Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In 2012 over $63 billion was invested in U.S. university research and development (R&D) in the fields of science and engineering (S&E). These fields comprise the research foundation for the major knowledge- and technology-intensive industries of science, engineering, and social science, which are estimated to account for 40 percent of U.S. GDP.[1] As engines for basic and applied research, universities train the next generation of the S&E workforce, many of whom spin out firms from university labs, invent technologies, and spur innovations (e.g. Colyvas et al., 2002; Conti & Liu, 2015; Furman & MacGarvie, 2007; Stuart & Ding, 2006).

We focus on this group of emerging researchers as they enter the S&E workforce by examining the effect of R&D funding on early career productivity. We focus on a high quality sample of graduate students that either are award recipients or honorable mentions of the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). Funding students since 1952, this national program has a demonstrated history of supporting promising graduate students in S&E disciplines. Over the program’s tenure, roughly 50,000 of more than 500,000 applicants have received awards.[2] As of 2015, NSF offers $138,000 for the full award with a $34,000 annual stipend and $12,000 educational allowance to the recipient’s institution for three years.

To examine the impact of R&D funding in emerging researcher success, we built a unique dataset tracking early career development for a random sample of GRFP awardees and honorable mentions. We restricted the full sample to the three most prominent fields in the Life Sciences (LS) to control for discipline-specific norms, standards of success, and career paths that may vary across academic fields. The sample includes: Ecology & Evolutionary Biology (6.05% of total GRFP sample; 21.32% of LS GRFP sample); Biochemistry, Biophysics, & Structural Biology (5.83% of total; 20.54% of LS); and Biology, Integrated Biology, Integrated Biomedical Sciences, & Kinesiology (3.51% of total; 12.36% of LS). Three hundred students were selected from each sub-field: 150 awardees and 150 honorable mentions from between 1995 and 2005, yielding a sample of 900 students. We focus on three outcomes: degree completion (time to degree), research production (publications and citations), and professional placement. We gathered this data from the ProQuest Dissertation database, Scopus publication database, and online searches.

For all three outcomes we include controls for year, sub-field, gender, baccalaureate institution traits, and graduate institution traits. Preliminary descriptive statistics reveal that 93% of the sample completed their PhD. For first placement post-graduation, 58% went into higher education, 13% to industry, 11% to nonprofits, and 8% to government. Regarding type of position, 37% took an academic post-doc, 9% non-academic post-doc, 6% tenure-track faculty, 6% non-tenure track research faculty, 4% non-tenure track teaching faculty, and 14% non-academic researcher. Econometric analysis will be used to assess the impact of R&D funding on each of these outcomes. Analysis will illuminate the importance of early-career funding on research productivity.