We are in the midst of a lost generation of graduate students. Grad students take 4-7 years to get a degree, but with 4 years of flat funding and now challenge grants’ funding being 1 in 100 there is a perception of no future in science by those students. No one wants to spend their lives writing grants, but the goal of the modern scientists is not doing research but getting grants. This has caused numerous science students to choose other careers.
What makes this worse is I recently saw a news article in the New York Times with a line implying it is Christmas for scientists receiving challenge grants (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/opinion/08satel.html). That concept could not be more wrong. There were over 20,000 grants submitted to the NIH for the stimulus package’s ARRA with less than 1% being funded. So it is Christmas for 1 in 100 scientists. That is not Christmas, it is a lottery.
How this affects students is they see the federal government being described as dumping many billions of dollars into science but all us scientists saying to students, “Sorry, I cannot take any students because I have no money.” I have had my funding cut from the NIH and grant acceptance rates go to ridiculously low levels. I need to submit 20 to 100 grants to get one funded but can only manage to submit 8 grants a year. I’m considered a prodigious grant writer but statistics still rule; there is simply not enough time to write more than about 8 grants per year. So that means it will take me 2.5 to 12.5 years to get a grant. My career has stopped being about doing science and is now a life of begging for money, with the education of future scientists sadly becoming a very low priority. Burgeoning scientists see this as students and realize there is no future for them.
In the 8 months since the release of the requests for grants in response to the stimulus package STUDENTS have seen their bosses focus entirely on the grants and not mentoring them. I went from weekly meetings to monthly meetings to passing emails late at night with the people in my lab.
There were a large number of students wanting to have their Ph.D. theses read and defended to move on with their career and instead of taking a few weeks to schedule; these meetings were moved back months. All this was because faculty like me were being encouraged by universities to grab at the billions from the federal government. I tried and did not receive any but the people who paid the price are the students. Eventually that price will be paid by humanity who will be the beneficiary of fewer educated scientists. The good students are leaving in droves for other things. We are experiencing a brain drain from this lost generation of scientists.