After a year’s worth of work, an advisory committee of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has completed a comprehensive study of the biomedical research workforce and concluded, in part, that, "The most effective training dollars that the NIH has to expend are those in their training grants." The advisory committee headed by Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman recently presented a number of recommendations to the NIH’s Advisory Committee to the Director and called upon NIH to divert funding from research grants to training grants for graduate students. The advisory group also urged NIH to support more postdocs on training grants and to increase the pay and improve the benefits for postdocs. Dr. Tilghman noted that continuing the same system at the graduate level of training at this country’s universities is unsustainable. She said, "There is a mismatch between the training that most graduate students receive and the careers most PhD graduates end up taking." Moreover, she explained that the number of academic jobs has shrunk dramatically compared to the number of new graduates. The growth of jobs for PhD biomedical scientists is outside academia. She also said that because of this shift, graduates must be prepared to work in industry, government, or in positions tangentially related to their degrees. The committee recommended that competitive fellowships and institutional traineeships be enhanced and students be given more independence and flexibility to develop into productive scientists. The advisory committee also said students must be given more opportunities to learn about careers outside of the academic community. The other key recommendations include the following:
- Graduate students should be limited to six years of NIH funding.
- Training should include management and entrepreneurship.
- Support should be increased for training grants and fellowships, not the number of positions supported.
- Postdoc stipends must be increased from $39,264 to $42,000.
- NIH-funded institutions should track student careers.
- Scientists should be moved into independent careers faster.
- Universities should be encouraged to support staff scientists.
- NIH training programs should be reorganized.
The Working Committee recommended that NIH take funding from R01 grants and spend it on boosting the number of training grants. Regarding the impact of increasing training grants, Dr. Tilghman said, "We think this will increase the overall quality of training of graduate students around the country."
In response to the Committee’s report, Director of NIH Francis Collins recommended that pilot-scale experimentation be conducted to assess the consequences of putting more resources into training grants.