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Graduate programs throughout the world are faced with a paradox.
There are more candidates than ever ready and willing to do research. And yet, research productivity is declining.
There could be many reasons for these facts, some indicating a need for reform and some not.
On the needs reform side:
There is a bolus of older professors recruited during the 60s and 70s who have aged out of their productive years and are taking up research dollars and tenured positions. "Science advances one funeral at a time." This is a solvable problem through reform.
High impact research follows a power law distribution, with a small number of researchers generating most meaningful research. Graduate schools are casting too wide a net and recruiting those who have no business attempting a career in research. How did graduate schools before the 1960s identify high impact researchers from a smaller pool of candidates? Why are we unable to filter out low impact researchers earlier?
On the does not need reform side:
Research is actually doing fine. Fields like CS and biology are making great strides because they are tilling fertile soil. Other fields like particle physics and aeronautical engineering are tilling exhausted soil. The humanities are worse; there is nothing more to say about most creative works. There is no quick way to rejuvenate these fields; we just have to wait for oddball breakthroughs to open new frontiers. Reform won't change anything. We have to surf the wave of discovery that the universe provides us. And the best way to be prepared for new discoveries is going through a PhD program.
2. Research is doing fine in some fields, indicating that nothing is broken about the research enterprise. Declining research productivity on the whole is due to newer ideas becoming harder to discover in most fields, due to the maturity of those fields. But in those fields that are less mature, research is proceeding as in the past. I don't have any citation, but it's a concensus that biology in particular is in a golden age, while CS while in a not-as-revolutionary time is still making solid gains.
2. Research is doing fine in some fields, indicating that nothing is broken about the research enterprise. Declining research productivity on the whole is due to newer ideas becoming harder to discover in most fields, due to the maturity of those fields. But in those fields that are less mature, research is proceeding as in the past. I don't have any citation, but it's a concensus that biology in particular is in a golden age, while CS while in a not-as-revolutionary time is still making solid gains.
1 is a fact, 2 is a potential explanation.
Decreasing marginal return in mature fields is nothing new. That makes it harder to obtain academic grants, and the private sector has different evaluation criteria.
Quote:
Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?â€
By Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen,
and Michael Webb*
Long-run growth in many models is the product of two terms: the
effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We
present evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. A good example is Moore’s Law. The
number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling of computer chip density is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s. More generally, everywhere we
look we find that ideas, and the exponential growth they imply, are
getting harder to find. (JEL D24, E23, O31, O47)
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