The effect you describe, the Matthew effect, is not strictly connected to tenure, but to reputation. While there may be a strong correlation between tenured faculty and grant recipients, the general trend is that those who have received grants in the past stand a better chance to receive grants/resources in the future. The same is true of institutions as well as individuals.

However, I think a challenge in addressing this is that the underlying policy is geared toward getting top shelf research rather than keeping young scholars in business. There are programs geared toward young scholars (like the CAREER awards), but they won’t cover everybody. To the extent that there is explicit policy about scientific and technological human resources at the federal level, it ends once they get into higher education.

But it seems that in fact it is a marker for seniority or excellence that is used as a lever to preferentially attract research dollars.

That’s not the worst thing in the world, I suppose, but it does seem like there is a disconnect between the policy justifications and the reality.

You raise great points. I don’t think there’s a consensus – yet – on how the economic downturn will affect the community. That said, I would look for discussions of the pre-existing trends in academe and academic research to see where things stand. My thinking is that limited resources will exacerbate those trends that are – at least on the surface – done to constrain costs. To your more specific points:

Government funding will be harder to get, but I don’t see industrial funding increasing as their bottom line will be affected as well (and their share of the national R&D funding landscape has shrunk for years – look at NSF Science and Engineering Indicators). It’s quite possible that industry may become more and more interested in taking advantage of existing academic research to stretch their limited R&D dollars.

I think the resource crunch will affect younger PIs more because they don’t – as a rule – have grants or other means of support at that point in their career. The age of first career-making grant has been increasing, and new faculty do need some institutional support as they are standing up their academic efforts.

As for any association between number of tenured positions and total research funding, that policy question is handled not by governments, but by universities and research institutes. Federal support shapes the environment where these policies are formed and implemented, but you have to look at individual universities and university associations to tease out what those policies are across the board.

As a likely future post-doc and (hopefully) tenured faculty in chemical engineering, I find these trends worrying.

Do you think the economic downturn will affect various funding sources differentially? Government money will be harder to get, but will the increase desire of companies to off-load their research mean it is easier to pick up industrial research dollars?

Perhaps more importantly, you seem to think that the downturn in research dollars will hinder the research output of young PIs more than established PIs. At least, that’s what I infer from your point about an oversupply of Ph.D.s, decreasing dollar amounts for lab start-up packages, and lower tenture track openings. Supposing you are right, do you think this is the best outcome? What is the policy justification for any association at all between the number of tenured positions and total research funding?

What’s a good source to find out more about policy and current thinking in this area?