Must Everyone in the Lab Have a Ph.D?
March 21st, 2009Posted by: admin
A proposal for a Research for America found in Olivia Judson’s blog this week essentially asks this question, just not in so many words. The idea is to have a corp of undergraduate degree holders available to serve a year or two in labs, before going on to graduate study or other endeavors. For me this gets to a number of related assumptions behind science and engineering graduate education in the U.S. that need some exploring.
The Profzi Scheme This cartoon from PHD Comics describes the pyramid scheme behind graduate education. There are two few faculty positions for all of the cheap laborers (graduate students) to rise up in this system. Combine this with the prevailing myth that asexual reproduction is the only post-degree model for graduate education and you have an odd combination – an underproduction of scientists and engineers, but an overproduction of Ph.Ds. If bachelors degree holders can function in a lab, then the need for bunches of Ph.D. students is in question.
Only Ph.D. Holders Count as Scientists Engineers don’t have to have a Ph.D. to be considered engineers. Why must this be true for scientists? Are all private sector scientists Ph.D. holders? Some commenters on the Research for America proposal have suggested that they need intensive training for people in their labs, training bachelors degree holders don’t have. While that may be true in very specialized circumstances, I find it difficult to believe that someone with a bachelors level education in a scientific field couldn’t be qualified to do scientific work. Certainly the numbers game played when Rising Above the Gathering Storm came out did not assume that all of the scientists and engineers it counted in other countries had Ph.Ds. Why should it be true here? If we focus on the requirements of the job, I think any gap in human resources could be effectively addressed by scientific masters degree programs, better integration of research into undergraduate education, and post-degree lab experience like Research for America.
Outputs and Outcomes Aren’t the Same Usually the debates over competitiveness focus on outputs – number of degrees, number enrolled, number of patents, etc. If we value the number of Ph.D. holders we have, rather than a more qualitative notion of an environment that encourages high-class research and development, then that’s where the attention goes. To focus on policies that try and increase outputs, without consideration of the influence on outcomes, then we get a situation where only one path to preparing a scientist or engineer is accepted. I think engineering (and technology fields in general) avoid this problem much more than scientists, in part because of an overemphasis on a long-term credentialling process. While it may be more difficult these days to have garage scientists than garage engineers (who would be a scientific equivalent to a Sergey Brin or Steve Wozniak today?), I think part of that is societal rather than an issue of resources.
Given the opportunity costs of graduate education, I think it’s a more rational path for many students to take a year or two in a lab to boost their B.S. experience and move on. Certainly enough people are doing this with just the degree. I hope we can encourage more alternatives for gaining scientific experience.
March 22nd, 2009 at 11:23 am
David, thank you for opening up the dialogue on how science is currently conducted and how it might be improved.
When I worked at OSTP, I remember university lobbyists saying we needed to bring in more H1B folks to work or we could not do world-class science. My question was “does that make “our” science world-class or we are just rich enough to import talent?” It also seemed a wee bit demeaning to native talent- which these same universities were in charge of producing.
In another case, on of my colleagues at a state university reported that a new administrator said that educating folks from that state was “holding the university back” from becoming a great research university. Perhaps doing research of the international and competitive kind, and teaching graduates of US high schools are two activities that are in tension, or actually a conflict of interest.
March 22nd, 2009 at 2:18 pm
I too am fascinated by this topic. I’m set to defend my thesis and hopefully earn my engineering doctorate in a few months.
1. The idea to increase attention to Masters programs makes some sense but the total lack of standardization may be a problem. Some universities and departments expect publications in the primary literature from Masters students’ research, and others just have 9-month coursework only programs with no thesis at all. Given that Masters programs tend to be cash cows for universities, I would expect some resistance to raising the standards too high.
2. I wonder about differences between the US and European or Japanese doctoral education. My understanding is that in some European countries and in Japan, the Ph.D. degree is more or less fixed in time, so that everyone is assured of graduating, but that you can receive a grade. The whole thing seems more in the mode of traditional bachelors and masters education. The professors are grading and evaluating you. Your graduation means you have reached some minimum standard of scientific or research competence. The mere fact that professors still see fit to grade their students’ dissertations implies that they believe they retain substantial expertise beyond what is indicated by their students’ attainment of the Ph.D. degree.
But in the US the emphasis seems to be that earning a Ph.D. is a signal that you have become the professional equal or colleague of your professors, capable of doing independent research. Professors don’t grade your dissertation because how can they grade a nugget of totally new scholarly knowledge? A dissertation, in theory, is such a novel contribution to human knowledge that its impact may be impossible to evaluate for some time.
In practice, I am sure I am grossly exaggerating the differences. But I think the difference in the two systems is at least somewhat real. I can see strengths and weaknesses for either side, of course, but one thing that strikes me is that the US system seems more prone to the “profzi” scheme. When the archetype/ideal of a Ph.D. education does not include creating an intellectual equal of yourself, perhaps it is easier to sidestep the PI-as-apotheosis-of-science line of thinking.
3. I also agree with David’s comments about engineering Ph.D.s relative to science Ph.D.s. An engineering education better provides students with industrially or commercially relevant skills than most science education programs. So either as a cause or effect, you get a lot more engineers going to corporate jobs, and engineers who go work at companies are less likely to be viewed as professional “failures”, as can sometimes happen in the sciences. In a way, the difference is related to my point in #2. Are science/engineering Ph.D.s traineeships or educations? If a Ph.D. represents a *traineeship*, it is presumably training by the PI to his trainees, and the goal of the training is to be able to functionally operate as a PI. If you don’t become a PI you could be a failure. But if a Ph.D. is conceived as an *education*, then it seems much more natural to expect that students could go off and do any number of wacky things when they are done.
OK, I’ll stop blathering now.
March 22nd, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Curt,
Thanks for the comparisons of Ph.Ds in engineering with those in science. But that wasn’t the intent of my comparison. I was writing more to compare the relationship between science education/training and being a scientist with the relationship between engineering education/training and being an engineer. That is, a person with a B.S. in engineering has an easier time of being recognized as an engineer than a person with a B.S. in science has of being recognized as a scientist.
Now, you can quibble about the differences between an engineering bachelors and a science bachelors (i.e., an engineering bachelors can require a fifth year for various reasons), but there are issues of expectation and credentialing here as well. If they made sense at one point or not (questionable, but the history knowledge of the relevant players is too thin to address this), it’s worth asking and answering whether it is now. My sense is no, but that’s based much more on intuition than empiricism.
March 22nd, 2009 at 2:58 pm
docpine,
Your comments point out that I could have added another dubious assumption, one that I usually take issue with.
Research Universities Value Teaching. It kind of depends on what you mean by teaching, but we value what we measure and/or measure what we value. Typically that’s research funding, and good teaching is often considered instilling the proper habits to make sure the next generation could get funding (putting aside the explosion of competition for those dollars).
There was a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education – which I only have access to in print, or I’d have shared it here – worth noting. A professor had made a assessment of how much value good teachers provide to universities in terms of the tuition retained from students that might otherwise have left. It’s a nasty measurement problem, but his estimates indicated it could be substantial. Good luck seeing that in a tenure committee evaluation any time soon.
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:21 am
Interesting post and having experienced some of these topics first hand recently I have been struck by what I also consider a flawed system. My general impression is that somehow employers and even the general public think that only someone with a Ph.D. has ‘credible levels’ of knowledge in the science fields.
I do believe there are a few basic reasons this occurs. First, when news outlets or congressional panels what experts they seek out people on the top of the food chain which will always be Ph.D. holders with years of research experience. So the perception of those seeing a news story or watching a hearing becomes conditioned to Ph.D. being a required moniker for knowledge in the sciences.
Second, there are few methods for scientist to be tagged with a level of ability and knowledge outside the degree process. There are some, for instance the American Meteorological Society does have the Certified Consulting Meteorologist program. However most engineers, if they want, can become a Professional Engineer if they decide they want to stay in the field. That type of certification also requires work experience. So practical application of skills learned in school is required to achieve a certain level of status.
Third, most pure science work is done in major universities and government labs in the US. Again there are a few exceptions, but the general arena for that type of work is for employers whose traditional systems for recognition are based on degree levels.
In going back to graduate school for a degree in the sciences and coming from a different arena previously, I was struck by this system that many in the business world or just outside academia in general would be find puzzling. I met many undergraduate students with exceptional skill and ability that would likely not pursue a graduate degree because they had no real desire to spend 5+ years getting a Ph.D., yet they felt without it any time in graduate school would be wasted.
I think that until there is a system in place that recognizes the skill and abilities in some way besides just these three monikers: B.S., M.S., Ph.D. that the problem will continue.
March 23rd, 2009 at 7:10 am
David wrote in #3: I was writing more to compare the relationship between science education/training and being a scientist with the relationship between engineering education/training and being an engineer. That is, a person with a B.S. in engineering has an easier time of being recognized as an engineer than a person with a B.S. in science has of being recognized as a scientist.
Even at the bachelors level, I think the difference in professors’ attitudes on whether they are training or educating their undergraduates is still an important distinction.
I’m getting a bit speculative, but I think that at the bachelor’s level attitudes among science and engineering professors are likely somewhat reversed. A science B.S. is more likely to be seen as an “education”, and an engineering B.S. is more likely to be seen as “training”. As a result, B.S. grads in science are seen as untrained and therefore unqualified to do science. They are educated on current theories and schools of thought in science. Engineers are trained, largely to do particular types of somewhat mundane but often useful calculations, over and over again. So engineers are seen as qualified, to, well, do particular types of relevant calculations. At the Ph.D. level, my mental model has people thinking of a science Ph.D. as *training*, being trained to do research, so that if they do anything else with their lives post-Ph.D. they are more likely to (unfortunately) be viewed as failures by the academe, but engineers as being “educated” about the scientific research process.
I’m painting with broad strokes and am unsupported by any real data. This is just my general, descriptive sense of how things are (not necessarily how they should be). I’d better stop before I dig myself in too deeply.
March 23rd, 2009 at 7:39 am
. In my world (natural resources) there are many folks with master’s out doing real work. Perhaps all the “applied sciences” are more like engineering.
Mostly they are in the world of applying scientific information, not generally producing scientific information in the peer-reviewed literature. In fact, there are many people with Ph.D.’s who are involved in the application world (including myself) for a variety of reasons, including the fact that there aren’t enough jobs (or research funds) in research, but also due to less-desirable factors about worklife, at least in universities.
Who is a scientist is definitely worth discussing, for nothing else if we are not clear on what a scientist is, how can we make sure they are adequately involved in policy? And whether there is a shortage or not?
Also the rhetoric about “only scientists should have certain kinds of jobs”..if we’re not clear on what is one and what aren’t one, this would certainly add to the fuzziness of such discourse.
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Curt Fischer,
I have no idea why you think this. Engineering faculties think they are educating students with BS degrees. If engineers were trained only to do mundane calculation over and over again, they would have one heck of a hard time doing engineering work!
Engineers are tested and certified to solve certain types of tractable problems not because they are mundane and come up over and over but to ensure public safety. The topics on the PE or EIT examines should not be taken as encompassing the full breadth of what is covered in an engineering education. Undergraduate engineering education does not focus only on doing repetitive computations of the sort that will appear on the PE exam.
March 23rd, 2009 at 3:52 pm
I did not mean to say that engineers are uneducated. I’m an engineer myself — I can only hope I count as educated. I’m sure faculty set out to educate their students, regardless of whether they’re science faculty, engineering faculty, or anywhere else. There is no mutually exclusive dichotomy between education and training, and I am sorry if I implied otherwise. Also, my “somewhat mundane calculation” sounds like your “tractable problems”. Certainly the problems aren’t mundane from the standpoint of their relevance to society: “If engineering is the application of science for human benefit, then the engineer must be a student of not only the application of science, but of human benefit as well,” and John Prausnitz once said.
But, I very much doubt that most B.S. degree holders in engineering ever receive P.E. or EIT certification. Even without these credentials, they stand to earn more than science B.S. holders in most fields, and, in my view, are more likely to be thought of as engineers than B.S. scientists are to be thought of as scientists. I doubt that public safety, narrowly construed, is a majority field of employment for B.S. engineers.
Education and training may not form a mutually exclusive dichotomy, but I think there is a difference between them and an important one. My belief, founded only on my own personal experience, is that engineering faculty are more likely to imagine their undergraduate students in some future professional setting, practicing what they’ve learned as an undergraduate. This thought is more likely to motivate them to modulate, edit, and update course material in response to industrial trends, and more likely to engender a commitment to enforce minimum standards for their students — i.e. to train them.
(I am not saying that scientists don’t think their undergrads will get jobs; nor am I saying that scientists don’t update or modulate their courses. I am only saying that scientists are LESS LIKELY to draw motivation to do so from their perceptions on how their undergrads will fare in the workforce.)
Furthermore, I think the situation is flipped around a bit at the Ph.D. level. I think here science faculty are more likely than engineering faculty to imagine all their students as future practicing professionals and to draw on this image as a source for what to impart to their graduate students. Problem is, scientist faculty’s image of a practicing professional scientist more likely to be “PI scientist at R1 University” than an engineering faculty’s image of a practicing professional engineer is to be a “PI engineer at R1 University”.
Look, its hard to make such blanket statements about engineers and scientists when all anyone is bringing to the table is their own experience. If your experience is different, I would love to hear about it. But even more it would be nice to have real data to point to.
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:24 pm
I see a problem with the article. The question is asked as to whether a B.S. can “do science.” I would answer “yes and no.” As an undergraduate, you take foundation classes and mostly read secondary literature. As a graduate student, you do deep into your particular field of interest and get to know the primary literature.
So does “doing science” mean doing lab work, or does it mean defining questions? A Ph.D with a faculty job and his/her own lab can “do science” without ever stepping foot into their own lab. Theoretically, they could have a lab tech teach undergraduates the skills necessary to “do the science” in a second meaning of the phrase.
If you turn around the question to ” can a person with a B.S. do work in a science lab,” then the answer is yes, and at Universities many do. Can they get jobs in industry with the skills they develop? Sure, but that’s not “doing science,” it’s just drone work. Ph.Ds are necessary to develop the research programs that put other people to work. Unless you spend the time familiarizing yorself with the state of the art in your field, you don’t know what needs to be done and what is likely to be possible/fruitful. Undergrads just don’t have the specialized knowledge for that sort of position. The problem is that the kind of job a B.S. is suitable for is not a job that usually leads anywhere. Setting up DNA machines doesn’t lead you to running a lab that uses DNA analysis. So why would someone with B.S. want to be a 21st century assembly line worker?
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Jon,
I think your definition of science is too restrictive. Science is only running a research program? Then we didn’t do science before the 20th century. And I’m not persuaded that your definition of science would allow for anyone in industry to be doing science. There’s a presumption here that science only happens at the leading edge, the state of the art. Where does the application of existing knowledge to new phenomena come in? How do you approach research which starts with a lot of observation (such as astronomy)?
Science includes drone work. Science includes running experiments, designing experiments, anything associated with the relevant scientific methods for that community.
Tying this tighter to the initial post, from a government’s perspective, they aren’t interested only in producing people to define the questions, but the people who can help find the answers. And there’s a lot of drone work involved there.
March 23rd, 2009 at 8:56 pm
I’m not sure what the fraction is. It tends to be more important in civil engineering and less important in electrical engineering. Some projects (e.g. bridges) need a PE stamp on documents; many don’t.
I don’t mean to suggest most engineers work in public safety. They don’t. It’s just that many non-engineers get the impression that engineering education is different from what it is.
Engineers with BS’s are more likely to be considered engineers than scientists with BS’s. That is true. Not only that, but BS engineers often get good, fun rewarding jobs that let them apply what they know in a creative way. This is actually why the education involves more than just training mundane problems. There are so many possible directions one can go with an undergraduate BS.
But, yes, one must apply what one knows to tractable problems in school.
If you are going to develop a process, or design something new, one of the tricks is to figure out how to turn the development process into a series of appropriate tractable problems and solve each to the level required.
Engineering departments do consider what topics are important to the workforce. I’m not sure it’s so much that the Engineering faculty are more sensitivity to their students job prospects than science faculty. Maybe they are. I’ve been on an engineering faculty but not a science faculty. I’ve always assumed the science faculty do think about BS student’s job prospects— maybe I’m mistaken though.
I’ve always assumed the real difference is that, by definition, engineering is oriented toward application. Industry employs people, and they need people who know how to apply science to make, develop or invent things, develop processes etc. So, to some extent, its a natural consequence for engineering itself to adapt a bit to what industry needs.
Science faculty may or may not– adapting to industrial needs is not inherent to their mission.
Anyways, it seems to me that as soon as a scientific field spins off enough applications, you suddenly have a new branch of engineering! In not to large an amount of time, the people doing that branch of science are sudden “Type X Engineers”. By definition, those portions of science with the smallest employment prospects for BS students are no longer the focus of the science department.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:11 am
I think the differences between engineers and scientists is a supply and demand issue. There are too many scientists competing for the available jobs which means the required qualifications have been inflated beyond what may be necessary given the tasks.
I suspect a similar credential inflation will occur in engineering as the number of engineers from developing countries with the necessary experiance increases.