Survey says: too many PhDs
Rebecca Hersher
Nature Medicine 18, 329 (2012) doi:10.1038/nm0312-329b
Published online 06 March 2012
The biomedical workforce is increasingly plagued by job shortages for young
scientists, according to a January report—the first public offering from a
working group created last year by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH
) to study strategies for maintaining a sustainable pool of researchers in
the country.
The report compiled information from an online survey conducted last year
that asked participants to rate the importance of eight workforce issues and
invited them to include comments. Around half of the 219 primary
investigators, institutional administrators and research trainees who
responded identified 'supply and demand' as one of the most pressing
concerns, with issues surrounding the characteristics of PhD and post-
doctoral training programs not far behind.
Now that the problems have been flagged, attention is shifting to finding
potential solutions. Creating more jobs to tackle the demand side of the
equation may be difficult, however. “NIH budgets haven't been growing, and
with government austerity measures now, the prospects for future spending
increases don't seem very encouraging,” notes economist Paula Stephan, who
studies trends in the biomedical workforce at Georgia State University in
Atlanta. Indeed, US President Barack Obama's budget request for fiscal year
2013, released on 13 February, proposed to keep the NIH's budget level at $
30.7 billion.
So, rather than relying on increased funding for the NIH, the working group
is considering suggestions that include reducing the number of training
grants for PhD students and post-doctoral fellows, creating more programs
for biomedical master's degrees rather than full-blown doctorates and
providing preparation for jobs outside tenure-track academic research,
according to the panel's co-chair Sally Rockey, who is also the NIH's deputy
director for extramural research. But, at this point, the panel is still
gathering further data on training and career options. “We would like to
know as much information as possible about the potential careers open to
physician-scientists and PhDs,” Rockey says.
Researchers, government officials and analysts all agree: something needs to
change if the biomedical workforce is to remain a viable and attractive
career option. “We need to rethink the approach we take to research in
order to create a better balance between training and productivity,” says
Howard Garrison, deputy executive director for policy at the Federation of
American Societies for Experimental Biology, a Washington, DC–based
advocacy group. “Everyone is looking forward to seeing the NIH
recommendations.” The working group is scheduled to present its full set of
proposals to the NIH director's advisory committee in June.
