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Collaboration cosmopolitanism: what are the effects on the “overlooked majority” of scientists and engineers?

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Abstract

Despite the fact that the vast majority of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workers are those with a bachelor’s degree, past studies in science policy and higher education are largely focused on research collaboration and nearly all examine doctoral-level or academic researchers. We use licensed data from the U.S. National Science Foundation to examine the impacts of collaboration cosmopolitanism on the job satisfaction and salary of bachelor-level science professionals. The concept of collaboration cosmopolitanism (Bozeman and Corley in Research Policy, 33(4), 599–616, 2004) pertains to various aspects of institutional and geographic distance in collaboration. We found that STEM college graduates having double-majored or minored in other fields tend to have higher levels of collaboration cosmopolitanism. We also found a significant positive relationship between collaboration cosmopolitanism and career outcomes. Women with STEM bachelor’s degrees are paid less than men, but women engaging in higher collaboration cosmopolitanism enjoy more benefits towards career outcomes than do men. We conclude with a discussion of policy implications for STEM higher education.

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Notes

  1. We control for scientific discipline because it occurs early in the scientific life course, and because it is an important determinant of major choice and productivity outcomes.

  2. An academic major is the academic field that an undergraduate student chooses and commits to. An undergraduate student earns a bachelor degree after meeting all the requirements of the major. An academic minor is the secondary discipline the student chooses in their undergraduate studies. An academic minor is subordinate to an academic major. Different schools or universities in the U.S.A. have various requirements for earning a minor.

  3. For our purposes, the distinction between STEM vs. health science and all else is not our preferred distinction but follows the NSF variable construction. The NSF classification of S&E occupations includes biological, agricultural, and environmental life scientists, computer and mathematical scientists, physical scientists, social scientists, engineers, and post-secondary teachers in these S&E fields. The NSF classification of S&E-related occupations includes health-related occupations, S&E managers, S&E precollege teachers, S&E technicians and technologists, architects, actuaries, and postsecondary teachers of these S&E-related fields. All other occupations are classified as non-S&E occupations.

  4. For example, a person only works alone will have a cosmopolitan scale of 0. A person collaborates only with the immediate work group will have a cosmopolitan value of 1. If a person has all the above collaboration activities, including working with immediate work group, with others in their organization but not the immediate work group, with other organizations in the USA, and with international coworkers, then the maximum cosmopolitan scale is 10.

  5. One issue of possible concern is that the model we employ has a large number of variables and there might be considerable latency among them. Thus, we applied a different analytical approach to investigate this possibility. We factor analyzed the predictor variables, discarding only those that had little variance or relevance to specific hypotheses (thus retaining more than 75% of the variables). In a more conventional approach, we specified an orthogonal rotation with a varimax balancing criterion. However, an even better test for latency is an oblique factor analysis and thus we conducted an oblique analysis as well. We focused on the resultant factors that had eigenvalues of 1.0 or greater. There were nine factors with eigenvalues greater that one, i.e., explaining more variance than any single variable. After performing these factor analyses and retaining factor scores (related the cases to the dimensions rather than the loadings, which related the variables to dimensions), we regressed the dependent variables on the resultant dimensions (in excess of 1.0 eigenvalue), for both the orthogonal and oblique cases. We feel that this extensive work provided little if any value beyond our original procedures. First, the lead factor (the one explaining most variance in the original matrix) had a relatively low eigenvalue (2.67270) and, more to the point, only three variables’ factor loading is in excess of ± 0.50. That is highly unusual in cases where there are strong dimensional properties or latency. Second, in the orthogonal case, the regression results were quite modest. Third, the oblique results explained a bit more variance but its multicollinearity is rife (unlike the orthogonal case in which there is none, by mathematical specification). The steps suggest that there is no latency problem or, if so, it is quite modest. Due to space limitation, we do not provide all the tables and results from the factor analyses. However, these are available from the author.

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Funding

The research is supported by the National Science Foundation (grant #NSCE-1537879; B. Bozeman, PI and M. Gaughan, co-PI), cosmopolitan collaboration among STEM women and minorities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Organization Research and Design and School of Public Affairs, Arizona State University, MC3720, 411 N. Central Ave., Phoenix, AZ, 85004-0687, USA

    Qingqing Wang, Jiwon Jung & Barry Bozeman

  2. School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, PO Box 872402, Tempe, AZ, 85287-2402, USA

    Monica Gaughan

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  1. Qingqing Wang
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Correspondence to Qingqing Wang.

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Wang, Q., Jung, J., Bozeman, B. et al. Collaboration cosmopolitanism: what are the effects on the “overlooked majority” of scientists and engineers?. High Educ 78, 1011–1034 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-019-00385-5

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