OTTAWA — Canada’s top engineering schools are having trouble convincing the brightest stars to pursue doctorates here, their administrators say, risking the programs’ futures as economic drivers.

The number of students in doctoral engineering programs at the universities of Waterloo, Toronto and British Columbia—which led recent rankings by Maclean’s and U.S. News & World Report—has dipped, even where many other PhD programs have expanded.

“We would certainly be eager to grow our PhD enrolments [in engineering] if we had the financial resources to do so,” said Jeff Casello, the University of Waterloo’s associate vice-president for graduate studies and postdoctoral affairs. He’s also an engineering professor, specializing in transportation systems.

Enrolment in Waterloo’s doctoral engineering programs peaked with the 2013–14 academic year at 686.6 full-time equivalents, according to statistics it publishes. Last year, enrolment was 656.1—not a collapse, but the second-lowest in a decade.

Over the same years, enrolment in Waterloo’s PhD environment- and health-related programs has almost doubled, enrolment in math PhD programs has increased nearly 50 per cent, and enrolment in science PhD programs has grown from 282.8 full-time equivalents to 350.7. Only arts enrolment has leveled off the way engineering has.

Both applied research with immediate uses and “fundamental” research are important, he said.

Waterloo professor Donna Strickland won a Nobel Prize five years ago for research on lasers she did (as a PhD student at the University of Rochester in New York) in the 1980s, he pointed out.

“My wife had a detached retina a month ago, and it was laser pulse work that Donna Strickland developed 30 years ago, just doing fundamental science, that ended up being the solution to my wife’s eye problem,” he said. The same technology is used in high-end industrial work such as manufacturing cell phones.

Engineering has long been the University of Waterloo’s marquee discipline and part of the explanation for the different trajectories is that its other faculties are catching up, said Casello, but he wishes the engineering faculty were still charging ahead.

Money is not the only factor, but it is a big one. “The federal government’s economic policy is to bring 250,000 to 500,000 new Canadians every year, and at the same time, we get no public support for providing the education to these enormously important actors in our economy,” Casello said.

A government-appointed panel had urged the Liberals to hike spending for graduate studies sharply, after 20 years of virtual freezes: “For any hope that Canadian science and research maintains its global relevance, it is critical that funding for students paid through scholarships and those paid through grants from the granting councils be increased to an internationally competitive level.”

Canadian universities raised a ruckus when the last federal budget didn’t do that, calling it a “bupkis budget.”

“The government values the critical role of graduate students and trainees—Canada’s emerging researchers—in producing the knowledge, discoveries and innovations that help build a strong future for Canada and the rest of the world and will continue to work with the research community to explore ways to support them,” said Audrey Champoux, a spokesperson for Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne, told The Logic in an email.

The government promised to consider the panel’s report from early this year and is doing so, she added. “More details will follow on further efforts to modernize the research support system.”

“With the stagnation in the federal levels of funding, we rely more and more heavily on individual research partnerships with external partners, and it’s becoming more complicated now—which external partners we can and can’t work with,” Casello said, alluding to the federal government’s crackdown on work with potential adversary countries.

“The material that we use for research costs more, the equipment costs more. And if there’s no more money coming in, we need to cut down,” said UBC’s Davide Elmo, associate dean of students and professional development at the university’s faculty of applied science. He’s a professor of rock engineering, which is especially useful in mining.

Doctoral enrolments in his faculty reached a peak in 2021 and dipped last year, and Elmo said administrators have been discussing it as the fall term begins. He said incomplete figures for this year suggest a small rebound, so “at least we are not dropping more than what we dropped last year.”

With federal funding for grad students all but frozen, universities top up their stipends from research budgets because they have to, Elmo said. “Vancouver is an expensive city.”

One major federal program to support doctoral students pays $35,000 a year; another just $21,000. If a professor supplements that by $3,000 a year, that takes a big bite out of a research grant, where $40,000 to $50,000 is a big one, he said.

Elmo said he’s currently supervising three PhD students. He’ll only take on as many as he’s certain he can pay for four years, he said, making him more cautious than some colleagues who trust that they’ll secure more funding as they go. But given the financial constraints, cautious professors will likely take on fewer students now than they used to.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a confounding factor, of course. “Lots of research has been delayed,” Elmo said. “As a supervisor, I’m not going to accept students into my program, knowing that maybe they cannot access the labs.”

That’s not a clean explanation for why enrolments rose in fall 2020 and 2021 before dipping in 2022, but maybe COVID-19 scrambled research agendas and they’re still recovering, Elmo said.

U of T’s published statistics on its graduate enrolments don’t go back as far as the University of Waterloo’s and end in 2021 (instead of 2022, like Waterloo’s and UBC’s), but they show declines in both applications to and enrolments in engineering PhD programs in fall 2021 compared to the two previous years.

Applications for all U of T’s doctoral programs combined rose steadily over four years and then shot up in 2021–22, from 8,419 to 10,549, so engineering bucked the trend in the wrong direction.

Like UBC’s, U of T’s incomplete enrolment numbers for this year show growth from last year, though it’s hard to be sure what’s caused the decline or the recovery, wrote the University of Toronto’s vice-dean of graduate studies in its faculty of applied science and engineering, Julie Audet, in an emailed statement. Audet is a professor of biomedical engineering.

“The rules related to physical distancing during the pandemic may have resulted in fewer opportunities for undergrad and even some master’s students to have laboratory experience and learn about research. This may have had an impact on PhD applications,” she wrote.

Then there’s the other side of the challenge: attracting the students the universities want most.

“When we hold recruitment events, we hear from undergraduate students interested in graduate studies but they often say they want to work in industry first and then ideally come back to do a PhD,” Audet wrote.

They might learn there, though, that holding an actual PhD isn’t much benefit to someone with a PhD-calibre mind.

“In my personal experience, what the industry values is the P.Eng., the “professional engineer” status,” Elmo said. “Before UBC, I was working as a consultant. Having a PhD didn’t really get me more money or a better position.”

Nevertheless, Casello said Canadian students’ interest in Waterloo’s doctoral programs has been steady. But there’s been a years-long decline in applications from foreign students, suggesting that Waterloo’s chances even to compete for the best in the world are worsening.

It adds up to peril for Canada’s innovation economy, the administrators agreed, if the best minds aren’t drawn to the cutting edge of research here.

“Your transition from undergraduate to graduate within Canada—that chain can actually break if we don’t show the student that the province, industry and the federal government is actually investing in the students,” Elmo said.