American scientists in variety of disciplines continue to struggle to start ______.

As policymakers warn that the United States is not training enough scientists to meet future needs, scientists in a variety of disciplines continue to struggle to start independent careers. What’s going on, and what can we do to fix things? We asked Representative Rush Holt, a scientist and one of Congress’s champions of science, to share his views.
    Rush Holt, a physicist and one of a few scientists in the U.S. Congress, has served in the House of Representatives for ’almost 8 years.
    Science Careers officer: Several studies over the last few years have suggested that the United States is not training enough scientists, in particular U.S.-born scientists and engineers, to meet future needs. I was wondering what you see in these trends.
    Rush Holt: I guess I would say I see a lot of questionable numbers about how many scientists we’re producing and what constitutes a scientist and an engineer compared with China and other countries. But I think it is clear that we are producing far fewer scientists and engineers than we can use productively, and that we can absorb and use in our economy. To put it another way, you never have too many scientists and engineers. You hear from scientists sometimes that there is a glut of scientists and "1 had to work outside my chosen field". Gee, I don’t see that as a tragedy. It’s true that there is sometimes a glut of scientists in one subfield or another. But I don’t think at any point that we have produced too many scientists. What I think we need is better support for graduate students, but that’s a little more complicated, a little harder to figure out what the right thing to do is. How do we get the sponsoring agencies and the supervising groupleaders to treat postdocs like full-fledged professionals?
    S.C. officer: How do we then funnel the fight number of students into the tight number of graduate programs? As I know you are aware, getting a graduate degree in the sciences is a huge time investment and an investment in resources, too.
    R.H.: I know, and I wish I had a better answer for you. There are market forces, and they work to a large extent. The problem is that there’s a time lag of 3 to 5 years, and it makes for an inefficient allocation of people. I’m from an era where it was possible to shift subfields. I would like to believe that’s still true.
    S.C. officer: How do you think we might help facilitate that sort of flexibility?
    R.H.: I don’t know. I don’t have legislation to suggest or directives for the NIH and NSF and NASA and NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and so forth. It is something that I am wrestling with and that I hope to be able to produce some policy suggestions.
    S.C. officer: What do you think is the impact of foreign scientists on the job market for U.S. scientists?
    R.H.: There certainly is a lot of competition now, more than ever. Generally speaking, I think we as a nation do better if we are not protectionists. I think it was Pat Schroeder who said, "You win the Indianapolis 500 not by spreading nails on the track but by building fatter cars". I think the protectionistic view and jingoistic view is not the most productive. We should not make it as hard as we are now making it for students to study here. By discouraging study for foreign students here, it’s hard to get visas, that kind of thing, we have created institutions in other parts of the world that are just as attractive as the institutions in the U.S. used to be. So we’ve kind of fed the competition by some of our restrictions. In fairness, a lot of those restrictions are easing, but a lot of damage has been done.
    S.C. officer: There are people out there clearly with the protectionist viewpoint that foreign scientists who are willing to work for lower wages are limiting opportunities for U.S. scientists. What’s your feeling on that?
    R.H.: That there certainly is some of that, but we can’t stop other countries from producing scientists. What are you going to do? We’re just going to have to do better, that’s all, continually do better as we have over the years. Traditionally, science in the United States has bested the competition. That’s not to say that there haven’t been good scientists and good research institutes in other countries both in Europe and in the developing world. But traditionally, over the decades, the United States has done better. It’s easy to say, but we’ll just have to continue to do better. I think that is the right prescription. There’s no way that we can punish the other countries for producing competition in science and technology.