Reshaping the Graduate Education of Scientists and Engineers

Scientists and engineers with PhD and other advanced degrees play a central and growing role in American industrial and commercial life. The traditional process of graduate education to the doctoral level, organized around an intensive research experience, has served as a world model for the advanced training of scientists and engineers.

Graduate education is basic to the achievement of national goals in two ways. First, our universities are responsible for producing the teachers and researchers of the future--the independent investigators who will lay the groundwork for the paradigms and products of tomorrow and who will educate later generations of teachers and researchers. Second, graduate education contributes directly to the broader national goals of technological, economic, and cultural development. We increasingly depend on people with advanced scientific and technological knowledge in our collective efforts in developing new technologies and industries, reducing environmental pollution, combating disease and hunger, developing new sources of energy, and maintaining the competitiveness of industry. Our graduate schools of science and engineering are therefore important not only as sources of future leaders in science and engineering, but also as an indispensable underpinning of national strength and prosperity--sustaining the creativity and intellectual vigor needed to address a growing range of social and economic concerns.

As we approach the 21st century, our graduate schools face challenges both within and outside the academic setting. Many disciplines of science and engineering are undergoing rapid and pervasive change, and many aspects of modern life are increasingly dependent on emerging technologies and the scientific frameworks from which they evolve. New national-security challenges, expanded economic competition, urgent public-health needs, and a growing global awareness of environmental deterioration bring new opportunities for varied careers in science and engineering. We expect our graduate scientists and engineers to continue the expansion of fundamental knowledge and to make that knowledge useful in the world. A world of work that has become more interdisciplinary, collaborative, and global requires that we produce young people who are adaptable and flexible, as well as technically proficient.

Greater versatility can be promoted on two levels. On the academic level, students should be discouraged from overspecializing. Those planning research careers should be grounded in the broad fundamentals of their fields and be familiar with several subfields. Such breadth might be much harder to gain after graduation.

On the level of career skills, there is value in experiences that supply skills desired by both academic and nonacademic employers, especially the ability to communicate complex ideas to nonspecialists and the ability to work well in teams. Off-campus internships in industry or government can lead to additional skills and exposure to authentic job situations.

To foster versatility, government and other agents of financial assistance for graduate students should adjust their support mechanisms to include new education/training grants to institutions and departments.

Most federal support for graduate students is currently provided through research assistantships. Research assistantships are included as parts of grants that are competitively awarded to individual faculty members to support their research. The grant funds are then used to provide stipends to the students in those faculty members' laboratories. Such assistantships offer educational benefit in the form of research skills to the students who work on the faculty members' projects. The needs of funded projects rather than the students' educational needs, however, have tended to be paramount in guiding the students' work.

We recommend an increased emphasis on education/training grants, an adaptation of the training grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health and other agencies. These grants would be awarded competitively to institutions and departments. Evaluation criteria would include a proposer's plan to improve the versatility of students, both through curricular innovation and through more effective faculty mentoring to acquaint students with the full range of future employment options.

While urging that the nation's overall support for PhD students be maintained as a sound investment in our future, we recognize that a heightened emphasis on education/training grants could reduce the funds available for research assistantships.

In implementing changes to promote versatility, care must be taken not to compromise other important objectives.

Modifying graduate programs to enhance versatility will require care and imagination. Change should be compatible with

• Maintaining local initiative. We envision change that comes from local institutional initiatives and that shows considerable local variation. Each program should build on its own strengths and interests.

• Maintaining excellence in research. A continuing goal of graduate education is the preparation of students who will dedicate themselves to careers in research. The reforms suggested here are not intended to alter that goal. Instead, we envision complementary steps designed to reflect all employment opportunities--in both the research and the nonresearch sectors. Nor do we espouse what some call "vocationalism"--setting each student on a particular career track and "training" him or her in a narrow specialty. We need instead an educational system that prepares students for a central feature of contemporary life: continuous change.

• Controlling time to degree. The time to degree and, more important, the time to first employment are steadily lengthening and are already too long. We believe that it is possible to foster versatility without increasing the time that graduate students spend on campus. Although long times to degree are often decried, universities have not generally made the disciplined effort needed to shorten them. One important step toward shortening the time to degree is to ensure that educational needs of students remain paramount. The primary objective of graduate education is the education of students. The value of such activities as working as highly specialized research assistants on faculty research projects and as teaching assistants should be judged according to the extent to which they contribute to a student's education. A student's progress should be the responsibility of a department rather than of a single faculty member; a small supervisory group (including the student's adviser) should determine when enough work has been accomplished for the PhD degree. Each institution is urged to set its own standards for time to degree and to enforce them.

• Attracting women and minority-group members. It is essential to attract a fair share of the most talented students to each discipline in science and engineering, irrespective of their sex or ethnic backgrounds. Where it appears that the number of women and minority-group members is low in particular fields, deliberate steps should be taken to deal with real and perceived barriers to full participation.

General Recommendation 2: Provide Better Information and Guidance

Graduate scientists and engineers and their advisers should receive more up-to-date and accurate information to help them make informed decisions about professional careers; broad electronic access to such information should be provided through a concerted nationwide effort.

The burden of learning about realistic career options should not be left to students themselves. We recommend the establishment of a national database of information on employment options and trends. This information, intended for use by both students and their advisers, should include, by field, data on career tracks, graduate programs (including financial aid), time to degree, and placement rates. Departments should track information on their students--not only those who go into universities and 4-year colleges, but those who go into industry, government, junior and precollege education, etc.

The rapid development of the Internet makes it possible to adhere to two important principles in regard to the database: the information can retain a more decentralized, "grass-roots" character than information assembled in central compendiums, and up-to-date information would be readily available to the ultimate consumers--doctoral students, graduates, and faculty advisers.

The National Science Foundation should coordinate federal participation in the database. However, it is preferable to design and manage the database within the academic community itself so that it has accurate, timely, and credible information.

Academic departments should provide the information referred to above to prospective and current students in a timely manner and should also provide career advice to graduate students. Students should have access to information on the full range of employment possibilities.

Advice for students should be improved by a systematic tracking of the employment path of each department's graduates and by use of the national database recommended above.

In the past, when students expected to become professors, graduate school was usually seen as a step on a simple career ladder. We are concerned that this concept is still held in some places. Departments should help students to regard their progress through graduate school as a journey with branches that require decisions. One decision point is the application stage, when students need more information on job placement, salaries, and unemployment rates in various disciplines to decide whether and where to enter graduate school.

Students should be encouraged to consider three alternative pathways at the point when they have met their qualifying requirements.

At the beginning of the research phase, departmental advisers should help students to choose among three distinct options: first, to stop with a master's degree, in light of their aspirations and projected employment demand; second, to proceed toward a PhD and a position in research; or third, for a student interested in working in nontraditional fields, to design a dissertation that meets high standards for originality but requires less time than would preparation for a career in academic research. We believe that the first option is typically undervalued and the third option often neglected.

The National Science Foundation should continue to improve the coverage, timeliness, and clarity of analysis of the data on the education and employment of scientists and engineers in order to support better national decision-making about human resources in science and technology.

In preparing this report, we discovered a lack of the timely and relevant information that students, advisers, and policy-makers should have. The National Science Foundation should seek to improve timeliness, increase detail on nonacademic employment (which now occupies most new scientists and engineers), and support extramural research on actual career patterns in science and engineering.

General Recommendation 3: Devise a National Human-Resource Policy for Advanced Scientists and Engineers

A national discussion group--including representatives of governments, universities, industries, and professional organizations--should deliberately examine the goals, policies, conditions, and unresolved issues of graduate-level human resources.

In preparing our last report, Science, Technology, and the Federal Government (1993), we found that no coherent national policy guides the education of advanced scientists and engineers, even though the nation depends heavily on them. At present, there is neither the conceptual clarity nor the factual basis needed to support a coherent policy discussion. We are concerned that many prevailing views are obsolete or are quickly becoming so.

As a starting point, the agenda for national discussion might include national goals and policy objectives, the relationship between the process of graduate education and employment trends, and difficult current issues (such as time to degree and sources of new students) on which opinions diverge.

1. However, this situation does not mean that graduate scientists and engineers can no longer do research. In terms of primary work activity, the share of positions in applied research and development is increasing. It is just that the share of people going into management of research and teaching is declining.