Teaching graduate students is an important — and typically rewarding — part of our mission as academic researchers. Each of us shares the goal of creating the “stimulating environment for training” that NSERC vice-president Isabelle Blain described in a letter published in the November issue of the Bulletin. But what should we do when the steps we are asked to take in pursuit of this goal are counterproductive?

NSERC recently introduced changes in its evaluation of training within the Discovery Grants competition. NSERC’s new policy is reminiscent of the old joke that the beatings will continue until morale improves — professors who cannot afford to support graduate students will see funding cuts until their training productivity increases.

Under the current grant evaluation scheme, one third of an applicant’s score (which determines the funding level) is made up from their past contributions to the training of Highly Qualified Personnel (HQP). The training score is strongly influenced by the cost of supporting graduate students.

I have reviewed enough NSERC grant applications to know that typically two-thirds of the budget of a grant goes to student support. But this cost is highly heterogeneous across Canada. Some institutions and provinces have strong financial support for graduate students and low tuition — others, the opposite.

From this uneven playing field, NSERC inevitably rewards researchers who are fortunate enough to work in more supportive institutions, because they can afford to support more students. At the same time, NSERC seems not to have engaged the universities in meaningful dialogue over graduate tuition and support. NSERC may feel that setting graduate tuition levels is a university prerogative. Yet from the universities’ perspective, there is little incentive to reduce tuition or increase graduate support. The researchers’ feet are to the fire with NSERC demanding HQP — they have no choice but to fund the stipend and tuition asked by their universities. Thus the researchers and students who are carrying out scientific research are trapped between two competing agendas at NSERC and in our university administrations.

Perhaps more distressing, is that the present system reduces HQP (i.e., “students,” or dare I say “people”) to the status of points in a competition. This creates perverse incentives. First, the situation occurs in which researchers who do excellent research with insufficient training will receive the same funding as those who train numerous students to do weaker research. It is debatable whether such a policy truly advances Canada’s scientific excellence.

More important though, this will inevitably tend to reward researchers who dilute the student experience. There are varying levels of this dilution, from simple “degree inflation” to, in the worst case, using graduate students as cheap labour. Graduate training in the sciences has always been an apprenticeship in which students learn by doing, gradually taking on more and more independence.

It is generally acknowledged that students’ work contributes greatly to the publication record of their advisors, and administrators typically describe graduate students as “essential” to the research mission of the university (leaving it unclear why tuition is so high and funding so low at many institutions). So there is already an incentive to use graduate students as means to an end, and the greater the proportion of a researcher’s grant that must go to student stipends, the greater is the incentive to turn learning by doing into earning by doing.

NSERC policy then doubles down by awarding bonus points to those researchers who have attracted the largest stable of workers. When any measure becomes a formal indicator of productivity, rewarded by administrators and funding agencies, researchers seek to boost their scores on those indicators. The emphasis on bibliometric measures of productivity has produced a widely-recognized trend towards the least publishable unit — smaller findings being published with more coauthors, as each seeks to maximize their publication list.

Since the number of students trained is now a measure of academic productivity alongside publications, it encourages a similar dilution of graduate training. Salami publishing (so called for the thinly-sliced output) is an inconvenience. By contrast, diluting student training shortchanges young people already living on minimal stipends and facing an expectation to contribute productivity to the lab, when what they signed up for was a meaningful education.

To their credit, most professors resist this incentive, and they should be supported in this, not penalized. NSERC policy evaluating professors by the number of graduate students in their labs encourages salami training ana­logously to salami publishing, but far less ethical.

One of the major justifications for NSERC’s emphasis on training of HQP is the claim (arguably a motherhood statement) that such personnel benefit Canada. Certainly a well-educated populace would be a great boon to any country, but I sense the argument is more financial than democratic: that a shortage of HQP is limiting economic development.

Business interests always seek a larger pool of labour. This keeps labour costs down, while allowing employers to be more selective. But the claim of a shortage is increasingly questioned. For business to assert a demand for HQP, they must not only desire the HQP, but also be willing to pay them. This is the very definition of demand in the economic sense. Yet businesses do not appear willing to pay for qualified personnel.

Ten years ago, Freeman et al (2001) docu­mented reduced lifetime earnings in doctoral bioscience employment due to oversupply, and the situation does not appear to have changed. Indeed, the “evidence” for a shor­tage seems based primarily on the fact that those with the highest educations are most likely to get hired. Both of these observations imply a glut of skilled labour competing for limited opportunities, rather than a shortage.

Such a glut is beneficial for business, but detrimental to students — the same students who have just graduated from training programs in which they contributed to lab productivity for minimal stipends. An increasing number of scientists are starting to question the ethics of continuing to produce “a pool of low-cost research lab workers with limited career prospects.”

In 2007, the Sloan Foundation’s Michael Teitelbaum presented testimony to a U.S. congressional committee that “there are substantially more scientists and engineers graduating from U.S. universities than can find attractive career openings.” In 2003, Norman Matloff argued in the University of Michigan Law Review that business claims of a shortage of qualified IT workers is part of a lobbying effort for more favourable regulations. The situation in Canada is unlikely to be vastly different.

It’s long overdue for academics and academia to do a little soul searching on this. Do we train graduate students because it’s good for the students or because it’s good for us? NSERC seeks to increase training by making training beneficial to researchers. A far more constructive policy would treat HQP as people to be supported rather than beans to be counted.

Discussions with universities over fair levels of tuition and support would be more constructive than squeezing researchers between universities and NSERC. Awarding grants solely on scientific merit would mean that the best scientists would be best able to accept more graduate students — a far more desirable situation than incentivizing inflated HQP numbers.

But if NSERC continues its present policy, individual researchers must decide how to approach graduate training within that system. For me, NSERC incentives are ultimately trumped by the fact that I work alongside my students, and see them as my friends and future colleagues. I will gladly continue to train students but only when I can offer them a fair level of support — a liveable take-home stipend, the equipment and supplies they need in the lab, and reasonable prospects for success on graduation.

This will inevitably keep my lab small, for which I will no doubt be penalized by NSERC. But having thought carefully about NSERC’s policies that is the choice I make.

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Robert Latta is a biology professor at Dalhousie University.

The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily CAUT.

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L’ACPPU invite les lecteurs à soumettre des articles de 800 à 1 500 mots qui portent sur des questions d’actualité liées directement à l’enseignement post-secondaire. Les articles ne doivent traiter ni de dossiers de griefs particuliers ni de questions d’intérêt strictement local. Ils ne doivent pas comporter des allégations non fondées ni des propos diffamants, calomniateurs ou offensants envers des personnes ou des groupes. Les articles peuvent être soumis en français ou en anglais, mais ils ne seront pas traduits. L’ACPPU se réserve le droit de choisir les articles qui seront publiés. La rédaction ne communiquera avec les auteurs de commentaires que si elle décide de publier leurs articles. Les commentaires doivent être adressés à Liza Duhaime.