I found Friday's Colloquium very interesting. I learnt a lot I did not know about the Federal Government's budget process. The speaker, Kevin Marvel, Executive Director of the American Astronomical Society, conveyed a lot of information, as well as a good take-home message, in his 50 minutes. He is obviously very well-practiced at doing this sort of thing! He does, after all, talk to persuade, for a living. I think of him as the Nick Nailor of science. And so it is no surprise that his talk was bang on 50 minutes, and entertaining to boot. Also, as one student said to me: "He was very well-dressed, not like a normal scientist at all".
I claim you could hear a sharp intake of breath in the room as he said "Science funding by the US government is optional". I believe it's really important to remember this. With 3 trillion dollars in the budget annually, it seems like the US has plenty of money to spend on science. But after you say that 50-60% of that needs to go to non-discretionary expenditure (e.g. Medicare, Social Security, interest on the national debt) and half of what's left goes to the Department of Defence, well, suddenly $3 trillion just doesn't go as far as it used to.
Science has always depended on patrons for its practice. Tycho Brahe had the King of Denmark, we have the US Federal Government. The non-defence part of R&D spending is about 2% of the budget: which is a higher fraction of GDP than most other (maybe all other?) countries. 2% doesn't sound like much, until you consider that this is competing with Foreign Aid (which receives an even smaller share of the budget than R&D), support for single mothers, road building, funding for schools, etc. etc. etc. Which should lead you to ask: Why does the US consider it worth its while to spend 10s of billions of dollars each year on scientific research?
And make no mistake, our Department benefits from that decision on a day-to-day basis. We
receives about $3 million annually in external funding, most of it from the Federal Government. We get 0.0001% of the total federal budget! Go us! But seriously, that money is crucial to the health of our program. It funds roughly 50% of the graduate students in the Department. It funds almost all the post-docs in the Department. And it funds about 20% of most faculty salaries. So the issues Dr Marvel was discussing are crucial to all of us. If the Federal Government decided tomorrow it could no longer afford to support scientific research many of you who are reading this blog would be out of a job. And your career prospects would take a huge nosedive. So what, then, should be our stance as regards this huge, somewhat capricious, organization with which all of our futures are interwoven?
3 comments:
If you think about it, most of us can easily be guaranteed decent paying jobs in industry once we graduate (regardless of our focus). Yet there are graduate students who pay to go to school in majors that once they graduate will struggle to find a job. So we're sitting pretty good, and we should be thankful for being paid to go to school.
Yeah, that's an interesting point. I think you're right that physics gradaute students are in a pretty good situation. I have friends who've paid a lot of money to go to graduate school to get, for instance, an MBA. And then there are grad. students in the humanities, who get roughly 2/3 of the pay of a physics grad. student and to earn that pay have to act as the instructor of record for their classes.
On a slightly different note: if you look at "Where are they now" you'll see that a majority of our grad students go, at least in the short term, into post-doc positions, not into industry positions. In these cases their dependence on Federal money continues. Those jobs in industry may be there, but they are not necessarily where everyone is going.
Yeah I was addressing the issue if federal money were to be removed that it would still be easier to "access" a degree in physics finacially. I always enjoy reading through that list to see the "non related" jobs people get after the program.
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