The National Institutes of Health NRSA stipend is used by many as a benchmark. Although the agency aims to raise the entry-level figure to $45,000, there is no guarantee that the rising tide will lift everybody's boat.J. FOOTT/NATUREPLIs there a minimum wage for US postdocs? If so, who sets it and who enforces it? The answer to the first question is: "sort of" — which is somewhat explained in the answer to the second. The salary levels of the National Research Service Awards (NRSA) given by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) are being used as de facto guidelines by postdocs and their supporters in university administration, in seeking pay rises. This practice has become more widespread since 2001, when the NIH bumped up the minimum NRSA salary levels by several thousand dollars for all levels of postdoctoral experience. In March 2003, NRSA stipend levels for entry-level postdocs rose to $34,200, from $31,092 the previous year.
Administrators both inside and outside the United States take note of the NRSA scales, but these are not official guidelines and have no teeth. Stipends still vary from institution to institution, even if their recipients have similar skills and experience. Some universities have started comparing their postdoc salaries with those offered by other institutions, and some have established guidelines of their own. Still, the NRSA scale remains the most widely used criterion.
The NIH receives many queries from researchers and administrators asking about salary standards. These are fielded by Walter Schaffer, acting director of the NIH office of extramural programmes and a research training officer, who states unequivocally that the NIH simply sets stipend levels for the NRSA programme alone — it doesn't publish standards for salaries. Although there are no exact statistics of how many institutions use the NRSA levels as a guideline, Schaffer feels that they are pervasively used in that way. "There's really nothing we can do. We publish the stipends and it clearly applies to the NRSA programme," he says.
Low wages are "a national issue that is being faced by virtually every university, medical school and research institution that 'employs' postdoctoral fellows," says Roslyn Orkin, assistant dean for faculty affairs at Harvard Medical School.
Meeting and exceeding
Many institutions are trying to meet or exceed the NRSA levels. According to Christine Hickey, spokeswoman for the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, postdoc salaries there have always been higher than the NIH minimum because of the high cost of living in Manhattan. "In addition, we provide some funding for each lab budget so that the burden does not fall squarely on the shoulders of the principal investigator alone," Hickey says. At Harvard, the preclinical departments have strongly suggested that, at least for the first two years of a postdoc, faculty members should better the NRSA minimum rates by $2,000. "To my knowledge, individual principal investigators and departments have been able to meet this financial challenge," says Orkin.
A few universities publish salary guidelines on the web. For example, Rockefeller University publishes a range, starting from $34,000–$39,000 for less than one year of experience. At Stanford University, says Karen Christopherson, a postdoc in neurobiology there, the first years of a postdoctoral fellowship used to be below the NIH numbers, but now entry-level postdoc salaries exceed the NRSA minimums. For autumn 2003, Stanford's minimum was $36,000.
"We have a postdoc office with a dean who takes this very seriously and is making sure that everyone is making the minimum," Christopherson says. "I think we were successful because we had supportive faculty and administration in place that wanted to push this through and we have a provost who stood very strong on this issue." John Boothroyd, professor of microbiology and immunology, and senior associate dean for research at Stanford University School of Medicine, says that the vast majority of faculty members recognize that raising salaries is the right thing to do. "The rate before for postdocs has been embarrassingly low," he says.
At Rockefeller most of the initiative has come from the administration, notes Kevin O'Donovan, a postdoc in the laboratory of molecular neuro-oncology, who is active in its postdoctoral association. Following a decree by the university's former president Arnold Levine, salaries for Rockefeller postdocs have increased twice in the past two years to stay ahead of the NRSA minimum rate. Maria Lazzaro, director of immigration and academic appointments, sent e-mails and letters to laboratory heads to ensure that they complied.
"We met with the postdoc association informing them of the new guidelines," says Lazzaro. Then the department followed up by going through each person's file to make sure they're being paid the correct amount, Lazzaro says. Rockefeller's postdoc association also e-mailed all the postdocs and lab heads about the salary increase.
Not retroactive
While postdocs rejoiced, the pay rises have caused difficulties for some researchers who have to meet them out of shrinking grants. The effect of increases on lab budgets is not to be taken lightly, say administrators. "In every single area we are at or well above the minimum," says Amy Gutmann, provost of Princeton University. "The faculty members have been very supportive in the cases where the minimum has increased the floor."
Administrators agree that it is especially difficult if researchers have existing NIH grants. "The reaction from faculty members has been in favour, but some have budgetary constraints," says Rockefeller's Lazzaro. "One thing that has come to my attention is that faculty NIH grants are for five years. They get the budget they asked for years ago and it doesn't have any built-in cost-of-living increase. So the NIH on one hand is encouraging certain salary levels for postdocs, and so are we, but labs that rely on those grants — particularly those headed by younger principal investigators — don't have the NIH funding to cover postdoc salary increases over time."
Helen McBride, a postdoctoral scholar in developmental biology at the Beckman Institute in Pasadena, part of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), concurs. She thinks these salary increases could affect junior faculty members more because they generally don't yet have an array of grants to supplement salaries. But Boothroyd counters that new faculty members get start-up funds and are less reliant on NIH money than more senior researchers.
Despite most institutions' efforts to abide by the suggested minima, "no guidelines for implementation have been established and NIH increases are not retroactive", says Orkin. "Thus, although the NIH stipend scale is marching upwards, there is no funding mechanism to provide similar percentage increases to those whose funding source began x years ago, when the starting stipends were lower."
Playing catch-up
Other universities are still trying to gather information on the range of postdoc salaries within their own institutions. Jim Randolph, senior associate director of research administration at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, says that there has "most decidedly" been an increase in Michigan postdocs' pay over the past few years, in line with increases by the NIH, whose goal is to raise stipends by 10–12% per year until entry-level postdocs start at $45,000.
Christopher Hall, a research fellow in the department of pathology at the University of Michigan, says that the Michigan postdoc association has yet to take on salaries as an issue. The postdocs hope to address the issue after a survey by the scientific research society Sigma Xi has been carried out next spring, when they will have a better measure of how their salary levels stack up nationally.
Randolph says that most postdocs he knows are not earning below NRSA levels. "I have to think that we do pretty well here, but it's hard for me to generalize. We really don't talk salaries," he says. He recently started a second postdoc and used the NRSA criteria to gauge what salary level to ask for in interviews.
Despite good intentions, not all universities have been able to raise the bar. "If you want to change things and bring the whole scale up to the NRSA minimum it has to be a grassroots faculty initiative," says Caltech's McBride. "We're trying to build that support now." Caltech has instituted a pay freeze for faculty and staff who make over $50,000, but staff under that level, including postdocs, will see a 3% rise.
The Caltech postdoc association has written to faculty members seeking their concerns about raising postdoc salaries and asking how this would affect each researcher. "We got the response we pretty much expected, which was: 'Hey, it's expensive to run a lab'," says McBride. "As someone going out to start a lab and fully aware of how much it costs to pay people a decent wage, this means my lab will stay small and I don't see anything wrong with that." Many institutions are well on their way to paying postdocs a decent wage, but the road to equity is still a long one.
Web links
NRSA stipend levels
http://grants.nih.gov/training/nrsa.htm
Rockefeller University salary guidelines
http://www.rockefeller.edu/pda/PDANews.html
Stanford University salary guidelines
http://postdocs.stanford.edu/handbook/salary.html
University of Michigan Postdoctoral Association
http://www.med.umich.edu/pibs/postdoc/aboutus.html
Caltech Postdoctoral Association
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Postdoctoral Association
