If the nation truly wants its ablest students to become scientists, Salzman says, it must undertake reforms — but not of the schools. Instead, it must reconstruct a career structure that will once again provide young Americans the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career.

Miller-McCune magazine has an excellent article by Beryl Lieff Benderly on the perverse incentives accompanying graduate education in the sciences (and, I would assume, in other fields as well). Simply put, doctoral students put in stupendous amounts of work for comparatively little pay – often into their late 30s – with the hope of securing a position in academia. However, the number of students receiving Ph.D.s every year is cruelly disproportionate to the number of positions available.

The result? A lot of high-level talent spends decades providing cheap labor before being bounced to another field, one that fails to reward their hard-earned expertise.