TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction - Richard B. Freeman, Daniel L. Goroff
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261904.003.0001
[engineering, postgraduate science, job market, competitiveness, PhDs, career paths, patents]
This book provides new information on the economics of the postgraduate science and engineering job market, addressing topics such as the factors that determine the supply of PhDs, the career paths they follow after graduation, and the creation and use of knowledge as it is reflected by the amount of papers and patents produced. Each of the chapters gives a detailed report on the particulars of the data analyzed, the methodology used, and the findings. The chapters also explore the tensions between industry and academe in recruiting graduates, the influx of foreign-born doctorates, and the success of female doctorates. The findings illuminate some of the concerns over the science and engineering job market expressed by the various commissions and studies. (pages 1 - 16)
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I. Supply of Students and Postdoctoral Fellows to Science and Engineering
Supporting “The Best and Brightest” in Science and Engineering - Richard B. Freeman, Tanwin Chang, Hanley Chiang
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261904.003.0002
[stipends, policy tools, sciences, engineering, graduate fellowships, United States]
Stipends to U.S. citizens/residents are a natural policy tool for increasing the incentive for Americans to enter science and engineering (S&E) fields without directly impacting the flow of talent from overseas. Analysis of National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships suggests that raising the value of awards increases the number of applicants and quality of awardees, while giving more awards increases the number of awardees, by definition, with only a modest reduction in measured academic skills. To the extent that changes in NSF fellowship policy induce changes in the policies of other stipend-granting groups, it is suspected that the qualitative results, at least, can be extrapolated to the broader market. To see if such an extrapolation is at least consistent with the data, this chapter examines the changing number of first-year first-time graduate students in science and engineering who were U.S. citizens and permanent residents relative to the number of S&E bachelor graduates in the United States. The results are consistent with the notion that more and better-paying stipends could raise the number of native-born/residents choosing S&E fields broadly. (pages 19 - 58)
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Internationalization of U.S. Doctorate Education - John Bound, Sarah Turner, Patrick Walsh
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261904.003.0003
[sciences, engineering, doctorate education, foreign participation, United States]
The representation of a large number of students born outside the United States among the ranks of PhD recipients from U.S. universities is one of the most significant transformations in the international market for higher education in the last quarter century. The primary objective of this chapter is to understand the factors affecting this growth. The pattern of flows into U.S. PhD programs both across countries and over time are explored. This chapter outlines the basic trends in PhD degree attainment and sets forth the institutional context of doctorate education in the United States. The differential cross-sectional representation of students by country at the graduate level in the United States is also explored. The determinants of the growth over time in foreign participation in U.S. doctorate study in the sciences and the analysis of the determinants of participation of U.S. students in graduate education in the sciences are also discussed in the chapter. (pages 59 - 98)
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Improving the Postdoctoral Experience An Empirical Approach - Geoff Davis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261904.003.0004
[sciences, engineering, United States, postdoctoral experiences]
The population of postdoctoral researchers in science and engineering has undergone a large expansion, nearly tripling over the last thirty years. While these scientists have produced tremendous quantities of new research, the relatively rapid growth in their ranks has been accompanied by two problems. First, the increase in the supply of postdocs has not been accompanied by a commensurate increase in the demand for them, at least in the academic sector. Second, large postdoctoral populations on campuses have strained institutions' capacities for providing these researchers with basic administrative oversight. Each of these recommended measures comes at a cost, so assessing their relative benefits is important if institutions are to allocate their resources efficiently. This chapter develops such an assessment. Linear models are used to isolate the effects of specific measures on outcomes using data from a large-scale survey of postdocs. The results are striking: a handful of straightforward and relatively inexpensive measures appear to make a large difference in postdoc productivity and in the overall quality of the postdoctoral experience. (pages 99 - 128)
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II. Careers in Changing Markets
Immigration in High-Skill Labor Markets - George J. Borjas
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261904.003.0005
[sciences, engineering, United States, labor markets, immigration]
This chapter uses data drawn from the Survey of Earned Doctorates and the Survey of Doctoral Recipients to analyze the impact of the influx of foreign students on the earnings of doctorates. These data provide detailed information on the size of the immigrant supply shock and the labor market experiences of doctorates in science and engineering. The data also contain information on doctoral fields and year of graduation, so that it is possible to construct specific cohorts of doctorates and examine how a particular supply shock affects the earnings of doctorates in that cohort. It turns out that the foreign student influx has differentially affected different fields at different times. The chapter exploits this variation in the supply shock to identify the impact of immigration on high-skill labor markets. The empirical analysis reported in this chapter clearly shows that a foreign student influx into a particular field at a particular time has a significant and adverse effect on the earnings of competing doctorates in that field who graduated at roughly the same time. Because the magnitude of the immigrant supply shock in particular fields has been sizable, this elasticity implies that many doctorates employed in the United States, whether native-born or foreign-born, have experienced a substantial wage loss. (pages 131 - 162)
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Does Science Promote Women? - Donna K. Ginther, Shulamit Kahn
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261904.003.0006
[sciences, engineering, United States, gender differences, academic career]
Fewer women are present in science academe than in the workforce as a whole, and this is particularly true in the higher levels of academe such as tenured jobs and full professorships at major research universities. This chapter begins from the point when scientists receive their PhDs and investigates gender differences as they move up the academic career ladder through the stages of getting tenure-track jobs, being granted tenure, and being promoted to full professorships. The chapter finds that in science, single women actually have an advantage over single men in obtaining tenure-track jobs and in being granted tenure after controlling for covariates, and that married men and women without children are quite similar at these two stages. Children lower the likelihood that women in science will advance up the academic job ladder beyond their early postdoctorate years. The chapter concludes that science is not homogeneous. There are particularly large gender differences in obtaining tenure-track jobs, getting tenure, and being promoted to full in the life sciences. (pages 163 - 194)
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Patterns of Male and Female Scientific Dissemination in Public and Private Science - Kjersten Bunker Whittington
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261904.003.0007
[sciences, engineering, United States, gender differences, patenting, publishing]
Information on the patenting and publishing activity of scientists and engineers has long been an interest among scholars of science and technology. This chapter presents a two-part analysis to address patterns of men's and women's dissemination in patenting and publishing activities across sectors and disciplines. The first analysis uses log-linear modeling of a national sample of scientists and engineers to address the association between sex, discipline, employment sector, and involvement in scientific dissemination. The chapter tests the extent to which sex disparities in productivity are created and maintained by sorting mechanisms as well as through organizational settings after controlling for sex distributions. The second analysis explores the ways in which various organizational contexts may differentially influence men and women scientists. The chapter presents network visualizations of coinventor collaborations between life science inventors working in the academy, public research organizations, and biotechnology firms, and addresses how the structure of science within each sector may contribute to sex disparities in productivity. (pages 195 - 228)
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Educational Mismatch among Ph.D.s - Keith A. Bender, John S. Heywood
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261904.003.0008
[sciences, engineering, United States, job mismatch, educational mismatch, doctoral education]
This chapter examines the consequences of job mismatch—lack of fit between education and jobs—among the most highly-educated workers in the economy. These workers of the knowledge economy are often thought to be critical for technological progress and growth. The evidence assembled here uses three related measures of mismatch from the Survey of Doctoral Recipients and estimates their influence on three job outcomes: earnings, job satisfaction, and turnover. Mismatch is associated with worse outcomes: lower wages, lower job satisfaction, and higher turnover. This persists across substantial variations in estimation and holds for academics and nonacademics and for men and women. The size of these influences is surprisingly large, including a double-digit reduction in earnings, a 20 percent increase in the likelihood of being dissatisfied, and a one-third increase in the turnover rate. The chapter attempts to estimate the determinants of mismatch and suggests that there may be substantial vintage effects at work as the fields in which the knowledge base changes most quickly appear to be associated with a greater chance of being mismatched. (pages 229 - 256)
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Capturing Knowledge - Albert J. Sumell, Paula E. Stephan, James D. Adams
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261904.003.0009
[sciences, engineering, United States, skilled workers, metropolitan areas, migration, decision making]
The objective of this chapter is to examine factors that influence the probability that a highly skilled worker will remain local or stay in the state. Specifically, the chapter measures how various individual, institutional, and geographic attributes affect the probability that new PhDs going to industry stay in the metropolitan area or state where they trained. The study focuses on PhDs who received their degree in one of ten fields in science and engineering (S&E) during the period 1997 to 1999. The chapter provides a discussion of the role new PhDs play in knowledge transfer and the role of geographic proximity in promoting the transfer. The chapter also offers a conceptual model of an individual's decision to migrate. The chapter concludes that states and local areas capture knowledge embodied in newly-minted PhDs headed to industry, but not at an overwhelming rate. (pages 257 - 288)
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III. Creation and Use of Knowledge
Instruments of Commerce and Knowledge - Cyrus C. M. Mody
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261904.003.0010
[sciences, engineering, United States, technology transfer, graduate students, academic capitalism]
Universities have long struggled to define their relation to the business world. This chapter explores a much wider range of relationships, however. These include: researcher sabbaticals from firms to universities and vice versa, technology transfer through firms' hiring of former graduate students and universities' hiring of former corporate researchers, corporate sponsorship of community-building activities such as conferences, corporate influence over researchers' choices of materials to characterize with their microscopes, corporate supply of parts for building microscopes (and academic feedback to the design of those parts), and corporate sponsorship of intramural research to stimulate formation of an extramural academic market. Most of these kinds of relationships are invisible in the debate about academic capitalism. Finally, both opponents and supporters of corporate involvement in university life have seized on grains of truth. Supporters have it right that corporate-academic linkages are desirable, even necessary, for research and innovation. (pages 291 - 320)
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International Knowledge Flows - Jinyoung Kim, Sangjoon John Lee, Gerald Marschke
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261904.003.0011
[sciences, engineering, United States, patent records, technology, policy making, migration, higher education]
This chapter uses U.S. patent records to examine the nature and extent of knowledge spillovers from outside the United States to U.S. industry. Because of their implications for economic development and science and technology policy, knowledge spillovers within a country or across borders have received considerable attention in the literature. The chapter examines whether international migration of researchers or the international location of subsidiaries by U.S. firms facilitates knowledge transfers across borders and details the construction of a researcher-based data set and then describes its use in an analysis of the influence of foreign R&D on U.S. innovation. The chapter finds evidence of growing allocative inefficiency in U.S. higher education. (pages 321 - 348)
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The Growing Allocative Inefficiency of the U.S. Higher Education Sector - James D. Adams, J. Roger Clemmons
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226261904.003.0012
[sciences, engineering, United States, universities, higher education, industrial science, technology]
This chapter presents new evidence on the productivity of U.S. universities. Interest in this subject originates with recent developments in U.S. higher education that strike as noteworthy and perhaps troubling. First, despite their high state, growth of employment and output in top U.S. research universities has slowed down in recent years. And second, growth of university research has not kept pace with that of industrial research. This chapter finds evidence of growing allocative inefficiency in U.S. higher education. The most compelling evidence for this claim derives from research output, which is better measured than teaching output at the same time. It is found that the universities whose productivity grows less rapidly experience more rapid growth in research share. The chapter suggests a different and more privatized approach to funding universities that would place greater reliance on parental finance of teaching, and federal and private foundation finance of research. In any event, some solution seems urgent if the United States is to retain its preeminence in higher education, and subsequently in academic and industrial science, technology, and innovation. (pages 349 - 382)
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Contributors
Author Index
Subject Index
