Recent Research: Improving Recruitment/Retention Success with Elite Academic Life Scientists

The National Science Foundation tells of a record number of doctorates awarded at the same time the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) reports opportunities to secure tenure-track positions continue to shrink, the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association points out state support for higher education remains below Great Recession levels, and AAAS says many federal agency research budgets are only now approaching pre-sequestration levels of 2012.

Basic economics would tell us, for most labor markets, a glut of skilled workers while the number of available job opportunities falls would apply downward pressure on wages. However, an article by Peter Schmidt in the April 22 print edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education points out full professors at America’s universities have seen their salaries rise on average 9 percent above their 2007-2008 pre-recession levels, even after adjusting for inflation.

Why might this be happening? With their shrinking numbers, the existing class of productive full professors present a commodity few public and private research universities feel they can afford to lose in the pursuit of federal funding, endowment growth, sponsored R&D, prestige and the best students. Many state technology-based economic development strategies focus on endowed chairs and centers of excellence encompass the same thinking to sustain and grow their local research enterprise.

While full professors across the board are seeing nice salary bumps, an even more select group of university faculty are coveted at a still higher level. Call them eminent scholars, endowed chairs, distinguished scholars, center directors, or star scientists, this group of top academic researchers in key disciplines are the subject of university and state recruitment and retention efforts akin to the much-maligned gamesmanship of conventional economic development, but with one notable exception: the location and relocation of elite scientists is not a zero-sum game on the macro level because knowledge and innovation follow and increase. [SSTI has written before over the past 20 years on the importance and impact of star/full faculty on university R&D funding, research output, sponsored R&D, and the industry agglomeration effects of star faculty and anchor institutions.] 

University research foundations, endowments and administrations, as well as more than a dozen state TBED groups or higher education departments, provide seed funding to entice elite researchers to join a particular institution, often paying for lab space, equipment, students, junior faculty positions and trailing spousal support. Most often, the public funds must be matched by private and/or institution sources to show their commitment to the particular field of research. 

Competition for the best scholars is fierce across institutions, states and nations. For example, Canada invests an average of $265 million (CAD) ($209.5 million U.S.) annually to attract and retain more than 2,000 university research chairs – more than 30 percent from outside Canada. So understanding the particular motivations for the possible relocation decisions of star researchers can be extremely beneficial for the design of future recruitment policies. Herein lies the potential value of a recent NBER working paper by Pierre Azoulay, Ina Ganguli and Joshua S. Graff Zivin.

The Mobility of Elite Life Scientists: Professional and Personal Determinants, prepared with financial support from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation’s SciSIP program, explores the career histories of more than 10,000 top life scientists in the U.S. to identify significant influences on the mobility decisions of scientists. Elite status is defined as career academic scientists either being highly funded, highly cited, a top patenter, or a member of the National Academy of Sciences. NIH MERIT awardees, Howard Hughes Medical Investigators or early-career prize winners were added to the sample to include more early and mid-career scholars.

The findings may have policy implications for TBED and university practitioners concerned about when and who to target for retaining star faculty or wishing to recruit others.  For instance, scientists more likely to move are more productive in terms of their publication production than their peers. And the quality of the local peer environment – measured by local collaborating/co-authoring peer quality, quality of non-collaborator peers and geographic proximity – can deter moving if it is perceived as equal or higher to the environment at distant locations. 

When institutions are of similar status, family status seemed to only come into play negatively when children reach high school. Scientists, consistent with most families, recognize the social costs of relocating children during high school can result in significant disruptions in the child’s life.  As a result, there is an increased likelihood of relocating immediately prior to the oldest child entering high school or immediately following the youngest child completing school.  

Does the prestige or quality of an institution, measured by amount of NIH funding secured, impact the relocation decisions of elite life scientists? The authors find that is not the case, at least not for professional factors, suggesting “the professional drivers of scientific mobility are insensitive to the type of move, lending support to the notion that all moves in this sample of elite scientists are ‘voluntary’ and driven by the desire to locate near higher quality peers, irrespective of broader institutional quality.”

With regard to the family, however, elite scientists appeared more willing to uproot a high-school age child if the new research institution was of perceived higher quality and were less likely to relocate downward to a lower prestige institution if at least one child was in high school.

Recent changes to NIH policies making the transfer of research grants from one institution to another are presenting a strong deterrent to relocation. Earlier literature has shown the policies resulted in higher transaction costs

The Mobility of Elite Life Scientists: Professional and Personal Determinants: http://www.nber.org/papers/w21995