Students are unsung heroes of university research, and federal research funding cuts hurt them most

Yahoo

3 days ago

Old Main building in the main campus of Penn State University, State College. (Getty Images)
One of my doctoral students recently graduated, and with his experience as a student researcher, he secured a job in a research lab at a large information technology company.
That's part of how federal research funding makes an impact: it provides crucial support to train the next generation of scientists, engineers, inventors, and entrepreneurs.
Sharp reductions in funding to the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are in the news, and much more depends on their funding than the creation of knowledge. We risk not only lost research, but also lost training for highly skilled labor, with repercussions that may never be fully remedied.
I'm an associate professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State, and I frequently encounter misconceptions when I talk about what it's like to perform research as a professor. Many people think that professors do all of the work of research, with students having minimal or no involvement. Within STEM (science technology, engineering, and mathematics), that's far from the truth. Modern research is labor-intensive and requires the involvement of many people, especially students.
It's common for a research-active professor to have several students working with them on projects. Professors know the landscape of their subject area and they use that knowledge to identify productive research topics, to guide students through developing them, and to help them create impactful results.
Students run experiments, collect samples and data, and analyze results, among other tasks. Professors sometimes say that their students run individual projects, while the professor provides strategic leadership and runs the lab.
Research grants pay for the expenses of research, and student salaries and tuition are two of the largest expenses. In the grants I receive, they're the largest direct costs by far. Many STEM graduate students, especially doctoral students, are employed as research assistants. These positions pay a small salary to perform research and typically cover tuition and benefits too. Without that financial support, these students wouldn't be able to devote five or six years to the research activities and training necessary for a doctoral degree.
Toward workforce development, research is one of the most effective — and personally rewarding –ways that we can train students for future STEM careers. Student researchers learn how to tackle difficult problems for which there are no answer keys, because research is the process of creating the answers.
They learn to work in collaborative teams, give presentations, write well, and integrate feedback on their work. All of this happens in a hands-on, open-ended setting that course-based learning does not provide.
The benefits to students exceed those, even. Graduate student researchers build professional networks by collaborating and attending conferences. Undergraduate researchers get intellectual enrichment beyond what coursework can provide, as well as a preview of what graduate school is like.
Anecdotally, regardless of their career paths, many student researchers also report high satisfaction with their work. The knowledge that one researcher creates might be modest, but the aggregation of that knowledge –across many researchers, over time — improves our understanding of the natural world and produces new technologies to benefit humanity.
Replacing academic research with corporate research is sometimes floated as an option, but this is infeasible for multiple reasons. One is the distinction between applied research and basic research. Applied research is focused on creating knowledge specifically to enable new products and services.
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In contrast, basic research expands what humanity knows or what we can do, both in a broad sense. Applied research relies upon people trained in an environment of basic research, where they have the freedom to think creatively and study fundamental problems.
Research universities provide that environment.
Beyond that distinction, the costs of training researchers make it unlikely for companies to provide the same experience universities are built to offer. Doctoral students spend several years learning how to perform research, and during that equivalent time in a company, they would contribute little—if anything—to the company's bottom line. Except at a few very large companies, creating a robust learning environment doesn't fit into industry structure or goals, while universities are designed around education.
I already see the repercussions of uncertainty in the funding landscape: one of my master's students lost a research assistantship that he expected to receive this fall. This is one example among many of a growing disruption in our universities' abilities to produce skilled researchers. This production can withstand small disruptions, but a large one like we're witnessing puts it in serious peril.
We depend on student researchers for many advancements in science and technology, and they depend on us to support their work. Pennsylvania's legislators and our representatives in Congress can play their role by standing up for NSF and NIH funding.
Shomir Wilson is an associate professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University, where he leads the Human Language Technologies Lab. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland in 2011, and has worked or studied at nine universities across four continents. He writes from State College. Readers may email him at [e-mail] and follow him on Bluesky at ‪@shomir.bsky.social‬.
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