Trends in Federal Support of Research and Graduate Education (2001) / Chapter Skim
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6 Findings, Conclusions, and Recommendations
6 Findings, Conclusions, and Recommendations
Pages 85-92
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From page 85... ...
More recent actions on federal budgets for research, including doubling of the NIH budget over the 5 years ending in FY 2003, will increase the current divergence between the life sciences and other fields unless other fields receive substantially larger increases than proposed. More specifically, whereas 12 of the 22 fields examined had suffered real loss of support in the mid-199Os (four by 20 percent or more)
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From page 86... ...
Fields in which federal funding for university research was down from 1993 to 1997 have nearly all had declines in both graduate enrollments and doctorate recipients from 1993 to 1999. Fields with increasing federal funding for university research, however, exhibit a range of divergent trends in graduate enrollment and doctorate production.
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From page 87... ...
In the medical sciences overall graduate enrollment and the number of RAs in particular grew nearly 40 percent. Trencis in Nonfecleral Research Support Together, states, philanthropies, foundations, other nonprofit institutions, and industry are sources of 63 percent of the nation's basic and applied research spending, and their share increased in the 1990s as federal expenditures reached a plateau.
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From page 88... ...
Curtailing research in a field may constrict the supply of trained people who are capable of exploiting emerging research opportunities. This effect is both direct, in that federal funding of university research supports the education of a significant number of graduate students in most fields, and indirect, in signaling to prospective graduate students that some fields offer poor career opportunities.
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From page 89... ...
As a result, the President' s budget proposal that year did provide increased funding for some agencies, in part to bolster support of certain fields.~° In the early 1970s, in circumstances similar to current ones, when funding for physical sciences and engineering research was reduced by cuts in the DOD, NASA, and Atomic Energy Commission budgets, OMB and Congress encouraged NSF to seek additional funding equal to about 10 percent of its budget to support scientifically valuable programs that were being dropped by other agencies. The appropriators obliged.
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From page 90... ...
in-depth qualitative case studies of selected fields, taking into account not only funding trends across federal agencies and nonfederal supporters and international comparisons but also subtler differences in the foci, time horizons, and other research characteristics that are obscured by quantitative data; (2) studies of agency research portfolios and i2National Research Council.
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From page 91... ...
, employment demands for trained personnel by field, and nonfederal sources of graduate support. One important question to address is the extent to which federal research funding determines the number of advanced science and engineering degrees produced, compared with the need for such personnel in the workforce.
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From page 92... ...
interested in the role of federal research in technological innovation, could fund or jointly fund such analyses. Recommendation 11.
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