I would like to know where the hell nineteen percent of research universities think their funding comes from.
Eighty-one percent of research universities say budget sequestration cuts are directly hampering their scientific research activities, according to a new survey released Monday.
Not everyone felt the sequester right away, but I can tell you that it caused an instant sphincter-tightening for just about everyone doing research funded by NIH, NSF, NOAA, DoD or any other public agency. Unlike a private enterprise these agencies all manage their money on a Toyota-style just in time basis, so less money in means less money out starting right now. This manifested itself in two ways. First, a lot of existing grants got a haircut, sometimes by as much as half. That tossed a lot of talented staffers into a suddenly very tight job market. This was great news for pharma and the next fat pill but a lot of research labs had no way to keep people with essential skills that cannot be easily replaced.
Second, agencies gave out fewer grants. Grants all go through a two-step process: a scientific panel of volunteer researchers ranks that month’s batch of applications based on a complex set of considerations, and then a second in-house panel decides what percentage of the agency’s top scoring grants they can afford to fund. In the good old days you could breathe easy if you scored in the top twenty percent; nowadays you bite your nails even if a clearly stellar proposal falls inside the top seven or eight percent of grants. That leaves far too many people out in the cold.
Anecdotes, data et cetera, but you could cite one postdoc named Tim F who has an H index of 10, multiple papers in PNAS and Nature journals and hit the job market at the same moment the sequester took effect. I more or less ruled out looking for faculty jobs after I found that people making the final cut right now have the kind of achievements that would earn you an assigned seat at the Justice League conference table. The story turns out fine: I found a staff position that I feel pretty good about all things considered, but to get there I had to compete with a startling number of senior faculty and over-qualified specialists looking for any safe harbor. All that I can say is thank your preferred deity that Obamacare will offer some support for the many scientists getting their first hard look at the individual market for health insurance.
ArchTeryx
Yep, the Republicans actually made “Starving Scientist” into a real thing.
I’m curious about what staff position you got, Tim. I’ve actually managed to get an interview for a core lab position at the Wadsworth Center in New York State, but still (three weeks and counting) waiting for the results of that.
Wish me luck. That doesn’t come in, my UI shortly thereafter ends, and “Starving Scientist” very rapidly becomes my reality.
Dolly Llama
Tim, do you think Ed’s right here? And do you think it has any effect on the above? Or are these mostly unrelated incidents at big STEM-oriented universities?
NotMax
Even the JLA found a seat for Snapper Carr.
katie5
H Index of 10? Not bad at all.
NonyNony
That’s not actually what the linked summary of the polling says. It actually says:
That’s quite a different thing that the ThinkProgress reporting that leads you to believe that only 81% said that it had an effect – it’s 81% that can point to things that they’ve had to do up to the date of the poll.
In an effort to avoid plagiarism, the TP report subtly changes the meaning of what was actually said. (Also that 19% is about 14 universities – the sample size is 74 universities that bothered to complete the poll at all).
El Cid
All the research conservatives ever needed is in the damn Bible.
Soonergrunt
But the Waltons are still making billions, so it’s all good.
Tim F.
@Dolly Llama: To some degree, yes. Research is largely supported by grant funding but universities use their central budgets to support graduate students, recruiting, start-up funds for new hires and ‘bridge funding’ for faculty to keep their labs open between grants. Right now that bridge funding is a really, really big deal, and the Obama stimulus measure to provide mini-grants for that purpose helped a TON.
I would not undervalue the importance of middle layers of university management. Regulatory and legal compliance can be incredibly challenging for a research university and a near-unimaginable effort for a university with an affiliated medical school. It takes a lot of people working all day to make sure that a school’s many moving parts do not throw a spring or catch fire, and as research gets more complex and regulations get more extensive (mostly for good reasons) the job keeps getting harder.
Nonetheless yes, management is an organism that exists to make more managers and the Lake Wobegon phenomenon just ensures that everyone has to tighten their belts a bit each year to make sure that top managers stay ‘competitive’. Those guys are the real problem and their entitled attitude can have a huge effect on morale in places like my last posting where it is particularly bad. Literally everyone on the research end is acutely aware of this. The areas where it has a real effect are thus relatively marginal for professional researchers but it does impact your quality of life when the worst offenders are also the biggest assholes about it.
katie5
@Dolly Llama: From my experience, Ed’s completely right. Administrators, and there are a lot of them, are making 2-3-5 times as much as faculty are. And they exist in a closed loop of meetings, strategic planning reports, and conferences. They make a science of justifying their existence and faculty have neither the time nor energy to pierce the bubble of their encapsulated existence.
Botsplainer
Don’t worry, the Kochs can fund the things which they think are interesting in a spirit of real philanthropy. Look for an uptick in funds devoted to the science of phrenology, and Jared Taylor can expect to be on some required reading lists…
Roger Moore
@Dolly Llama:
It’s clearly true that administration is growing out of control, but I don’t think that’s closely connected to research grants. The granting agencies have actually clamped down pretty hard on grant overhead rates, which seems to have been effective in preventing administrations from looting the grant funds too vigorously. I suspect that some of the problem is the reduction in grant levels, and some of it is a red queen effect, where everyone has to submit more and more grants to try to make up for the reduced chance of getting any individual proposal funded.
Pete
All true, but I would argue that this is not a “suddenly very tight job market”. The academic market has been horrible for years now. The sequester made it worse but it was terrible before. The lack of jobs, the plight of adjuncts, the prizing of Ivies over actual solid work; it’s all been a long time coming. The system is broken and was before the sequester. This just turns up the fire. People were already roasting, though.
piratedan
@katie5: I envision college administrations being eerily similar to Governor Lepetomiane’s cabinet from Blazing Saddles, phoney baloney jobs … my apologies to all administrators out there
Tim F.
@Dolly Llama: I would say that bloated tuitions tighten the pool of people who can afford to complete college and then live on beans as a graduate student. Your work is only as good as the people who do it, and cutting out increasing numbers of candidates with increasingly painful college loans will shut the doors of academic research to what I fear will be a large number of future stars. The list of Nobel winning scientists would look a lot thinner if you only include those whose parents could afford to pay retail for their undergraduate degree.
Capri
@katie5:
At the STEM research university where I work, administrator salaries are a lot like actor salaries. The vast majority of administrative staff get paid quite poorly – a lot less than your average faculty member. Then there are a few “stars” – heads of their division and such that get paid very, very well.
Cassidy
Haven’t we been led to believe that all the focus on sports is what these schools need to fund themselves?
liberal
@Pete: biggest problem is that in a long run equilibrium, one phd out of all the ones a PI makes will get a PI position. Most people in academia don’t seem to understand that. (Ignoring pop growth which in this context is relatively small.)
OzarkHillbilly
2 thoughts: Research is highly over rated. and, Looks like my buddy got that position at the University of Arkansas just in time.
katie5
@Tim F., @Dolly Llama: The sequester also will affect who can easily publish. Most fields need research funds to do field work, pay for time on machines (e.g., telescopes, electron scanning microscopes), etc. No funding means fewer papers, means less competitiveness in job market. You could have funding to be a postdoc but maybe no funds to actually conduct the research. You lose compared to your colleagues who do have the funding.
Rock
The causes of sky-rocketing tuition are many, but surely the decline in state support for public universities is a significant factor. I think it is the most significant factor, but I cannot assert that it is for certain because doing so would be committing the pundit-like sin of thinking something is true just because you think it. While I’m sure administration is bloated, I think its a mistake to assert that an excessive management layer is the culprit without better evidence.
Also, in another example of things not being simple, students and the set of parents that pay for some students to attend college, seem to generally like fancy buildings, amenities like gyms and wifi…and kind of sadly good athletic teams. Colleges fund all of those things to compete for students…so the market or at least a perception of the market pushes those investments.
henrythefifth
My friend works in a disease research lab (like, you know, we want to cure them!) at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. They’ve had to let people go due to NIH funding cuts under sequestration. Guess who’s district Vandy is in? Rep. Marsha Blackburn, one of the Teabaggers all over the teevee during the govt shutdown. I bet there’s a lot of federal money being pumped into universities like Vandy, but that won’t stop a-holes like her from cutting off their noses to spite the face.
sparrow
I’m a young scientist just starting out. Last year, just before the sequester, I won a very competitive two-year grant from NASA. Only to find out it was chopped down to 1/3 of the money… which is enough for about 5 months salary. So yeah, it sucks.
mike with a mic
Their funding comes from private donations increasingly. As someone who works for an organization that does a fair amount of research this is old hat. The word has been out for years that we and everyone around us needs to get cracking on that sweet Clinton and Gates foundation cash because the government funding is simply not coming back. And it’s not just the Republicans on The Hill we deal with that aren’t going to bring it back, the Democrats on The Hill are touting private funds as the way to go as well… they don’t want to bring back public funding either.
Hence all the arguing over the debt and entitlements. Neither party is going to raise taxes to deal with the debt or to put funds into the general fund to replace what was robbed from the SS trust fund. So the two choices are we can shrink entitlements and accept that there will be no money for anything but them… or we can kill social security, ignore all those IOUs, and then have money in the general fund for things like research. Neither party considers tax increases on the professional or upper classes to increase funding an option.
Get used to it, this situation was growing before the sequester. If you want public funding for research you need to get onboard with the rest of us to make sure entitlements are cut so we have money for it. Fund research end social security. Because we aren’t getting the tax money to pay for it, and even if defense is cut that money will just come out of DOD research and then be turned into tax cuts.
ArchTeryx
@sparrow: Yeah, I feel for you. I had a 5 year funded position get reduced to 2 – which wasn’t enough to complete my paper. So, the postdoc ended with only a review paper for me, and essentially took me out of the academic job market.
Elie
This bullshit is killing our scientific leadership in the world and will not be easy to make up. It is going to devastate and set back some very very important research and derail careers. It will allow other countries to step into the void, forcing us to relinquish our leadership… I am furious at this. The republicans are solely responsible for this and unfortunately, will not be made to pay for it. Hate really is not too strong a word.
WereBear
I’ve found the new breeds of conservatives are the kind you find in the basement, eating the seed corn.
Their brains don’t seem to do the whole chain of reasoning thing. I’ve got four cats, each of whom has a better grasp of “cause and effect” than the Tea Party representatives clogging the tube news.
geg6
I am not a scientist but I am just now seeing the huge cuts and costs that sequestration have affected the federal student aid programs. Origination fees on Stafford and PLUS Loans went up from 1.0% to 1.051% on Staffords and from 4% to 4.204% on the PLUS. And will increase again for any loans originated after December 1. Federal Work Study and the FSEOG programs were cut by 5.5% and are slated to be cut another 5% for 2014-15 (both programs are for students with financial need, of course). The Iraq and Afghanistan Service Grant and TEACH Grant programs were cut by 10% and 7% respectively, with both slated for another 10% cut in 2014-15. Pell was left alone for this year but is slated for a cut in Y2 (2014-15).
I am just now getting into my busy season for financial aid nights at local high schools. I will be making these effects of sequestration one of the topics of discussion. People need to understand that sequestration is affecting everyone, not just those dirty government workers.
liberal
@OzarkHillbilly:
IMHO research really is highly overrated. OTOH, as one of my favorite sayings goes, “95% of everything is crap.” If we’re going to spend money on things, I’d rather it go to scientific research than, say, bloated salaries on Wall St.
Cassidy
My teenage daughter has discovered a significant enthusiasm in STEM during her last year of middle school. Her previous interest was cardio thoracic surgery. She’s gone so far as to take the lead researcher role for her robotics club project to develop a new, safer wild land fire shelter. It’s been fun talking with her about it. Something tells me I’ll be encouraging her to become a surgeon anyway.
katie5
@WereBear: I’m not sure these guys realize it’s seed they’re eating. At least starving settlers realized the trade-off they were making.
wenchacha
My son is in his sr yr for his BSEE, looking at grad programs, maybe on to PHD. It will be a real bitch for people who figured they were choosing a good career path, and then run up against a lack of funding. Hell, my kid wanted to be a sculptor.
Roger Moore
@liberal:
This. The system assumes most of the work will be done by a pool of poorly paid trainee researchers (grad students and postdocs) much larger than the faculty and staff, which only works during periods of exponential growth and/or strong non-academic demand. That made sense in the post-WWII period when there was rapid growth and a need for lots of Cold War researchers, but it doesn’t make sense today. Rather than figure out how to reconfigure our academic research around long-term, non professor staff, we’ve extended the length of graduate school and post doctoral fellowships. A would-be researcher today can spend almost as much time in post-graduate training as they did in their primary, secondary, and undergraduate education, getting paid peanuts the whole time. It’s a crazy system, and we need to do something to reform it.
Adolphus
As a scholar in the humanities all I can say is, welcome to our world. There is plenty of room at the table since there is no food on it.
Violet
It’s a race to the bottom for everything, including scientific research. Maybe China can find the next great cure for disease or send the next mission to Mars. Who needs science? God takes care of his own.
WereBear
It’s funny how the “parasite model” is so strong and near-indelible. Law firms, academia, even The Sopranos… where the old and established feed off the young and hopeful.
hoodie
@Violet: I guess there’s a subtle irony to that. The tea party types running state legislatures (and their wealthy benefactors) don’t want to reform this system, they view the current trends as reform. They’d just as soon have all those grad students and post-docs picking tomatoes and lettuce or selling insurance so they can unlearn all their soc1alist tendencies. Cultural Revolution, American Style.
pamelabrown53
@Elie: My nephew who graduated last summer with his doctorate in Linguistics. In applying for post doc research programs he was offered one at John Hopkins for, I believe, 1 year at 40k and another in Berlin (Germany) at 60k for 3 years. Guess which one he took?
MomSense
@Tim F.:
Both my older boys did well in high school and were accepted to “good” schools but the cost was prohibitive even with scholarships, grants, and loans.They both decided to attend state schools and commute from home because they felt that their options would be limited if they were to graduate with a ton of debt. Interestingly, they have found little difference between the content and quality of courses they are taking and the courses their friends at Ivies are taking.
pamelabrown53
@pamelabrown53: P.S. For some reason I’m not allowed to edit my comment. Was trying to delete the word “who”.
Rock
Just to echo a previous comment…I know multiple people who have stated that the future funding of academic research is in soliciting money from industry and private foundations. Not only will government investment in science not return to pre-sequester levels, it will in fact continue to be cut. Again, that’s anecdotal but I know of no contrary evidence.
I would not encourage anyone to pursue a career in science in America…the job market is abysmal and the grad student/post-doc system is truly exploitation. Finance seems like a generally better choice for anyone considering career paths.
Violet
@MomSense: Ivy League schools are all about the contacts you make and the alumni network you’ll have going forward in life. That’s what you’re paying for.
OzarkHillbilly
@liberal: I suppose I should say I was being very sarcastic. As I like to say, there is no such thing as bad research, only unknown avenues of exploration.
David22
@Violet, @hoodie: I think the disruption of scientific research was a deliberate feature of the sequester, not a bug. The Repug/Teabag Party is virulently dedicated to the destruction of knowledge and expertise in any form – it’s how they intend to turn most of us into Eloi. (You know who the Morlocks are.)
MomSense
@Violet:
I bet a lot of those students already have the ability to make those contacts without attending the Ivy.
handsmile
@geg6:
I hope you’ll be reporting back here on the responses you encounter/confront once you introduce the “effects of sequestration” into public (?) discussions of financial aid eligibility/availability. (i.e., is it all Obama’s fault or that of Obama and Congressional Democrats?)
@MomSense:
I’d have to imagine that they’re eating better (and wearing cleaner clothes) as well. :)
Big R
So…a non-academic with an h-index of 2 is looking at what kinds of prospects for his Ph.D. admissions? Asking for a friend.
LanceThruster
They could always raise funds Oral Roberts U. style where he hallucinated 900 ft Jesus who said to send him money or God would kill him.
MikeJ
@LanceThruster: They could do that if they only had a brain.
Another Holocene Human
The other 19% are run by overpaid administrator politician butt sucking dickheads. And that includes state schools.
Another Holocene Human
@Tim F.: A return to real progressive taxation (and reform on investment taxation to get rid of this cap gains loophole) would put an end to it more than anything else.
Squeeze out the money and these bully boys will go back into embezzling and LLC money laundering/tax cheating as god intended. Running a college is quite boring for the brainless without the lure of dosh.
Roger Moore
@WereBear:
I have an interesting perspective from being on the board of the collective bargaining unit at my institution. We have an unusual situation in which the professors, research professors, and staff scientists are all members of the same unit, and I’m the only non-professor on the board. I’m frankly disturbed by the attitudes of some of the faculty toward post docs and staff.
Our institution requires that post docs with 7 years of experience either be promoted to staff scientist or let go; this is intended to ensure that they aren’t kept around indefinitely. There’s a small but vocal contingent of professors who are really angry about this. They think they should be allowed to keep people around as post docs more or less permanently and never have to pay them more than the NIH maximum. As an alternative, they want to be able to promote to staff scientist but then deny raises beyond cost of living adjustments, and they’re none too happy about having to pay those. They understand these people are the backbone of their research, but they want to keep paying them like trainees rather than long-term professional staff. Some of it is that they’re short-sighted jerks, but they’re being short sighted in large part because funding agencies are assuming all the real work gets done by grad students and post docs and are reluctant to pay more, no matter what the qualifications of the employee.
Another Holocene Human
@Pete: Well said.
xiphas
@henrythefifth: I’m currently a post-doc at Vandy, my lab is ok, but others are in big trouble. The medical center just cut ~1,000 jobs due to a combination of the sequester, Tennessee not taking the Medicaid expansion, and a few more reasons.
Marsha Blackburn is NOT the house rep for Nashville and Vanderbilt, though she does represent some of the exurbs. We have Jim Cooper, and although he is a Blue Dog, he could be much worse.
LanceThruster
@MikeJ:
Thanks. I rather enjoyed that.
jl
@mike with a mic:
There is no long run federal government debt crisis, except the one caused by outrageous growth in health care expenditure in the U.S. So you pose a false dilemma in saying we have to cut entitlements to increase government funding for research and education.
And, for those interested in the role of funding cuts, if you search Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View blog, there are some posts on federal and state funding cuts for public higher education, and relationship to increases in tuition. In many states, maybe a third, the cuts over the last ten to fifteen years have been savage, in the range of 15 to 30 percent, and there is a relationship between those cuts and tuition increases.
Joel
Married to K-99 funded researcher with Nature papers on resume. The market is extremely tight. Takes some good ol’ fashioned wrangling to get consideration it seems.
jl
@Joel: I skimmed the link to the Gin and Tacos. It said that deans and deallets and administrators had ‘support staff’.
What is this ‘support staff’ it spoke of? I have a distant memory of such a concept, but it was long ago and not sure I remember correctly.
Joel
@Roger Moore:
How do we do that? The key concern here is financials, right? What happens when we tell aspiring professors that they’re looking at a non-tenure track position that maxes out at 60-80K? I’ll give you a hint: Wailers album.
Elie
@pamelabrown53:
Yep. sadly. We cannot allow this to go on…I believe that the administration and Democrats need to start talking about this way more forcefully
MomSense
@handsmile:
Especially since they do a lot of the laundry and cooking!!
Elie
@Elie:
I would add –along with all the other cuts that are hurting the poor and weak such as WIC cuts. The republicans are explicitly hurting our country now and for the future– by design and intent..
geg6
@handsmile:
I never, believe it or not, get those kinds of responses when I have to discuss the political issues affecting student aid (not that I do a lot of that, but when needed I do it). I’m guessing that so many people are so intimidated by the whole student aid process and I am their expert in that alien world that they take what I say to heart. I never go partisan on it, but I do make clear where the regulatory/legislative jams are and that the people I’m speaking to have agency in effecting beneficial changes. I always, when I have to discuss such things, simply tell them that they should contact their congressperson and ask them to do what is best for students. It seemed to work when the student loan interest issue was a problem this past summer. I mentioned the uncertainty about interest rates, that Congress is who controls the interest rates on federal loans and that they were arguing about whether to increase interest or decrease interest and whether the interest rate should be fixed or variable/fixed during the summer orientation sessions for parents. I told them that they should contact their congresscritter and let them know what they thought. Several of these parents came up to me on move-in day and told me that they did just that and were glad that the whole thing got settled by the time school began. It’s not what I wanted totally and I think most parents were in agreement with me for the most part. But it turned out better than it could have, considering the craziness of the GOP these days. I have yet to run into a Teabagger parent. I’ve met up with some libertarian parents (who simply don’t apply for aid but who are all convinced they have the most brilliant children on earth and why haven’t I given their budding Einstein every penny of merit scholarship money I control, huh?) and some obviously old-school Republican parents, but no Teabaggers. The vast majority of parents I deal with are pretty good people just trying to do their best and get their kids a good education.
Lyrebird
QFT.
Finished my phd in ’09, spent one yr adjuncting, and I thank MPD (my pref deity) that that yr was in NY state, with a Healthy NY plan to help at least some of those too “rich” for Medicaid but otherwise SOL.
Still in limbo job-wise, but employed in my field and glad of that.
Roger Moore
@Joel:
That’s essentially what’s already happening. Established professors are addicted to cheap labor from grad students and post docs, so they train far more of them than there are actual jobs for. It’s unfair and cruel to lead people on through a decade plus of underpaid grad school and post doctoral fellowships with the false promise of a tenure-track job at the end of the rainbow. It would be far more kind and honest to reduce the number of graduate and postdoctoral positions to something closer to the number of available jobs, especially if we made up for some of the reduction by increasing the number of long-term staff jobs.
We talk about other industries abusing the system by keeping unpaid interns for a summer, but academia has more or less industrialized the process. Yes, grad students are usually paid, but it’s crappy pay, terrible working conditions, and for far longer than other industries abuse their interns. Then we turn around and don’t offer real jobs to most of them when they’re finished. It’s a grotesque system that most people would reject out of hand as horribly unfair if it were proposed de-novo today, but that supposedly liberal academics accept without a blink because it’s already in place and they benefit from it.