Students, Research, and Grants: An Explainer
Research is the process of creating new human knowledge, and federal research funding has been in the news, with sharp reductions in grants issued by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Within universities, those grants serve a dual purpose. In addition to supporting the creation of knowledge, they provide financial support and training to student researchers. Those students perform much of the labor of research.
I’ve written this explainer to answer questions about how students, research, and grants are all related. Toward the end I also cover some questions about international students. I am an Associate Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University, a large land-grant university with a strong research mission. I can speak as a researcher in computing (an umbrella term that covers several related disciplines), but much of the explanation below applies across other disciplines in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
How are students part of STEM research at universities?
Students often perform many, or most, of the hands-on activities of research. These activities include running experiments, collecting samples or data, analyzing results, and leading the preparation of manuscripts for publication. In computing, the importance of students is reflected by the fact that they are often listed as the first authors on publications, while faculty come later in the author list.
Graduate students are especially involved in making research happen; those are the students seeking degrees beyond the bachelor’s level, like the M.S. and the Ph.D. An M.S. gives a person advanced knowledge beyond the bachelor’s degree, through more in-depth courses and opportunities to specialize their education. The Ph.D. goes beyond the M.S. to prepare a person to lead research.
At a university with a strong research mission, it’s typical for a professor to have several students working with them. Professors sometimes say that their students run individual projects, while the professor provides strategic leadership and runs the lab.
Why don’t professors just do all the research?
Research tends to be done in teams, and professors and students have different roles. Through years of experience, professors know the landscape of their subject area, and they use that knowledge to identify productive research topics, to mentor students in productive research practices, to guide them around common pitfalls, and to help them create impactful results. Also, unlike students, professors are qualified to apply for grants to fund research, and the labor behind a successful grant application is significant.
However, professors are busy: in addition to research, they must teach courses and perform other activities to support the university and their scholarly communities. Teaching, research, and service is a standard triad of responsibilities that professors who engage in research often speak about.
What role do grants play in the graduate student experience?
Grant money pays for the expenses of research, and student labor is one of the largest expenses. (In my grant proposals, it’s the largest direct cost by far.) Many STEM graduate students, especially Ph.D. students, are employed as research assistants. These are part-time positions that pay a small salary to perform research and typically cover tuition too. Benefits like basic health and dental insurance are also common. Tuition, benefits, and salary contribute significantly to the overall research expense.
Other forms of financial support exist, like teaching assistantships and fellowships. In many STEM disciplines, including computing, it’s rare for a Ph.D. student at a major university not to receive a salary and tuition coverage somehow. However, research assistantships are desirable because they enable students to focus entirely on research, which allows them to make faster progress toward completing their degrees. This also enables faster research discoveries.
But I heard that people go into debt for graduate school. Graduate students are getting paid?
Some of them, yes. Otherwise it would be difficult for Ph.D. students in STEM to spend several years pursuing their degree. Research assistantships and other forms of graduate student support are less common for master’s students, who often have to pay their tuition and living expenses for the one or two years of school. Those forms of support are also harder to find outside of STEM, like in the liberal arts. Also, even when graduate students receive a salary, it tends to be low. Research assistants who are supporting families or live in expensive areas sometimes must find second jobs or take on loans.
What about undergraduate researchers?
Some undergraduates participate in research too. Some want to write undergraduate theses or build portfolios to apply for graduate school, while others try it just to see what it’s like. Paid undergraduate research positions exist, but the expectations for research output are much less, because undergraduates have to take more courses than graduate students and they’re still learning the basics of their discipline.
How do students benefit from being researchers?
Student researchers learn professional skills, like how to tackle difficult problems, collaborate in teams, give presentations, write well, and process feedback on their work. They also learn discipline-specific skills in a hands-on, open-ended setting that course-based learning doesn’t provide. Undergraduates who want to apply to graduate school get a preview of what it’s like before they commit. Graduate students build professional networks by collaborating with researchers at other institutions and presenting their work at conferences.
Anecdotally, many student researchers also report high satisfaction with having performed research. It gives them difficult, engaging problems to work on, and the result is new human knowledge. The knowledge that one researcher creates might be modest, but the aggregation of that knowledge — across many researchers, over time — improves our understanding of the natural world and produces new technologies to benefit humanity.
Let’s say private industry started making much larger investments in research. Could they replace grant-funded research at universities?
Assuming a huge increase in private spending on research, the human capital to perform research — in other words, the people who have the skills to do it — would still be a missing piece. Industry researchers, just like academic researchers, tend to get their training in graduate school. Research assistantships give students the time and support for that training. Without the research grants to universities, there would be far fewer research assistants. In turn, that means there would be far fewer graduates with research skills for companies to hire.
Could companies provide the same research training that universities provide?
The costs of the training process would make it unlikely for companies to provide the same experience. Ph.D. students dedicate several years to learning how to perform research, under the guidance of professors. During that equivalent time in a company, an employee who is a research trainee would contribute little — if anything — to a company’s bottom line. An employee standing in for a professor’s role would also perform fewer profitable activities, since they must spend time mentoring research trainees. This points to a larger problem: universities are designed around education and training, and replicating that environment doesn’t fit into industry structure or goals.
It’s also helpful to know a distinction between applied research and basic research. Applied research is focused on immediate goals, and most industry research fits into that category; the aim is to create knowledge as needed specifically for creating new products and services. In contrast, basic research isn’t pressured by immediate goals, and it’s more about expanding what humanity knows or what we can do, both in a broad sense. Basic research lays the foundation for applied research. Basic research is a strength of universities, and a basic research environment helps aspiring researchers to learn to think creatively. However, because companies are profit-oriented, basic research is a misfit activity for all but the very largest ones.
Why do so many graduate students at US universities come from outside the US?
The US doesn’t produce enough home-grown graduate students for its research. Within graduate degree programs in computing, international applicants often outnumber domestic applicants, and even if those programs admitted all the domestic applicants there still wouldn’t be enough research assistants. Incidentally, well-qualified domestic applicants are highly prized: they are eligible for more public and private fellowships than their international counterparts, reducing the financial load on universities and on professors’ grants.
There are other reasons international students are common. The US has very good universities, which attract graduate applicants from around the world but especially from countries that lack strong universities of their own. Also, master’s students typically have to pay their tuition (unlike Ph.D. students — see above), and the tuition money gives universities incentives to seek and admit master’s applicants beyond the U.S. This source of income is one of several that universities use to compensate for declining financial support from federal and state governments.
If research grants to US universities were sharply curtailed, would the international students simply go elsewhere?
Perhaps over time, but it would be difficult for other countries to create an equivalent number of opportunities for aspiring graduate students. For its sheer quantities of academic researchers and universities with strong research missions, the US stands alone. Without the funding, most of those aspiring researchers wouldn’t be trained, and most of the research wouldn’t happen.
Any views expressed in this article are mine alone and do not reflect my employer.
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