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Graduate Education Flawed, Study Finds
Graduate school does not adequately prepare students for the jobs they take, concluded researchers who conducted a survey sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The survey was administered in 1999 to Ph.D. candidates at twenty-seven universities in eleven disciplines (art history, chemistry, ecology, English, geology, history, mathematics, molecular biology, philosophy, nonclinical psychology, and sociology). A report based on the survey says that Ph.D. programs persist in preparing graduate students mainly for academic careers at research universities, despite an ongoing shortage of such jobs.
Only 27 percent of full-time faculty hold appointments at research universities, and no more than half of Ph.D. recipients in the disciplines studied end up in tenure-track faculty positions. Yet few students reported that career-planning workshops on nonacademic careers were available at their institutions, or that their departments encouraged them to consider nonacademic career options (the authors of the report note that since they relied on students’ perceptions, there may be a lack of publicity about such workshops rather than an actual lack of them). And although 31 percent of faculty work at two-year colleges, only 3.9 percent of students indicated that they would prefer such a position.
In addition, students are not particularly well prepared by their graduate programs to be teachers, the report says. Only about half of the Ph.D. candidates surveyed indicated that they had had an opportunity to learn specifically about teaching in their discipline; about half were required to serve as a teaching assistant, and about half said a term-long teacher-training course was available to them.
The study found that even in the area where doctoral programs concentrate their efforts—preparing graduate students for careers at research universities—the programs fall short. Although most students reported confidence in their ability to conduct research, fewer than half said they were prepared by their programs to publish; moreover, fewer than a third professed to be familiar with "customary policies and practices" regarding appropriate use of research funds, allocation of authorship for papers, or review of papers. As a result, the report concludes, "students are not well prepared to assume the faculty positions that are available, nor do they have a clear concept of their suitability for work outside research."
The report further suggests that the current state of graduate education may contribute to a decline in faculty participation in the governance of colleges and universities. Researchers found that although a strong majority of students are interested in service-related activities such as advising student clubs, fewer than a third expressed any interest in committee work, critical to college governance. Instilling students with a respect for this responsibility, the report advises, would help ensure a continuing role for faculty in institutional governance.
The report, including a detailed list of recommendations for students, faculty, administrators, and professional organizations, is available at <www.wcer.wisc.edu/phd-survey/>.
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