An Alternative Perspective on Recommendation 3
Henry W. Riecken
Let me begin by stressing that I dissent from the unqualified endorsement and recommended expansion of training grants in chapters 5 and 6 and not from the overall study findings, which I strongly support. The compelling evidence presented in chapters 2 and 3 and appendixes, together with the confirming testimony at the public meeting and experiences of individual committee members, led us to the unanimous conclusion that the current level of PhD production now exceeds the current availability of jobs in academia, government, and industry where new life-science PhDs can independently use their training. We also unanimously agreed that further growth in graduate training in the life sciences must be curtailed and that there should be no further expansion of graduate educational programs except ''under rare and special circumstances".
The committee had a much more difficult time, however, in deciding how best to achieve the recommended goal of stabilizing graduate enrollments. The difficulty derives chiefly from the complex interdependence of research and training, as described in chapter 6. While some of the committee's recommended actions—in particular, the broad dissemination of information pertinent to career prospects—will be useful in addressing this goal, I strongly disagree with the recommendation to increase training-grant support. In my view, this recommendation is unsupported, outside the study charge, and inconsistent with the committee's overall study findings. My specific objections to this recommendation are as follows:
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I want to emphasize that I have these reservations about the training-grant recommendation because of the totally inadequate evidential basis for the recommendation and because of the consequences it would have—not because I hold strong views on the intrinsic merits of either training grants or research assistantships. For several years, I chaired the aforementioned Committee on National Needs for Biomedical and Behavioral Research Personnel, which recommended annually to Congress the number of training-grant positions to be supported under the National Research Service Awards Act. Earlier, I served as associate director of the National Science Foundation with particular responsibility for the education and training of scientists (in all scientific disciplines). These experiences have made me keenly aware of the difficulty of making a valid comparison between alternative support mechanisms, as well as the multiple difficulties of implementing the changes recommended in this report. Without considerably more evidence on the relative merits of alternative mechanisms for supporting graduate students, a recommendation to increase training grants and