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When you come to a fork in the road-take it," Yogi Berra is reported to
have said. Unfortunately, the choices are not clear cut when the future
of graduate education in the sciences is discussed. Few, however, would
disagree that graduate education is being challenged quantitatively and
qualitatively, and that change will come in both the size of the graduate
enterprise and in its focus. These changes are being precipitated by
pressures on internal university resources, by changes in the academic
employment market, by diminishing stability in industrial employment and
by changing basic and applied research priorities. These
issues are shared to varying degrees in most developed countries. The
issues seem clear, but what to do about them is quite unclear, given the
uncertainty of the magnitude of the problem. Some idea of the uncertainty of the solutions may be derived from the recent National Research Council (USA) report, "Reshaping the Graduate Education of Scientists and Engineers." The report did not recommend any limits to size or growth, but it did recommend changes that would decrease the length of the time of Ph.D. programs, would reduce their specialization, would better prepare students for careers outside academe and would better inform students about the outside employment market. The report also commented on changes in support mechanisms with a shift away from funding of research assistantships from grants and contracts to departmental- or school-awarded training grants. These are modest and probably sensible proposals, although it is not clear how broader education is easily reconcilable with shorter graduation times. However, many would argue that the recommendations simply do not go far enough. Their arguments run along the following lines: graduate education must be more than faculty cloning themselves for future academic positions that do not exist; it should be more than the labor needed to execute the principal investigator's research and thus enable more grants to be obtained with which to hire more research assistants; it must be more than a source of cheap teaching; and it must be more than a path that leads to a career as a post-doctoral fellow. That those arguments may be a prelude to significant quantitative and qualitative changes in graduate education is indicated by the just-published Rand Corporation-Stanford University study which indicates systematic overproduction of Ph.D.s in engineering and some sciences by approximately 25 percent. This conclusion is broadly consistent with much anecdotal material and accords with the conclusions of an American Chemical Society Task Force, which examined doctoral education in chemistry. Additionally, the continuing changes in the pharmaceutical industry, as exemplified by the recent Glaxo-Wellcome merger, add to the size of the available Ph.D. pool. There is no indication yet that these consolidations are at an end. Universities are not institutions that change readily at the macro level. Some have likened universities to supertankers-massive, impressive, slow to turn around and embarrassing when run aground. However, the triple witching hour for scientific research that is now upon universities, with diminishing tax-based and private support, with changing employment demands and opportunities, and with increased expectations for productivity, is likely to bring change more rapidly than previously anticipated. The next decade for university-based research and graduate education promises to be both interesting and uncomfortable. DAVID J. TRIGGLE Dean, School of Pharmacy State University of New York at Buffalo Article reprinted from Pharmaceutical News
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