702. IN DOCTORAL EDUCATION, IT'S TIME FOR AN OVERHAUL
February 28, 2006
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"The national median at all universities for registered time-to-degree (from completion of a baccalaureate degree to receipt of the doctoral degree.) is 7.6 years - a figure that has been rising steadily over the last 30 years."
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Posted by lagace on February 28, 2006
702. IN DOCTORAL EDUCATION, IT'S TIME FOR AN OVERHAUL
February 28, 2006
Folks:
The posting below by Philip Cohen, dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at the University of Texas at Arlington. and Rick Cherwitz, professor of Communication Studies and director of the Intellectual Entrepreneurship Consortium (IE) at the University of Texas at Austin. looks at the state of doctoral education in the state of Texas, with clear implications for other states and even other countries. The posting is from the Austin American Statesman, January 17, 2006 [Statesman.com]. Copyright 2001-2006 Cox Texas Newspapers, L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Undergraduate Research as the Next Great Faculty Divide
Tomorrow's Graduate Students and Postdocs
------------------------------------- 715 words ----------------------------------
IN DOCTORAL EDUCATION, IT'S TIME FOR AN OVERHAUL
Students and parents are experiencing something akin to sticker shock: Tuition at public universities in Texas and across the nation continues to rise as a direct result of stagnant or declining state funding. These increases especially impact graduate education because the programs are more costly to run than their undergraduate counterparts. As the price of a Ph.D. rises, it's time to ask whether Texas graduate students and the state are getting the best doctoral programs for their investment.
Doctoral education in Texas generates cutting-edge research contributing to economic development. It also produces researchers needed to solve critical issues confronting our state, prepares future faculty and helps build an educated, literate workforce for the 21st-century.
Yet all isn't well. Although American doctoral programs are widely and accurately acclaimed throughout the world for their ability to produce innovative researchers, educators and professionals, fundamental reforms in doctoral education are urgently needed.
Reports on the state of doctoral education from the usual suspects (the Association of American Universities, the American Council on Education, the National Research Council, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation) express concern about time-to-degree and completion rates, lack of diversity among those seeking and receiving degrees, uneven mentoring practices, the relevance of curricula to pressing public problems, poor preparation of students for the transition to academic and non-academic positions, and the paucity of American citizens pursuing doctorates in science and engineering.
A recent investigation by the Council of Graduate Schools discovered that after 10 years of study, the completion rates were only 64 percent in engineering, 62 percent in life sciences, 55 percent in physical sciences and social sciences and 47 percent in the humanities. These findings are consistent with those reported in previous studies.
The national median at all universities for registered time-to-degree (from completion of a baccalaureate degree to receipt of the doctoral degree.) is 7.6 years - a figure that has been rising steadily over the last 30 years.
Although similar information for Texas doctoral programs is not available, which itself is disturbing, there is no reason to believe that such data would paint a rosier picture.
Since training doctoral students is a time, money and labor-intensive proposition, such data are profoundly alarming.
True, some students will drop out or fail to meet required academic standards, but research shows that significant numbers of doctoral students who do not complete their degrees are performing well academically yet are alienated by poor social and academic integration into their programs, poor mentoring practices, and other factors.
We must wonder how many more students might complete their doctoral studies if reforms were made in graduate programs. Surely Texas taxpayers deserve a better rate of return on the dollars they invest in doctoral education.
The state should act decisively to improve the performance of its public doctoral programs. Indeed, The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board took the first step by adopting a staff report that became the official policy on doctoral education.
Recommendations include: making available to the public reliable data about the performance of doctoral programs; adopting more rigorous planning and approval processes for new programs; implementing more substantive reviews of existing programs; improving diversity and broadening doctoral program curricula to emphasize skills that prepare doctoral graduates for jobs outside as well as inside academe.
An advisory board consisting primarily of graduate deans from doctoral degree-granting universities and health-related institutions is working with the coordinating board to implement these recommendations.
As is often the case in higher education, it's tempting to assume that recommendations will bring change. It is more likely that faculty and administrators will resist, viewing the coordinating board's recommendations as an unnecessary intrusion.
Those of us in academe, however, would do well to respond by developing, implementing and owning a flexible but comprehensive approach that seeks to remedy the issues the report identifies while recognizing and respecting the different missions of public research universities.
Rather than wait for the chorus of calls for accountability to swell and lead to externally imposed, poorly designed solutions, we should take the initiative by working together to devise strategies for improving our doctoral program success rates, participation and program of study. In so doing, we will be acting as both good academic citizens and good Texans for the benefit of faculty, doctoral students, taxpayers and the future of our state.
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Cohen is dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at the University of Texas at Arlington. Cherwitz is professor of Communication Studies and director of the Intellectual Entrepreneurship Consortium (IE) at the University of Texas at Austin.
Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/01/17gradschool_edit.html
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Comments about this article: [9]
I quite agree with the thesis of this article (702) but am sorry that they do not have accurate degree completion data for, for e.g. the U of Texas. UCSD has a continuous and elaborate reporting of all dimensions of their graduate student population (admits, enrollments) as well as degree completion data by discipline. Their url is http://ogsr.ucsd.edu/reports/graddata/03Fall/index.htm. Personally, I feel it can be a model for every institution that takes their accountability seriously.
I would like so much to argue that an untapped source of support for doctoral students is the counseling personnel at university counseling centers at major research universities.
The research is clear, to my way of thinking (as a counseling
psychologist and former administrator in the graduate arena) that counseling center professional staff are well equipped to deal with the psychosocial factors that are often the determining factor in whether or not a doctoral student withdraws from a program.
However, because of most administrative structures, graduate programs are under the aegis of academic affairs; counseling centers, in the domain of student affairs and it is almost a case of 'never the twain shall meet.' Ad hoc programs for graduate students are often offered by counseling centers, but they do not play an active and formal role in the doctoral student expederience and in degree completion.
What I yearn to see is an alliance between counseling center administrators and one or two counseling staff AND the graduate advisor and graduate chair in each
academic department. Faculty are experts in their discipline but not trained in the human sciences and often ill-adept to do anything other than guide the intellectual development of their students. It is counseling professionals who can expertly attend to the social and psychological skills development that is part of
the novice to emerging expert role. Counseling professionals play an important role in undergraduate student development but there are infrequent and often temporary alliances between graduate departments and counseling center personnel. My Jump-Start intervention for early-stage doctoral students incorporates that shared intervention. It is described on my url:http://weber.ucsd.edu/~eparent/
Probably, it will take someone on the administrative level to formalize such activity, but I would like to see individual departments and center directors, perhaps,
test those ideas empirically.
Posted by: Elaine Parent, UCSD on February 27, 2006 06:12 PM
[702]
Elaine Parent wrote:
>> Faculty are experts in their discipline but not trained in the human sciences and often ill-adept to do anything other than guide the intellectual development of their students.
I coordinate a doctoral-level programme in India and am actively engaged with "research practice" and "doctoral education" issues. Certainly in India, as also in many other countries, unfortunately, most faculty-members are unable to "guide the intellectual development of their students." Of course, there are always those rare professors who are committed to the cause of research training and are also competent to guide the intellectual development of their students.
We are planning a special issue of the Journal of Research Practice (JRP) to focus on graduate/postgraduate student's experience of doing research. Please see the announcement in the journal's Web site (announcement to appear in early March 2006).
I also welcome you to visit some of our initiatives in improving the quality of doctoral education in this part of the world:
Doctoral Summer School (2006)
Research World, 2005
Posted by: Dr Debiprasad [DP] Dash, Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar, INDIA on February 27, 2006 10:34 PM
I have found getting a Ph.D. needs people who are self guided and motivated, but also can be a very lonely task. As the earlier post suggested counseling could be critical to success. Mentoring from professors is important, but some professors have better skills at that than other.
Because I am an older graduate student and now Ph.D. Candidate... I knew that I needed a support base, so I gathered together a support group of mostly woman students to help share my load. The amazing thing is that in return, they also felt supported. Most of my friends here are international students who I think can feel especially allientated in a foreign environment.
At the encouragment of one faculty member, we have formed small research groups (5 people) to share findings, problems, and conerns. We try to meet every two weeks and have a topic or talk about or sometimes what people need to know at that point. Last week, one topic was (my need), now that I have over 700 minutes of interviews completed and three note books of primary documentation collected, how can I sort through the infromation to make sense of it? I got three great ideas about how think about the process to get started writing.
One or two times a term, we also have small (10 to 12 people) relaxed social get togethers (usually planned by me) where we all bring food and share to celebrate our successes. Now that I am in the void of writing, I find I need these interactions even more...
Of our initial group of about ten only two people have dropped out. Within two and a half years seven of us have passed our preliminary exams and are moving into the research and writing phase. Interestingly enough the men do not seem to be making as much progress as the women, I think because they are not as open about sharing their concern and problems. and don't feel the need to form support groups.
This has worked really well for us. But in many ways, I was the impetus for the interactions because I knew I needed the support. While a faculty member suggested we do this... it needed a student to bring us together and I was open enough to share my fears and conerns, which allowed the other younger students to share theirs...
So I am not sure how this could be implemented as policy, but it seems to be working for us.
Posted by: Virginia Tech on February 28, 2006 09:46 AM
RE: 702 Doctoral Ed/Time to Degree
One piece of the time-to-degree puzzle, at least in the humanities, is not the issue of institutional resources, but the issue of growing institutional expectations for new hires. Because the job market is tight, hiring departments can look for the best, and "the best" almost always means that the applicant already has an academic track record: several years of teaching experience, a published article or two or three, a dissertation ready for revision and publication, conference papers at national venues, etc. The hiring department expects today's applicant to enter the department and hit the ground running. That was not true, say, 25 year ago, when all the applicant needed a completed degree and the promise of potential.
To be competitive in the current humanities job market, a student must achieve a high level of professionalization before competing for entry positions. Yet there are very few post-docs in the humanities that provide time to build such a track record after graduate school. The brightest students understand exactly what is going on, and they take a few extra post-comp years to get where they think they need to be to compete -- to get the first articles out, to present at conferences, etc., while still under the mentorship and in the comfort of their graduate department.
Other issues play their own role, but student behaviors usually follow institutional expectations.
Posted by: Maria Carlson, University of Kansas on February 28, 2006 02:18 PM
>Rick, we are often pulled beween the need to be current (with all the
>wasted effort that implies) and the need to be historic and understand
>the contributions of the past (with all the wasted effort that
>implies). This has often seemed to me a balancing act, between the
>young turks and the old guard. I am 62, hence I tell graduate students
>that they should read ethnographic and historic books and articles in
>the original form, rather than the way these have been framed by more
>recent scholars. Often, the original is put as a "straw person" and caricatured.
>
>I do not think that the solution is in adjusting time to degree, but
>rather to recognize that in the disciplines that have built a body of
>knowledge that is relevant, understanding the past and current are two
>sides of the same, important coin, and to focus graduate instruction on
>reconciling both sides.
>
>Al Dekin
>
>(our time to degree in Anthropology is about 10 yrs and is holding
>steady)
>
>
Posted by: Al Dekin, Anthropology, Binghamton University, SUNY on February 28, 2006 04:57 PM
I was interested in the national median of 7.6 years for completion of a doctoral degree in the US but was unsure of the what "from the completion of a baccalaureate degree to receipt of the doctoral degree" implies. Does this mean those students who qo directly from pregraduate to doctoral studies? or does it take into account other postgraduate studies - master degrees on the way to the doctorate? I ask this because under new higher eduction rules in Venezuela doctoral students are expected to finish in a maximum of five years which has always seemed over ambitious to me, especially in a context where very few students are able to study full time.
In so much as the comments of Elaine and Dash, I am fully in agreement as one who suffered from the strains of doctoral research in the US and who had to look for psychological help - confronting the implied "weakness" that this entails, and help from fellow students - the importance of which was mutually recognized but did not generate the permanent activity described by Dash, saludos and thanks to those generating this initiative, John
Posted by: John Foley, Universidad Central de Venezuela on March 1, 2006 04:58 PM
Following up on some of the other posts, I think that the metric of “time-to-degree� that is used in this post is flawed, in that we should not expect (and should probably even discourage) students to go straight from undergraduate work into graduate work. The appropriate measure is the time it takes from admission to a graduate program to completion, and that time is also rising, mostly due to the factors cited in the post by Maria Carlson. It is important, I think, for us to remember that graduate education (particularly the Ph.D.) is optional. Indeed, there are ample data showing that there is substantially more money and stability to be found in pursuing business ventures and applied degrees. If a student begins a graduate program and then drops out to pursue more lucrative opportunities, I think that’s a good thing. In my experience, the students who take some time to work or otherwise remove themselves from the university setting prior to graduate school are much more likely to persist and complete their degrees. Presumably this difference is the result of being more aware of the costs and benefits of further education and therefore reflective of a greater personal investment in the process.
When we start to talk of achieving 100% graduation rates in as little time as possible, we run the risk of replicating some of the current problems in undergraduate education; namely, many students see college as simply the thing you do after high school, such that they are uninvested intellectually in their studies and end up with a paper degree that does not accurately represent any intellectual growth or new capacities to contribute to society. We should not be putting off the development of deeper learning and critical thinking skills until graduate school. This phenomenon of passing the buck to the next highest level has been going on for a long time (especially in grade school), and there is some evidence (based mostly on industry feedback) that some of our Ph.D. recipients are now starting to graduate with questionable qualifications for entering the workforce. The solution, which is clearly supported in this posting, is to institute greater levels of accountability and self-evaluation to the graduate-education enterprise.
Finally, many schools have taken on the task of evaluating the greatest hurdles for graduate students and postdocs in terms of persistence in the degree, and every time the most important factors turn out to be intractable conflicts between personal goals (especially family issues) and professional goals. It is no secret that success in academia is achieved by adopting a transient lifestyle for a decade or more, all of which happens during the years in which society expects you to meet your partner, start a family, and perhaps “settle down.� Assuming you successfully negotiate these conflicts, this period is then followed by several years of expectations for very high output before you can achieve some measure of job security. Even if you are at the very top of the field, it is nearly impossible to achieve some semblance of permanent employment (and never mind where that might be) before the age of 35 or 40. Most of the people I know who started (and perhaps even finished) their graduate studies took a look at this future and said, “No thanks.� Admittedly, this problem is now widespread, as most families need two incomes to achieve a middle-class standard of living, and most careers require personal mobility since companies are far less likely to reward loyalty. In the end, the most practical solution for many people is to stretch out the educational experience until they see some opening for their interests and expertise.
So, I guess I agree with most of the primary concerns raised in this posting, but I worry when people focus on metrics such as “time-to-degree� or “number of people staying in academia� since these metrics do not accurately represent anything meaningful about the underlying problems and the challenges that lie ahead.
Posted by: Ahrash Bissell, Duke University on March 2, 2006 09:54 AM
RE: 702. IN DOCTORAL EDUCATION..."
"performing well academically yet are alienated by poor social and academic integration into their programs, poor mentoring practices, and other factors"
As a doctoral student and from informal discussions with my fellow graduate students, one major possibility for "other factor" is institutional emphasis on one type of "intellectual craftsmanship," -- the writing of a 100+ plus pages of the dissertation. There are alternatives rarely considered in graduate education.
I earned my second masters from a program that used electronic portfolio instead of a thesis.
This portfolio incorporated research, literature reviews, and projects into a single website that showed the work and progress of the student towards integration of research, theory, application and teaching (Boyer's four domains of intellectual scholarship). *
The beauty of this type of "intellectual craftsmanship" is that with a click of a hyperlink, potential employers can examine the scope and depth of the candidates' achievements.
The electronic portfolio is adaptable to emphasize a particular domain such as discovery research, synthesis of the literature, theory/research-informed practice, and knowledge dissemination (teaching)
Equally important, the electronic portfolio provides a venue for sharing knowledge within the academic community.
As indicated in the articles below, many ABD students are satisfied with their experience and skills learned but do not feel the need to complete the dissertation as a credential for the job market. This supports the use of portfolios as measure of accomplishment and Phd credentialing
Leaving the PhD Behind
Doctor Dropout
*"Scholarship Reconsidered" by Boyer (1990) :
Discovery Research
Synthesis
Application
Teaching
See also
Has Scholarship Been Reconsidered? (Oct 4, 2005) INSIDE HIGHER EDUCATION
Posted by: Rym Hubbard, UMC Doctoral Student on March 9, 2006 02:08 PM
John,
This is evan jenkins. I relocated to Shreveport , La. my email address is
ixaej@yahoo.com
Posted by: Evan Jenkins on November 12, 2007 08:26 PM