Top-Flight Research At Small Colleges Merits More Recognition, More Support

Last month, I had the pleasure of speaking at a Bethesda, Md., meeting of scientists, college administrators, funding agency officials, and others on a subject that has long been of paramount interest to me: the value of undergraduate research at small liberal arts colleges. The meeting was part of a twoday program cosponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Council on Undergraduate Resemch (CUR). The council’s 2,000plus membership, for the most part, is composed of science faculty and administrators at undergraduate schools throughout the United States. It had organized the event with the aim of stimulating dialogue among its own members and representatives of NIH and NSF on the subject of funding opportunities and grant administration policies as they pertain to the smaller colleges and universities. Earlier this year in The Scientist (Feb. 22, 1993, page 10), CUR’s immediate past president, Laura Mays Hoopes, offered cogent, qualitative arguments in support of her recommendation that undergraduates be drawn into “high-risk but low-budget experiments that can launch whole new fields of investigation.” I agree that hands-on research is immensely important as a means of encouraging young people to enter and remain in the science pipeline. Moreover, in my own studies I have found that undergraduate institution research, judging by the frequency with which it is cited in subsequent papers, is quite often of very high impact. Thus, it is important not only as a means to an end, but also as an end in itself. In my talk at the meeting, I reviewed some of my findings with the audience, and was therefore able to provide a quantitative complement to Hoopes’s views. Several years ago, at the Institute for Scientific Information, we did a citation analysis of the Oberlin Group-50 small colleges that produce a significant percentage of future Ph. D.’s. (A report on this analysis was published in the Aug. 17, 1987, edition of Current Contents under the title “Research and dedicated mentors nourish science careers at undergraduate institutions.”) In my talk at the recent gathering, I expanded the analysis to include many more schools—since CUR represents some 600 colleges. I demonstrated that many of these