Does America Really “NEED” More Scientists and Engineers? Responding to Slate
4 Jun
According to David Plotz at Slate, “America Needs More Scientists and Engineers.”
America needs Thomas Edisons and Craig Venters, but it really needs a lot more good scientists, more competent scientists, even more mediocre scientists.
I’m not sure I agree. At least, not in the traditional sense. You see, we’re graduating more scientists and engineers than ever before, postdocs are getting longer, and there are fewer and fewer tenure track jobs available. What we’re not doing is enabling many PhD’s to succeed outside of the traditional academic system.
Over the next month, Slate plans to offer:
new methods for how to teach science and math. We’ll focus on how to keep girls interested in science…And, most importantly, we’ll collect your best ideas for how to improve American science education.
I understand these are good intentions. In fact, I have been thinking and writing about the same topics for a long time. Here are two ways to have a significant impact without adding “more” scientists and engineers to the pipeline..
- Arm scientists with communication skills. You want a scientific workforce that can really make a difference? Prepare more scientists for work in public policy, journalism, and media. Don’t label these as an “alternative” careers, but viable, exciting, and rewarding ways to contribute where it matters.
- So you want to keep girls focused in science? It’s not a numbers problem until graduate school – plenty of young women are engaged in science and engineering as undergraduates. It’s a retention problem! Keeping women in the academic pipeline means fundamentally changing academia to be more accommodating to us.
Of course, that’s only the beginning. Chris Mooney and I have a lot more to say on this in Unscientific America.
In this age where a large segment of the population can arbitrarily decide to deny science it finds inconvenient, we certainly can’t stop producing more scientists and engineers.
But your first bullet point is the most critical – rather than develop just scientists who ply their wares in labs, in the field, and in scientific journals that only their colleagues can read, scientists must be able to communicate with the public.
After all, the anti-science lobbyists focus entirely on trying to sway public opinion by going on TV and radio talk shows, writing Op-Eds in targeted magazines and newspapers, and otherwise talking to the public directly. They know that the public at large isn’t going to be going to scientific lectures or buying a subscription to 100 science journals. Given that much (most/all) of what the lobbyists put out there is false or misleading(often intentionally so), scientists need to be out there as well, speaking directly to the public and providing the accurate information.
BTW, great book. I read it when it first came out. I highly recommend it.
Good points. I have been involved with research on this issue more from the education standpoint rather than workforce. One other thing I have heard, is that STEM jobs in, for example, the technology sector are more in need of applied technical training, rather than STEM PhDs. Some of this technical training is not even offered at ITT Tech or other trade schools. So some of the need is for better pipelines to prepare people for the work that is available at the rates that competing superpower economies are able to do with their populations.
IMHO, the biggest way to help is the simplest – MORE MONEY. Quadruple the budgets of the NIH and NSF. More money means more overhead money, meaning more profit to universities for hiring more faculty, meaning better job prospects for current pre-faculty stage folks and more advances.
Plus, with massive increases in funding, we can stop using PhDs as the workhorses of labs, replacing them with technicians, post-docs, and assorted skilled folks who may not want the headaches of running a full lab.
Honestly, I cannot envision any conversation on the state of US science without mentioning 8% grant approval rates.
I don’t think it is a matter that we need more scientists and engineers, but rather that we need more jobs for the scientists and engineers who we have.
I am a systematic biologist, I do fish taxonomy. We do not know how many species of creatures inhabit the planet, because there are too few people like me; people who study, know, and care about a group of organisms.
Some time back I received a grant request for review. It was an application for support to an NSF program tasked to retrain ecologists, etc, as systematic biologists. It was a well written grant, involving people I knew and respected. I though maybe I should highly recommend it, but I dithered around and finally called the NSF Program Director. I told him, that after much soul searching, I was returning the grant request without review, because I did not support the program he was directing. The program was designed to produce more systematic biologists when there was a shortage of appropriate jobs, and very capable systematic biologists were having to do something else to put bread on the table.