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A few years ago, with information from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), we reported that the Triangle was one of the regions in the world with the highest number of Ph.Ds per capita.
It offered a sense of pride for all of us knowing there’s a lot of good work being done at our universities and research consortiums with researchers from all sectors finding the key to the next gadget or drug that would make the world a better place to live.
Already, the United States is tied with European countries when it comes to being a highly educated population. About 2 percent of the U.S. population holds a Ph.D., and men are more likely than women to have a Ph.D. in this country.
But there’s something happening in that field that should give all of us pause. While it is still not at a red-hot alarming stage, reporter Zac Ezzone uncovered in his centerpiece story this week that the researcher turnover rate at many universities is running higher than usual. Ezzone honed in on the University of North Carolina system, where he found that the system’s turnover rate for voluntary separations and retirements was trending around 15.5 percent earlier this year, far above the 8.9 percent recorded in the previous years. A separate report presented to the Board of Governors noted that the system lost 585 faculty members between July 2021 and January 2022.
The UNC system is not alone in this. More and more universities across the board are losing faculty positions. The American Association of University Professors’ annual faculty salary survey report shows a slight 0.6 percent dip in overall faculty headcounts between fall 2019 and fall 2021, with bigger declines in associate’s and master’s degree-granting institutions.
According to Inside Higher Ed’s 2022 Survey of College and University Chief Academic Officers, 19 percent of provosts say faculty members are leaving at significantly higher rates than in the past. About 60 percent say they are leaving at somewhat higher rates.
But why?
For one, as Ezzone’s story points out, researchers are leaving universities as they are tired of bureaucracy and politics. Instead, they are going to the private sector, where they are given the resources such as money and time to come up with the next big thing. Companies capitalize the research through earnings releases by talking to research analysts about the potential. Stock price goes up, the market cap goes up and the research is paid for essentially by the investors. Until of course, we come to find out the research could not support the promise. Everything swoops down and the entire science team is let go.
For public universities, especially in the Triangle, this is dangerous. That’s because much of the universities’ basic research programs are funded by the federal government through the NIH, National Science Foundation, NASA, the Department of Defense, and a few others. Researchers, almost always, are able to leave with their research. That means less opportunity for a university’s tech transfer arm to monetize the research.
Every time a public university generates revenue through commercialization, it puts less pressure on state governments to use additional taxpayer money to finance the running of colleges.
We don’t know why this exodus of researchers is among us, especially right at the end of the pandemic – but we better find out quickly why.
Otherwise, the bragging rights of having the smartest people on the planet right in our own backyard may be short-lived.
Sougata Mukherjee is editor-in-chief of Triangle Business Journal. Reach him at sougata@bizjournals.com.