Doctoral education: Another tragedy of the commons?

The Commission on the Future of Graduate Education in the Pharmaceutical Sciences report published in the journal provided an overview of the state of graduate education in the biomedical and pharmaceutical sciences through 1998. The report's authors have continued to closely follow graduate education in these areas and express concern that the recent dramatic increases in the federal support of biomedical research, specifically the doubling of the NIH budget, is producing an excess of PhD graduates in the biomedical sciences. They suggest that these continual increases in program enrollment are primarily driven by personnel needs of the academic research enterprise itself (The Tragedy of the Commons), not by employment demands or most importantly, the educational needs of graduate students. The result is that too many biomedical science PhD graduates end up in increasingly prolonged postdoctoral positions. The PhD oversupply problem is driven to a great extent by the unlimited supply of talented foreign students, which negates the role of market factors in moderating demand for graduate education, and obfuscates the decrease in academic preparation and interest of U.S. students in graduate study in the sciences. The authors provide recommendations for addressing the problems raised in this report.