The Drive for Doctorates

Until recently, the doctor's degree struck most Americans as pedantic claptrap. The Ph.D. was only academe's union card: a German import, first earned by three Yalemen in 1861. Few envisioned a day when it might become vital to the entire U.S. economy. That day is here. By 1960, Columbia Sociologist Bernard Berelson reported that Du Pont employed more Ph.D.s than Yale or Harvard, General Electric twice as many as Princeton, the Federal Government as many as the nation's top ten universities. And this is only the beginning. For every Ph.D. that it fails to educate the U.S. may soon pay a price of 100 or more unemployed people.

The link between doctorates and dollars is clear in the new science-oriented industries, aerospace, electronics and nucleonics, which more and more cities count on to create thousands of new jobs a year. Such industries thrive on brains and feed off universities. They need Ph.D.s in the executive suite as well as the laboratory, and the rough hiring equation is that one Ph.D. can back up five to ten engineers, while the engineers support 50 to 150 skilled workers.

100 per 1,000,000. Physicist Lloyd V. Berkner, "Father of the International Geophysical Year" and president of the new Graduate Research Center of the Southwest in Dallas, calculates that the U.S. needs 100 new doctorates a year per 1,000,000 people. This works out to 18,800 doctorates in 1963, compared with the 12,400 produced last year. Last week the National Academy of Sciences reported that by 1969 the annual output may double to 24,000--but only "if present trends continue," meaning that everything depends on expanded faculties and facilities across the country. What are the chances? On form, not bad.

As a long-range pattern, says the academy, production of research doctorates has been doubling every decade, and geographical distribution has vastly widened. In 1920, the national doctoral output was confined to 26 mostly Northern and Eastern states, with 66% of it in only ten universities. Now doctorates are bred in every state except Idaho and Nevada. The current top ten doctorate producers are Columbia, Illinois, Wisconsin, Harvard, Berkeley, N.Y.U., Michigan, Ohio State, Cornell and Minnesota.

Breeding Ph.D.s. Physicist Berkner estimates that 75,000 high school students a year are abler than the median winners of last year's doctorates. Will the bright kids go for Ph.D.s? Yes--if they attend top colleges that now send as many as 90% of their seniors to graduate school. Yes--if they live near a Berkeley or a Cambridge that inspires graduate study. Yes--if the U.S. can increase the number of "substantial" graduate schools (those that produce 250 or more doctorates a year). The U.S. still has only 20 such universities, confined to twelve states, and they turn out two-thirds of all Ph.D.s. To serve the entire country, says Berkner, the U.S. needs 75 "substantial" graduate schools right now.

No one can mass-produce good Ph.D.s. The only way to build what Stanford University Provost Frederick E. Terman calls "communities of technical scholars" is to pay big money for a few big stars. Then they can lure the lesser stars and brighter students that ultimately bring in whole industries. That idea is now getting urgent attention across the country. New research centers are being studied or built in Boston, Chicago and Detroit, in California, Florida, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Virginia and Wisconsin. Physicist Berkner's center in Dallas is off to a $25 million start as a "mecca for men of science and technology." By 1975, it aims to have 1,000 researchers working with Southwestern universities to breed 2,000 Ph.D.s yearly.

Finger of Fate. All this worries many thoughtful academicians. Biologist Caryl P. Haskins, president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington warned last week that Big Science crash projects threaten to create "massive imbalances" in U.S. research. The Ph.D. drive also alarms liberal arts colleges that cannot compete with big universities for research-minded students and professors. What is happening, asks Columbia University's Provost Jacques Barzun, "to the beautiful notion of developing the imaginative and the reasoning powers apart from marketable skill?" In a day when "one sheepskin to one sheep is no longer enough," he says, "the liberal arts tradition is dead or dying"--a victim of the pressure for college work in high school and for graduate work in college. "Sooner or later the college as we know it will find that it has no proper place in the scheme of things," says Barzun.

Yet equally important in the 1960s, perhaps, is the old prophecy of the late Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: "In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute: the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back the finger of fate. Today we maintain ourselves. Tomorrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated."

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