Presidential Perspective
The Value of Undergraduate Research Programs
by James Gentile
President of Research Corporation
Many college administrators and professors today have warmed to the idea of undergraduate research as a significant value-added experience their schools can offer. Here’s why:
* First, it’s an exceptionally pure form of learning – for all students, not just the top end.
* Second, there’s plenty of evidence showing that if you want to attract, retain and sustain graduate students among women and people of color – folks traditionally under-represented in the sciences yet increasingly prevalent in our colleges -- the kind of mentoring that goes on in quality undergraduate research programs is fundamental because it gives these people a sense of place. It gives them an intimate one-on-one interaction with faculty who are seen more as colleagues struggling to solve problems, rather than as distant authority figures impersonally transmitting abstract information.
* Third, undergraduate research tends to emphasize for the student what his or her life in science would be like.
* Fourth, somewhere in the process, if all goes well, undergrads begin to think like scientists and ask questions like scientists.
As undergraduate research gains in popularity, however, the academic community should be asking one central question:
If this process is deemed a superior method for learning science, shouldn’t colleges and universities have fair and workable formulas for compensating faculty who mentor undergraduates in the laboratory?
The time demands are not insignificant – undergraduates require intensive training and close monitoring if they are to obtain maximum benefit from their experiences. Yet at most institutions busy researchers complain they have barely enough hours in the day to run their labs and teach their classes.
Beyond this chronic workload issue, however, is a strategic argument of utmost importance to the United States.
According to this argument, China and India, the 21st-centry’s 500-pound gorillas, are said to be churning out hundreds of thousands of science and engineering graduates each year. While recent studies indicate the startling academic statistics emanating from these Asian giants incorporate two-year degree programs often far inferior to U.S. programs, the point is nonetheless clear – America must diligently pursue excellence in scientific research if it hopes to remain ahead of an ever-burgeoning crowd.
Gail Burd, associate dean of the University of Arizona’s College of Science, observes that American universities currently may have the edge over a nation like China, where book learning dominates the undergraduate experience and most science students don’t get into the lab until they’re working on advanced degrees.
Contrast that approach with the UA, where there has been a long, grassroots tradition among professors of including undergraduates in hands-on research projects.
“To maintain our edge in research, we have to be doers, not just thinkers, not just readers,” Burd says. “We need people who are actually going to do the science.”
A phenomenal 60 percent of the 3,000 or so UA students within the College of Science are doing undergraduate research. And of those students, about 65 or 70 percent have done it for more than one semester.
Those of us who have seen how undergraduates respond to real research opportunities, not just washing test tubes, understand the great value it holds for our nation’s future. These are sophomores, juniors and seniors who are confident they can hold their own in most research teams, who truly understand how science is done, and who see real world problems in three dimensions rather than filtered through one-dimensional textbook jargon. They know first-hand that there are numerous ways to think about an issue and approach an experiment.
Their growing ranks most assuredly constitute a priceless national “brain trust” of seasoned realists increasingly capable of facing immense challenges in the coming decades. In days gone by, of course, we simply called it good, old American know-how.
So how should our nation’s system of higher education be compensating those who foster this superior form of learning?
The question has been asked and answered – at least in one form -- at the College of Wooster, which President R. Stanton Hales notes has a 59-year tradition of tutorial education and independent study, a program Woosterites refer to simply as “I.S.”
I.S. at Wooster is applied across all disciplines, including the humanities. Under the program, a senior is required to spend one quarter of the final year doing some form of creative work appropriate to his or her discipline – in the case of the sciences, perhaps that means writing a publishable scientific paper.
Hales says I.S. advisors typically meet one-on-one with their students for one hour a week throughout the year to discuss and review their latest efforts. Once the I.S. thesis is submitted in late March, a copy goes to a second reader, and every senior spends a tense April working up an oral defense with both readers and often with other members of the department as well. A final version of the project is filed with the Registrar.
“We certainly have found that I.S. is an expensive model,” Hales admits, noting that from its inception faculty were concerned about teaching load.
“The necessary solutions were twofold,” he says. “The first was to build I.S. formally into teaching load calculations. In our system, which until recently was a standard 3-3 teaching load, each I.S. enrollment counts 1/10 of a course, so that five students carried across the academic year equal one course. Thus, a typically full-time teaching load might be five regular courses and one course worth of I.S. Some departments do four regular courses plus a double I.S. load. The new annual load for tenure-track faculty is 5.5 courses, on our way we hope to five, so that then a typical load might be 2-2 plus a full I.S. load of five students carried across the year.”
For the second part of the solution, he says, Wooster established a program making faculty eligible for full-pay leaves every five years.
“A mild limitation on the number of such leaves makes this program at times competitive,” he adds, “but the great majority of applicants are approved. It’s an expensive but very valuable leave program.”
Obviously the Wooster system might prove to be a hard sell at taxpayer-supported institutions and at private colleges which are not as well endowed. That’s where a private organization such as the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust can be of assistance in promoting undergraduate research.
John Van Zytveld, senior program director for Murdock, says the Murdock College Science Research Program, operational since 1992, “probably more than anything else that we’ve done, or that anyone else has done in the Pacific Northwest, for that matter, has raised the quality of undergraduate research.”
So far the trust has given a total of nine grants to institutions chosen by invitation only.
“We have a group of consultants that advises on these grants,” Van Zytveld says. “And the institutions have to be in a position of having at least one rather strong department and one that’s at least close to reaching that point, and maybe a third or fourth that can be pulled up by their fellows. But at least they should be in a good position where three years of fairly strong funding at a level of $300,000 to $400,000 can go a long way to creating a sustainable undergraduate research program. And then, in almost every case, we’ve provided three additional years at about half funding to nail it down.”
Here at Research Corporation, the Cottrell College Science Awards are made in support of significant research that contributes to the advancement of science and to the professional and scholarly development of faculty at undergraduate institutions along with their students. In addition, the Cottrell Scholar Awards are for beginning faculty members who wish to excel at both research and teaching, which often includes undergraduate research.
These are just a few examples of a wide range of programs available to colleges and universities looking to improve undergraduate research programs – a process that must be accelerated in the coming years.
“Undergraduate research is important for a variety of reasons,” Van Zytveld observes. “From a student perspective it’s really the only way that a student gets to know what science is all about. Science is not a textbook; science is a search for new knowledge, new information, new understanding by a community of scholars. And so a student should get the feeling that’s what he or she is doing in the larger realm of ideas and understanding. What that means is that the choice of topic is extremely important -- it has to be interesting to the student or faculty person, but it also has to be interesting to the larger scientific community. So you can’t just do anything you feel like doing, you can’t just do anything that hasn’t been done before. But you’d better do something that’s going to be of interest to people.
“The second thing is you’ve got to do a good job at it.
“And the third thing is you have to report what you’re doing to other people. Because, after all, that’s the whole reason for doing it, so that you can bring the entire scientific enterprise, the enterprise of knowledge, forward.
“And then for the faculty, faculty can supervise all kinds of student projects, but the kind of research that the faculty supervises the students for that is of the greatest value is research that also builds the faculty person’s professional expertise at the same time. And that’s original research.”
As a nation facing increasing global competition on all fronts, can we expect anything less from our system of higher education?