Why don't more economics students get SSHRC doctoral fellowships?

In 2017*, just seven economics PhD students were awarded SSHRC doctoral fellowships, according to data provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to the Canadian Economics Association. Put another way, only 1.6 percent of the 430 new SSHRC doctoral fellowships awarded that year went to students studying economics. 

The immediate cause of this lack of awards is a lack of economics PhD students applying for SSHRC funding. In the 2017* competition only 84 of the 4,141 people applying for doctoral fellowships were economics students. It is true that the economics applicants' success rate was slightly lower than average - 8.3% as compared to 10.4%. However bringing the economics success rate up to the overall average would only have resulted in another two awards.

The question then is, why don't more economics students apply? I can only speculate, but here are a few possibilities:

There may be relatively few SSHRC-eligible students studying economics in Canada. SSHRC doctoral fellowships are only available to Canadian citizens or permanent residents. In my university, international students comprise a good chunk of the incoming PhD class. Although many become permanent residents before they graduate, their permanent residency may come too late for SSHRC funding. Playing around with this University of Toronto web page suggests that, there too, relatively few Canadian citizens take economics PhDs.

Alternatively, it may be that economics students find it relatively costly to apply for SSHRC doctoral fellowships. The application process for SSHRC requires that students submit a "program of study". Applicants must: "Provide an outline of your doctoral thesis proposal, including the research question, context, objectives, methodology and contribution to the advancement of knowledge, and your special interests in the proposed area of research" (here). If my university is typical, economics graduate students have little opportunity to practice writing research proposals, do not have a clear thesis topic in place until the second or third year of their program, and struggle to articulate their methodology using accessible terminology. Faced with drafting a program of study, some students may simply give up.

Or possibly economics students rationally choose not to apply for SSHRC, knowing that their chances of success are low. But why would that be the case?

Perhaps the ability of the typical economics PhD student is, in truth, lower than the ability of the typical student in other disciplines. Economics students know this, so rationally choose not to apply for SSHRC funding. However economics PhDs do well in the job market. At UBC, a number of programs report the placements of selected recent PhD graduates - see, for example, economics, philosophy, history, sociology and this report. UBC's economics department lists more PhDs graduating and going on to professional careers related to their studies than any other arts or social sciences program that I could find. The professional success of economics students suggests that, if anything, their ability levels are higher than that of students in other programs.

Alternatively, perhaps the typical economics PhD student has a much more accurate assessment of their own ability level relative to their peers than the typical PhD student in other disciplines. The National Graduate Survey asks respondents, "Compared to the rest of your graduating class in your field(s) of study, did you rank academically in the top 10 percent/below the top 10 percent but in the top 25/..." Of the MA-level and above students asked this question in 2013, only about one percent admitted that they ranked in the bottom half of their graduating class (calculated from the NGS PUMF using ODESI's on-line analysis tool):

Evaluation of students in economics is more exam based than in most other arts and social science disciplines. If professors announce the distribution of exam scores, students will have a relatively good idea where they rank relative to their peers. Economics students who know they are not among the  best in their program might rationally choose not to apply for SSHRC funding. The problem with this theory, however, is that it is not consistent with the lower-than-average success rate of economics students applying to SSHRC. If only the best economics students applied, one would expect the economics success rate to be relatively high.

A final possibility is that economics students have high ability levels, believe they have high ability levels, but know that they are unable to signal their ability to the SSHRC evaluation committee. 

Grades are one way to signal ability, but economists are tough graders (for undergrad level evidence, see here). Economics students will not stand out on the basis of GPA alone.

Recommendation letters are an important signal within the economics profession, but their value outside the profession is more limited. One person who has had experience ranking SSHRC doctoral fellowship files told me, "I rarely see a negative letter from anyone other than an economist". In other disciplines, the norm is to refuse to write a reference letter unless one is able to shower fulsome praise upon the candidate. Economics professors' willingness to pen half-hearted endorsesments may hurt our students.

Publications are another potential ability signal. Some of the successful non-economics applicants in the SSHRC competition had publications at the time of their award. There is a complete list of award winners here. Using that list, it did not take me long to find UBC psychology student Klint Fung with multiple publications, or geographer Josie Wittmer, who published her MA thesis in the journal Applied Geography.

However early- and mid-stage economics PhD students are rarely able to signal by publishing. High quality economics articles are typically longer than, say, psychology articles, so take longer to write. Publication lags are long. It is rare to throw half a dozen authors, including some MA or junior PhD students, on an economics publication. The discipline places such value on publication in highly ranked journals that an early-stage publication in a mediocre journal can have a negative reputational impact (see here). For all of the reasons, economics PhD students rarely publish early - but their failure to do so make it harder for them to win SSHRC grants.

Conference presentations and prizes are another way for graduate students to stand out. This SSHRC study reported that the average SSHRC doctoral fellowship holder made 9.29 conference presentations during the course of their PhD studies; the average doctoral student without a fellowship made 7.24 presentations. That seems high relative to the number of presentations economics students make, and could be another way in which economics students fail to signal excellence.

I have given several answers to the question posed by the title of this post - why don't more economics students get SSHRC doctoral fellowships? - and I do not know which answer is correct. What I am more confident about, however, is that there is a problem. 

SSHRC's internal audit committee conducted an evaluation of the SSHRC doctoral fellowship program in 2015 (available here). The audit committee's overall evaluation of the doctoral fellowship program is positive, but it does note "the future demand in academia for people with graduate-level education, relative to current supply, is less clear". This picture from the report, comparing the number of new faculty positions in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) with the number of doctorates is telling:

Given the decreasing number of professorial jobs, one of the recommendations of the SSHRC evaluation of the doctoral fellowships program was:

Recommendation 3: In collaboration with universities, SSHRC should promote the acquisition of professional skills by doctoral students – awardees and non-awardees alike.

This recommendation stems from several findings indicating a need to increase awareness of and better prepare doctoral students for employment outside of academia. In particular, the evaluation noted that doctoral enrolment has been increasing steadily while the number of faculty appointments has been decreasing drastically over the past ten years. Survey results also indicate that a notable proportion of respondents, particularly among non-recipients, hold a position outside of the academia.

The logic here seems to be "some of the students we are funding are in programs with relatively poor job prospects, so the programs need to change, they need to become more professionally oriented." It seems to me that an equally reasonable conclusion would be, "some of the students we are funding are in programs with relatively poor job prospects, so the funding model needs to change, it needs to encourage students to enter programs with better employment opportunities." 

One of those programs is economics.

*Note: If I understand correctly, the success rates quoted at the start of this post refer to students who applied in November, 2016, and were awarded scholarships for the 2017/18 academic year.

Comments

[Majromax]

> In 2017*, just seven economics PhD students were awarded SSHRC doctoral fellowships, according to data provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to the Canadian Economics Association. Put another way, only 1.6 percent of the 430 new SSHRC doctoral fellowships awarded that year went to students studying economics.

Is economics one of the greatest outliers here? Do any fields have unusually high award rates relative to their size?

If the root difference lies in application rates, then it might be possible to see what field X does "right" that economics does poorly.

[Frances Woolley]

Majromax, I don't have any data on the size of various fields.

This old blog post has information on the distribution of Canada Graduate Scholarships by field, which is pretty similar to the SSHRC doctoral fellowship distribution: http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2016/12/economists-dont-get-sshrc-money-grad-student-edition.html. Psychology does get a lot of awards, but I don't know if it gets a disproportionately high number of awards. We don't know the underlying distribution of eligible students, which is what we'd need to really make an assessment.

One thing that helps put the doctoral fellowship numbers into perspective - 4.8 percent of insight grants (the subject-specific grants for faculty members) went to economists in the same year that I'm talking about here. So there's something very different happening at the faculty and the student level. But again, economists may be a higher percentage of the faculty members than they are of the students.

[Stephen Gordon]

Excellent post. Certainly from where I sit, the main obstacle is eligibility: almost all our students are international.

And this touches on a key pont as well: "If my university is typical, economics graduate students have little opportunity to practice writing research proposals, do not have a clear thesis topic in place until the second or third year of their program, and struggle to articulate their methodology using accessible terminology. Faced with drafting a program of study, some students may simply give up."

A (possibly apocryphal) story from my grad school days is the PhD candidate who applied for and received a SSHRC fellowship with the following research proposal: "I will write a PhD thesis in economics."

I've been on the internal SSHRC fellowship grants committee for a few years, and unless you know what economics PhD programs are like, you'd think that our students are a terrible bunch of slackers compared to the proposals submitted from other disciplines.

[Frances Woolley]

Steve - thanks for those comments. On: "you'd think that our students are a terrible bunch of slackers compared to the proposals submitted from other disciplines."

One of the things I was most proud of at the Antigonish CEA meetings was the undergraduate poster session. There's now a whole bunch of graduating econ student who have a conference presentation, or maybe even an award, to put on their resume. If every study group did a poster session at their conference, the cumulative effect might be non-trivial.

Also I have to wonder about the idea of just stuffing students with knowledge about econometrics and economic theory and then hoping that they will transmogrify into researchers. Perhaps we should have more of a spiral curriculum in econ PhD programs - take some courses, write a paper, take some more courses, write another paper... Students tell me over and over again hat they didn't really understand metrics until they actually had to carry out an original piece of research themselves.

[Michael]

How do department sizes and application rates differ? Eg, if there are 100 Psychology students and 10 Economics students per cohort, the observed outcome would not be surprising (even with equal application rates).

[Frances Woolley]

Michael - "How do department sizes and application rates?"

Relevant question is how does number of students eligible to apply to SSHRC differ - econ is unusual in social sciences and humanities in having relatively high percentage of international students. No info on that. Given that students can apply for a SSHRC doctoral fellowship prior to starting a PhD, and can hold a fellowship outside of Canada, it's not obvious how we *could* get info on size of potential applicant pool even if we tried.

For sure size of applicant pool is an issue - I just don't know how much of the observed outcome is explained by the size of the applicant pool. It could be 10%, could be 100%.

[J]

I'm a first year Ph.D. student who considered applying for a SSHRC each of the last two cycles and decided not to, and the "relatively costly" story above pretty much describes exactly why I ended up not applying either last year concurrent with Ph.D applications, or this year concurrent with coursework.

Last year, I sat down with a rough possible thesis idea, but was (and am) completely unfamiliar with how to write research proposals, and felt that writing one would be a significant time investment, and that even then it would probably read worse than applicants in other fields' proposals. I knew the success rates for SSHRCs were low, and after struggling a bit decided to prioritise applications and studying for the GRE over writing the SSHRC proposal.

This year, I felt my time would be better spent focusing on first-year coursework and again chose not to apply. I expect I will end up applying next fall.

[Frances Woolley]

J - thanks for sharing that. Hope you do apply next fall. Good luck!

[John Chant]

Another nice post, Frances.

At one time, SSHRC used to allocate fellowships by discipline. I imagine the allocations among disciplines then were according to the number of applications.

I think the move to screening by university committees has changed things to the detriment of economics students. Economics, unlike many other disciplines, requires students to take course work beyond the MA whereas other disciplines treat the MA as the end of course work. As a result economics students apply a year or two later than students in many other programs. When they do apply after finish their course work, the conversation often asks why the student is presenting a dissertation proposal at such a later stage. The committee members, many from disciplines with research only degrees, agree that the student should have made more progress than just a proposal at their current stage and downgrade the application.

Ironically completion times for economics PhD students are shorter, some times much, much shorter, than in other disciplines.

As you know, all this is quite dated but I doubt if things have changed.

[Frances Woolley]

John, "I think the move to screening by university committees has changed things to the detriment of economics students" - I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was the case, but I don't have evidence unfortunately.

"When they do apply after finish their course work, the conversation often asks why the student is presenting a dissertation proposal at such a later stage."

As Kevin Milligan commented on twitter, this is where letters of reference might make a difference. If a letter written can put a student's work in context - explain "this is how stuff is done in economics and this student is totally fabulous" - possibly that might help.

[Steve Ambler]

Thoughtful post as usual Frances,

I think John's point about course work is very relevant. I'm guessing that Economics has the most course-work heavy PhDs of any of the social sciences and humanities.

I sat on our university's SSHRC doctoral fellowship pre-seclection committee for a couple of years and have some anecdotal evidence.

Grade inflation in other fields is a definite phenomenon. We looked at quite a few applications in psych where the applicants had GPAs of 4.2/4.3. They were getting A+ grades in classes where the class average was above 4.0. We haven't gone down this road nearly as much in Economics. Nor do I think we should, but this does penalize our students.

You're right that Econ students don't have much practice writing proposals. They don't have much practice writing, period. Our undergraduate programme has an applied research class where students have to write up their results, but mostly our students are taught to solve cute little problems. We do have a compulsory thesis requirement at the MSc level (I think a lot of programmes have dropped this), but the MSc theses most often conform to a rather rigid cookie-cutter style -- question, methodology, literature review, model, data, results, conclusions.

Plus, most students from other fields have publications of some kind to put on their cvs. Often this just means a book review or a publication in a non-peer-reviewed venue, but at least it's something and it seems to count. You're right that we have a mentality of punishing mediocre publications, which discourages PhD students from just getting something in print.

[Frances Woolley]

Steve, thanks for dropping by and sharing those experiences. It sounds like this is really typical.

The question to my mind is: now what? What are the options for Canadian econ departments who would like to see their students getting more funding?

One option is to change what we do to make our students more competitive for SSHRC. I don't get a sense that there's any appetite for doing that - except perhaps for introducing more writing requirements early on. But I don't think that would be enough to really tilt things substantially in favour of our students.

Another option is to try to lobby SSHRC, and try to get some weight put on, say, PhD students' job market prospects when making funding decisions. Don't think that's likely to happen any time soon. There is some kind of nod towards relevance in the http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/society-societe/community-communite/Future_Challenge_Areas-domaines_des_defis_de_demain-eng.aspx>future challenge areas but I don't really see these doing anything much to shift the funding allocations between disciplines.

The thing that I think would do most to benefit economists was requiring all programs to provide honest information about their completion rates, time to completion, and employment outcomes of their graduates. The applicants in other areas would still look good relative to economist students, but there might be a lot fewer of them!