Capping Public Funding for Post Graduate Studies

They consume a fortune in public funds, but are they all worth the price?

Can data help us design a more selective - and fair - system of public funding for higher ed?

Call me naive, but I’m pretty sure there’s never been an elected politician or a senior bureaucrat who suddenly and unprompted sat up in his or her chair and exclaimed:

“Why, this is madness! We simply must increase funding for post graduate studies.”

That’s not how it works. My guess is that public officials are more interested in keeping the noisiest lobbyists just happy enough to keep the chaos to a minimum. Since there’s probably never been an organized movement of activists determined to reduce funding for any programs or even to maintain the status quo, the noisiest pro-funding lobbyists are the only ones who get fed.

Which would at least partly explain why funding only tends to increase.

For all intents and purposes, constraints are defined by university faculties, as they decide who gets into graduate programs and which dissertation topics are given the green light. But some of the stuff that comes out the other end can be crazy. Here are a few actual dissertation topics:

• A Web of One's Own: Situating the queer child in digital rights discourse

• A Distorted Mirror: Faith, Race, and Identity as Reflected in Spanish Diplomacy during the Reign of Charles V

• Experiences of YMCA Day Camp Counsellors and their Perceptions of Youth

Of course, that’s not to say that those specific dissertations should not have been written or contain no value. It’s possible that, had I asked them, their authors could have confidently demonstrated the soundness of their rationale and methodologies. Perhaps it’s only when taken out of context that the titles sound quite so outrageous. In fact, I have nothing against anyone pursuing any course of study on their own dime.

But as some very public academic trends suggest, there’s certainly no shortage of sanctioned nuttiness on campus these days. Considering how nearly 60,000 research doctorates were awarded by US institutions in 2022 alone - each at significant public cost - we absolutely do need limits.

Now I’m not suggesting that non-academics have anything useful to say about whether “Disentangling the roles of formant proximity and stimulus prototypicality on asymmetries in vowel perception” is groundbreaking, urgent, or even coherent. But I’m fairly sure most of us would agree that, from a whole-of-society policy perspective, the taxpayers who ultimately pay the bills should also have at least some input.

For the rest of this article, I’m going to share some numbers to demonstrate the scope of the problem, and then offer what might be the start of a filtering process to help us tame the graduate program beast.

How much does higher education cost?

A lot.

Specifically, in 2017, the US federal government spent around $74.8 billion, all 50 states together chipped in another $81.1 billion, and there was yet another $10.5 billion from local governments. Beyond that, there were $94 billion worth of federal student loans issued along with a half a billion more from states. As we all know, many of those loans will never be repaid, leaving taxpayers on the hook.

Those numbers cover all levels of higher education. But what does it cost an individual student to move through the system all the way from undergraduate to PhD, and how much of that cost is covered by public funds?

As a very rough estimate, the total cost - including tuition, books, and living expenses - will fall between $150,000 and $400,000. The lower end of that range represents students attending public colleges. That doesn’t mean that a public college education is necessarily cheaper to provide. Rather, the lower public-facing price tag simply excludes higher government funding levels.

In any case, multiply that by the 60,000 doctorates awarded each year in the US, and you’ll get a sense of the total annual cost of post graduate track studies.

What proportion of those costs come from public sources?

For our purposes, it’s not worth trying to nail down accurate estimates of the public portion responsible for each on-campus pencil sharpener and climbing wall. We’ll just take it as given that a substantial part of administration overheads are covered by government programs of one sort or another.

But it will be useful to look at how graduate students fund their own expenses. The 2021 numbers from the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) from the US National Science Foundation have a lot to tell us about cash flows.

23.9% of doctoral candidates in science and engineering disciplines reported “fellowships, scholarships, or dissertation grants” as their primary source of financial support, compared with 25.4% of those in non-science and engineering fields. Teaching assistantships were the primary support source for 20.2% and 25.3% of candidates, respectively.

78.1% of all male doctorate candidates and 89.8% of all women reported that fellowships, scholarships, or dissertation grants made up at least some of their financial support. A further 18.5% (men) and 27.1% (women) also relied at least in part on loans.

While the precise breakdown will vary from program to program and school to school, I think it’s fair to assume that the majority of those categories of funds come from governments rather than private grants and endowments.

Only 3.9% of science and engineering students and 7.1% of non-science and engineering students reported that their primary support came from employment.

I can’t resist pointing out one more tangentially-related data point from the SED report: The median time between graduating with a bachelor’s degree and completing a science or engineering doctorate is 8 years. But the median time for non-science candidates is 12.3 years. Curious.

How can we measure higher ed investment outcomes?

Despite all the ambiguity we’ve seen, I myself have a pretty clear sense of which kinds of research are useful for society and which are colossal money wasters. But my personal opinions aren’t important, so that’s the last you’ll hear about them in this space.

It would be nice if we had a simple algorithm that objectively assessed dissertation topic applications for social value and economic payback. But there isn’t. In its absence, we could build a checklist of metrics to serve as a proxy for value. This could be used as part of a filtering process powering a smarter funding mechanism.

Such a checklist might assign greater weight to fields whose measurable outcomes best match a set of ideal values. Our filter might favor: