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Hey, Capitol Hill: Fund Graduate Education
Quality graduate education is what makes quality undergraduate education possible. If we neglect the one, we'll lose the other.
By Philip Cohen
Our nation would be well served if our elected officials made improving graduate education a high priority. At first glance, graduate education seems like an unlikely candidate for the legislative front burner. Surely, Americans are beset by far more critical issues, such as the war on terrorism, homeland security, and soaring health-care costs. Rising deficits mean that much domestic discretionary spending may be cut over the next few years.
Many federal legislators see graduate education as limited to the production of professors. As a result, graduate education often ranks relatively low as a federal priority. We need to make clear to our policy makers that the higher education issues they do support—undergraduate education, workforce development, and academic research—do not exist separately from graduate education.
Advocates for these other education issues often make their views known on Capitol Hill, and many elected officials have sponsored legislation on these matters. In a new century characterized by a knowledge-based global economy, it would be surprising indeed if our political leaders were not paying close attention to these crucial prerequisites for creating the technologies, industries, and jobs of the future. Many elected officials do not realize, however, that the quality of our graduate programs, faculty, and students directly affects our ability to produce superior undergraduate education, a sophisticated workforce, and significant research.
Good graduate education improves undergraduate education, because having the best graduate students in our programs will help produce a better teaching faculty for the nation’s growing undergraduate and graduate student population. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) estimates that between 2000 and 2013, total enrollment in degree-granting institutions will increase 19 percent, from 15,312,000 to 18,151,000 students. The economic well-being of these students will depend, in part, on obtaining a postsecondary degree. A 2002 Council of Graduate Schools analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data showed that high school graduates earn on average $30,400 a year, bachelor’s degree recipients $52,200 a year, master’s degree recipients $62,300 a year, and doctorate recipients $89,400 a year. Multiply these differences over a lifetime, and you quickly realize that the professional and economic empowerment of future Americans depends on having access to high-quality faculty.
Public Benefits
Improving our country’s human capital provides not only individual economic benefits but crucial public benefits as well. College and university faculty are needed to help produce the highly educated workforce that American businesses and industries will need if they are to compete in an age dominated by information rather than manufacturing. Increasingly, Americans will need graduate and professional degrees to get their first job and advance in their careers. Indeed, a master’s degree is now the entry-level requirement for many professions.
Workers will need more than technical and professional training: their careers will also require them to be verbally, visually, historically, and culturally literate—competencies that the humanities, the fine arts, and the social sciences help provide. In a world in which American goods are produced, sold, bought, and used all over the globe, American workers will also need to be conversant with a diverse range of cultures and languages. Who will teach U.S. workers how to function in and be critically aware of this global culture? Faculty members, trained in U.S. graduate schools.
Graduate education is also a critical driver for academic research, a crucial initial stage in the development of technologies and processes that, once commercialized, can help spur economic development, create the industries and jobs of the future, and improve national defense and homeland security. But outstanding research requires outstanding graduate students. That’s because graduate students form the university’s and the nation’s research workforce, helping faculty in the lab turn their ideas into useful discoveries and inventions while pursuing their own studies. As any science or engineering faculty member will tell you, one excellent student in the lab is worth far more than two mediocre ones.
Training future faculty and generating significant academic research are, however, impossible without graduate programs that attract the best students in the nation and the world. How do universities draw such students? Simply put, we must pay them, using graduate assistantships that enable students to work as apprentice teachers and researchers in areas related to their programs of study. The better funded these positions are in terms of stipends, tuition fellowships, and health insurance, the more likely they are to attract the type of students who can make the difference between success and failure in the lab. Moreover, the speed with which we can produce future faculty is accelerated when students are paid as graduate assistants. Decreasing the time to degree helps make graduate study an affordable and desirable option for our brightest students.
Because graduate education is so closely related to our national self-interest, much needs to be done to help our universities attract the best graduate students. Award packages in some disciplines at many research universities are too low to attract outstanding students. Moreover, graduate student debt levels are rising at an alarming rate, causing many to rethink the idea of going to graduate school. A 2002 Council of Graduate Schools analysis of the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study published by the NCES in 2000 found that although the percentage of students graduating with debt in 2000 (47 percent) was relatively unchanged from 1993, the average debt loads had more than doubled: from $10,200 to $24,500 for master’s students and from $16,800 to $36,300 for doctoral students. After taking on increasing levels of debt to finance their undergraduate education, some of the best and brightest may not be able to afford the cost of their graduate education.
Too Few Science Students
A second obstacle to attracting top graduate students is that fewer students are enrolling in graduate programs in science, technology, engineering, and math, fields crucial to our national security and economic development. Although more U.S. citizens than ever before are pursuing graduate degrees, this increase has consisted primarily of women and minorities who have not been pursuing science, technology, engineering, or math. A 2002 survey of graduate enrollment by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Educational Testing Service found a 7 percent increase in total graduate enrollment of U.S. citizens and permanent residents over 2001, with increases of 10 percent for African Americans, 5 percent for Native Americans, 14 percent for Asian Americans, 11 percent for Hispanics and Latinos, and 7 percent for women. Excluding the increasing number of women in biological sciences, however, these groups continue to form a small percentage of the enrollments in biological sciences, engineering, and the physical sciences.
For example, African Americans accounted for 2 percent of enrollment in biological sciences, 3 percent in engineering, and 4 percent in the physical sciences. Native Americans made up 4 percent of enrollment in all three categories. Asian Americans accounted for 6 percent of enrollment in biological sciences, 14 percent in engineering, and 14 percent in the physical sciences. Hispanics and Latinos made up 3 percent of enrollment in biological sciences, 4 percent in engineering, and 5 percent in the physical sciences. Women accounted for 52 percent of enrollment in biological sciences, 20 percent in engineering, and 33 percent in the physical sciences.
We had been filling the declining pipeline of U.S. students interested in science, technology, engineering, and math programs by attracting international students to these programs. A Council of Graduate Schools report found that in fall 2002, non-U.S. citizens accounted for 25 percent of enrollment in biological sciences, 51 percent in engineering, and 43 percent in the physical sciences. The 2003 Survey of Earned Doctorates produced by the National Opinion Research Center reveals that 32 percent of doctorate recipients who declared their citizenship hailed from outside the United States. Many of these students return home after earning their graduate degree, but some remain in America and contribute to our scientific and technological competitiveness.
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, however, fewer international students have been pursuing their graduate education in America. Increased security procedures and complicated visa processes; the perception that the United States is now less welcoming to foreign students; and the aggressive recruiting of these students by European, British, Canadian, and Australian universities have all led to declines in international student enrollments. In November 2004, the Council of Graduate Schools reported that first-time international graduate student enrollment had decreased between 6 and 10 percent for the past three consecutive fall semesters; the steepest declines occurred in 2004 in life sciences and agriculture, business, and engineering.
As a result of these trends, fewer U.S. and international students are pursuing science, technology, engineering, and math degrees on our campuses; fewer of them are contributing to academic research productivity; fewer of them will become faculty members who will teach our undergraduates and train our workforce; and fewer of them will contribute after graduation to our country’s research productivity and economic development.
To ensure our ability to produce outstanding faculty and researchers, we need to make America a more welcoming place for international students and scholars without compromising our national security. Federal agencies and higher education groups have made some progress on this front. But we also need to devise ways to improve both graduate student compensation and the recruiting of women and minorities to our graduate programs.
More Support Needed
One way to encourage more qualified U.S. citizens from all backgrounds to pursue graduate degrees might be for Congress to extend the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program. This successful federal program provides funds for eligible undergraduates in the natural and social sciences, engineering, humanities, and math at 156 colleges and universities to undertake intensive research under the guidance of a faculty mentor, an experience that helps them gain ad-mission to and succeed in doctoral programs. Students eligible to participate in the McNair program include first-generation college attendees, women, minorities, and students from low-income families. But this program funds only undergraduates. Allocating funds to help support the best McNair undergraduates who enroll in our graduate programs could help increase the number of qualified U.S. citizens pursuing graduate degrees at our universities. Other remedies might include increasing the current number of federally funded assistantships for graduate students, increasing loan limits for graduate students, and decreasing the amount of tax that graduate students pay on their aid packages.
I began by mentioning terrorism, homeland security, and rising health-care costs, all crucial issues confronting our nation. Who can respond to and investigate terrorism and shore up homeland security effectively? Policy makers and analysts; diplomats; linguists; experts on culture, religion, and ethnic groups; aeronautical, nuclear, and civil engineers; and epidemiologists and other biomedical researchers. Who can help explain and contain health-care costs? Doctors, health-care administrators, nutritionists, health-care advocates, financial analysts, gerontologists, social-services managers, nurses, and biostatisticians. These folks have one thing in common: almost all of them went to graduate or professional school. Graduate education is not only a private benefit but also a public good. As such, it is worthy of public investment. Some increase in graduate student compensation is urgently needed if our graduate programs are to carry out their mission of producing the faculty who teach our undergraduates, train our workforce, and advance the applied and basic research initiatives that contribute to the well-being of all current and future Americans.
Philip Cohen is dean of the graduate school and vice provost for academic affairs at the University of Texas at Arlington. He has published widely on American literature, William Faulkner, and the relationship between literary studies, textual scholarship, and editorial theory. He is the editor, most recently, of Text and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpretation.
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