks of PhDs and post-docs advances science; there is no question at all that this is a good thing. They also acquire "deep knowledge," which is to say that they come to know a particular subject better than anybody else in the world. Maybe the experience of having understood something so deeply is by itself a good thing, regardless of what it is that they have understood. The real question is whether all of this training in how to do research adds any value to these people that they would not have had were they not trained specifically in how to do research. We have all heard stories of physics PhDs who do wonderfully well on Wall Street. No doubt there are such people, but I wonder whether their success comes because they were trained to do research in physics, or because they were very smart in the first place.

The real "Crunch" comes when you have to advise students regarding their professional direction. Recently, I was on another visiting committee at a university that I thought should not be giving out PhDs in physics. I was, in fact, prepared to tell them that they should do away with their PhD program. I talked to their graduate students, asking them if they were aware of the job market, particularly for people from a university like theirs. They said, "Of course we are aware of it; we understand acutely well how difficult things are for people out there." I asked them if they were therefore resentful and wanted to get out of this business. They said, "No, we love our professors, and think we are getting a great education. We would rather get our PhDs and take our chances." Well, if that is their attitude, I am certainly not going to be the one to tell them that they should not be getting any more education.