First of all, I’m a sorry I’m a day late on this one. Second of all, the reason that I’m a day late is because it’s hard to know where to begin.
Here’s how I most frequently see conversations about graduate education go:
1. There is an “oversupply” of graduate students!
1.a. Programs at all but the most elite institutions should be shut down!
1.b. Even the elite programs should admit only as many students as can get jobs! Fewer graduate students!
1.c. Students are stupid! They should go find gainful employment and jump ship on academia!
2. But what about a “life of the mind”?!
2.a. It is anti-intellectual to criticize graduate education in this country! We have the best graduate programs in the world! That’s why everybody from other countries comes here for grad school!
2.b. It’s our responsibility to make sure our grad students get jobs! The problem isn’t with how many students we admit – it’s with our failure to professionalize/mentor those students!
2.c. How dare we try to tell people who want to pursue graduate degrees that they shouldn’t do so? They are adults!
The funny thing is, I think I’ve taken every one of these positions at one time or another. Now, well, I’m just going to throw out some scattered thoughts, and then I’m going to leave this to you all to discuss.
The reality is that we – and by “we” I mean institutions of higher education from community colleges to elite research institutions – need graduate students to teach. The contemporary university cannot function without its armies of graduate students, just as it cannot function without its armies of adjuncts (who oftentimes are graduate students). So if we are to shrink graduate programs, where does that leave undergraduate education in this country? What does that do to open access to education – not only at the undergraduate level, but also at the graduate level? Who gets left out when programs get eliminated or downsized? And further, how do we make institutions that are not primarily educators of graduate students part of this conversation – because contrary to what some might like to believe, every institution relies on graduate students to get its daily work done. (And don’t even talk to me about how the for-profits exploit graduate student labor – particularly from weak programs like the MA program in which I teach – to get their classes staffed.)
Another question (and I don’t have the answer to this given my field so I’m interested to see what people in fields where this is relevant have to say) is how much of research depends on those armies of grad students (who then will become post-docs) to run labs and collect data. What do we do about that piece of the puzzle, if we are interested in thinking about restructuring higher education?
But so I guess there are two questions here:
1) What is our responsibility to graduate students themselves? In some respects, I think that there are many answers to that. Not all graduate students aim to join the professoriate, and thus a program like mine serves a need for those students – who want to bump up their rank as teachers, who want to get a promotion at work that requires a master’s degree. But there are always a few of those students whose dreams change midstream, and those students will leave my program in debt and not terribly competitive for their new path. And then there are the research universities, who are training the next generation of scholars and teachers – except of course many of the scholars and teachers they are training have no hope of securing full-time, tenure-track employment. What responsibility do those research universities have to change things, and how might they go about it?
2) To what extent is any conversation about graduate education going to lead us to a conversation about undergraduate education? How do we reconcile the needs of both tiers – at all of the different tiers of institutions that have their thumbs in those pies? The reality is that institutions like mine are often the training ground for graduate students in school at the research university down the road. We are where they go when their fellowships run out, when they need teaching experience beyond TAships, and when they need some extra cash. What does that mean for the quality of undergraduate education at a university like mine? Further, what does it mean when some students at my university end up deciding that they want to pursue graduate school – have they been trained adequately to get into a decent program, or are they doomed to end up in an unranked program that they pay for out of pocket? And, let’s say they do get fully funded – does that really make it better when they’re losing ~8 years (conservatively) of income over that time?
So how do we think about how undergraduate and graduate education fit together? How do we reconceive how graduate education works in order to try to address issues in the employment structure of higher ed from the source? Is graduate education the place to start, or must we start someplace else before we deal with graduate education?
Sorry that this post has more questions than answers and that it’s so disjointed. I really need to get to my real writing today, and so I needed to dash this off quickly.
Well, one way of thinking about question 2 is that in the humanities, we’ve messed it up. That is, we’ve linked undergrad and grad education to the detriment of both. That is, while some teaching experience is good, we have given short shrift to funding graduate education by paying for it with undergraduate tuition, and we’ve saved money by serving undergraduates with underpaid grad students. If we were to think what would constitute the best graduate education, and the best undergraduate education, we’d get a different model.
And I’m not in the sciences, but I do wonder whether research has been shaped by the need to employ grad students. Would there be different research done if the scientist had to do it? Or a different amount?
I agree with you about us ending up with a different model if we really were concerned about doing both kinds of education in the best way possible. One difficulty at this point, esp. in English, is that at this point the system is such that I would never advise an undergraduate to go to graduate school unfunded because of the employment prospects at the end of the degree. Since the vast majority of funding comes from some mix that includes teaching, to advise students that they shouldn’t go without funding does seem to reproduce the very thing that is detrimental.
While I’m not in the sciences or social sciences, it is my sense that research is very much shaped by whether a scientist has graduate students. I think this actually makes the gap much wider between scientists at various institution types vs. those in the humanities. There are amazing scholars in my field who are at all different kinds of institutions – institution type doesn’t really matter that much in terms of productivity or reputation – or it need not. In contrast, my sense is that my colleagues in the sciences and social sciences have a much harder time because they don’t have the human resources (grad students, post-docs) to pursue certain lines of inquiry.
I’ll hit point #1: Our responsibility to grad students is
a) admit only those who we think can complete the program and do reasonably well. We don’t know whether their desires are to get an academic job, train for the foreign service, or just have an advanced degree. And their goals may change throughout the course of the program. So “limit admissions to students who can get jobs” is unreasonable.
b) be honest with them from day one about the job market in academia, but then present them with alternatives. I’m working on this in my department, and it’s tough, because I’ve never seriously had to think about a Plan B. But perhaps I’d have a better idea about this now if some faculty members in my own grad program had talked to me about alternatives.
c) maybe, just maybe, encourage the M.A. as a precursor to the Ph.D., so students can see what they’re in for, and decide if it’s right for them.
If we change how grad education works, we also need to lower the tenure requirements for junior professors at R1s. Or at least we need to think about these things.
There is a completely different way of looking at graduate education (and other levels of non-tenure-track positions), which is like minor league baseball.
The vast majority of players who join the minor leagues want to make it to the bigs, but know that their chances are small. They are willing to take the chance because they love baseball and because the rewards of making the bigs are so high. Minor league baseball players get paid like absolute shit and live in horrible conditions.
From the standpoint of the system, the minor leagues serve both a training function and a selection function: both preparing and identifying the most promising players for advancement to the next level.
No one seems to ever claim that minor league baseball is a horrible scam and that only as many baseball players as can make the majors should be allowed to join the minors.
Comrade PhysioProf, you return to this analogy of professional sports repeatedly in these conversations and I just think it’s a false analogy and a dangerous one. There’s a stark difference between the reward of playing for the Yankees and getting a tenure track job. Additionally, unless we do away with the university altogether, college professors are a necessity in a way that professional athletes just are not, a point a commenter made at my blog last week. Moreover, one of the main reasons the number of PhDs far outstrips the number of available jobs isn’t because there’s some agreed upon finite number of “teams” with a finite number of teams; it’s because universities are looking for the cheapest ways to teach students and so tons of positions are given over to adjuncts. The reason I think it’s a dangerous analogy is because it justifies unnecessary and unethical practice (whether that be a question of the number of graduate students or the practice of adjuncting altogether).
At the end of the day, I don’t think anybody views academia as similar to professional sport, and certainly nobody who’s just starting out in the field views graduate school as pee wee football and so the questions being raised here will continue to be salient ones.
I think Notorious’s comments about presenting alternatives goes a long way. I think it’s vital for the idea of leaving academia or the professoriate to be a conversation that can be had openly with professors and not just whispered about with graduate student colleagues who really aren’t in the know.
Dr. Crazy, I really appreciate the tone you’re using to articulate these questions. So often conversations on this subject become defensive on the part of those who’ve come out ahead in the current system and bitter on the part of those who haven’t. I think a first step towards getting anywhere is a change in tone and a refocusing on a responsibility towards students, both undergraduate and graduate.
This paradox you mention is so important to point out: “to advise students that they shouldn’t go without funding does seem to reproduce the very thing that is detrimental.” This is the reason the analogies to sports and the arts don’t hold up for me. If your graduate education is funded through your own teaching, your role is about more than just training and selection for a better position. As teachers, graduate students and adjuncts (at least in the humanities) perform an essential function in the education of undergraduates. The importance of their role as faculty is masked by their status as “students”; this devaluation of teaching, in part, is what perpetuates the crappy market for “real” jobs.
I agree with Notorious that being “honest with graduate students from day one about the job market in academia” is important, but this honesty should not only be about the job market in academia and alternative career paths but also about the reasons why the job market in academia is the way that it is.
Dr Crazy asks about the science side of the divide: [H]ow much of research depends on those armies of grad students (who then will become post-docs) to run labs and collect data.
I’ll play. Somewhere between “most of it” and “almost all of it”, particularly if you include contingent Research Faculty in areas like biomed research, although it is difficult to decide how much to attribute to the grad students themselves and how much to the post docs and research “professors” who come out of that grad student pipeline.
In my field (physics), the ratio is smallest at institutions like your own, but they don’t do very much of the total research done in the world. At R1s, you probably can’t imagine the scope of some programs. There are definitely professors who spend all of their time writing and managing, but it should be said that they do know what is going on everywhere in their program. Most of the time. However, it should also be noted that most instances of major academic fraud have taken place under the umbrella of a manager who doesn’t question results that come out as expected.
I think Comrade PP is right on the money with the comparison to minor league baseball. It’s an analogy, not an isomorphism. It’s not like there are only 30 universities in the entire country, and only a couple dozen professors teaching at each one via some massive on-line distance learning program, so you can’t compare salaries … yet.
The pyramid of they system, creating the dream that leads kids to play for $1100 a month, riding a bus from town to town in hopes of that million dollar pay day, is quite similar.
The difference is that the pyramid in academia is quite a bit narrower with many MANY places where you can play for $4,000 to $5,000 a month if you actually want to teach rather than live “the life of the mind”. The tragedy is that (1) very few graduate students know the odds, partly because some fields don’t collect any data at all and (2) a surprising number don’t know that most of the jobs are not in places like the school’s they attended so they don’t even know where to look. A case in point: even t-t humanities jobs at our CC rarely get more than 40 to 50 applications, even in a year when people claim to be desperately looking for jobs.
I missed this part. In the biomedical sciences, the answer is almost all of it, except that this question is not posed correctly.
Grad students and post-docs do not “run labs”, but nor do they only “collect data”. I have about fifteen researchers in my laboratory. *I* “run the lab”. The more senior researchers (senior grad students and post-docs) in my lab each direct a project that is under their own complete day-to-day and week-to-week control, with more junior researchers associated with one or another of these projects. The senior researchers also control the long-term direction of each of these projects, with long-term guidance and mentoring from me.
BTW, I can see disagreeing with the minor league baseball analogy and thinking it is inapt, but “dangerous”? Coal mining is dangerous. Having no job at all and risking malnutrition and poor health outcomes is dangerous.
Ending up a disgruntled PhD with a job that isn’t pontificating to hordes of adoring undergrads over sherry in a wood-paneled office at Harvard is not “dangerous”. And if you look at the employment statistics of the US Dept of Labor, you will see that even now–despite the terrible economic conditions and high overall unemployment–people with advanced degrees are at essentially full employment. Not getting to have the one cushy job you thought you wanted is not “dangerous”.
Maggie made the above point about lowering tenure requirements. I don’t really see that tenure requirements have to be changed if graduate school is changed. I think that’s just wishful thinking on her part. Besides, wouldn’t it make sense to have a longer tenure clock rather than lower tenure requirements? Personally I do not think I could handle that stress.
One could even argue that there isn’t a problem at all (as in 2c). People are making choices. They’re not getting jobs in academia. They’re grumpy but they chose a grumpy path. Any changes would be paternalistic.
With the way that libertarian paternalism is “in” right now, maybe we should be trying to think of “nudge” solutions to gently discourage people (but which people?) out of fields that have a high probability of misery upon graduation. Or we can just make the job information more salient and encourage statistics collection for the fields that don’t collect it (as was suggested previously). Or we can make sure each first-year student gets a field-relevant copy of “What can I do with a PhD in X” book upon matriculation. I read the math version as an undergrad.
Thanks everybody for weighing in! I’ve been so busy doing real work-like things that I hadn’t even looked at all the comments until just now. Some responses:
Re: tenure requirements, I don’t think they would need to change in the humanities because I really don’t see that shifting teaching responsibility away from graduate students would make much difference in what candidates come into a t-t job with. At least from what I’ve seen, grad schools aren’t producing students that look all that different from what grad students looked like, say, 25 years ago. The primary difference is in quantity of teaching – not in what students are teaching or what they are researching. As I’ve said before in response to some discussion, teaching experience has diminishing returns. Teaching 8 sections of comp over 4 years at the same institution does a person no more good than having taught 4 sections of comp at that institution over 4 years. Not even at teaching schools.
I’m a huge fan – particularly at institutions like mine, but maybe elsewhere, too – of encouraging MA programs as a stepping stone to the PhD. The MA is a much more flexible degree and much less time consuming. Also, MA programs do tend to emphasize many different possible career paths, where PhD programs don’t.
As for the minor league analogy, I think CPP makes a decent case for it, and I think others make good cases against it. For what it’s worth, I’m not sure that we really need an analogy for what’s going on in higher education right now. The point isn’t whether becoming a professor is analogous to becoming a pro ball player (or a movie star, or a rock star, or whatever the flavor of the week thing is – these analogies always get made and they always seem to be about professors trying to seem cooler than they really are, ’cause it sure ain’t people without t-t jobs making those analogies). The point is to talk about higher education generally and the path toward becoming a professor as one piece of that. Fighting over analogies seems sort of to stall the discussion, I’d say. That said, I agree that such analogies aren’t “dangerous.” I just think they get us off task.
Thanks for the explanations and clarifications from the science folks about the role grad students play in research. I still think you people are weird for working with other people.
So, keep the conversation going, my peeps. Some questions: what might the academy look like if we reconceive the grad education portion of it? Do we need to think about grad education differently by discipline? Is the PhD just a research degree, or should it be? How do any changes we make in grad education influence (or not) undergrad education?
As a grad student in the humanities who made most of the classic mistakes (taking out loans for an MA, going to a good but not elite PhD program taking too long on the dissertation, thereby running out of guaranteed funding and now spending too much time now adjuncting), this is a hard subject, but one that merits serious discussion. I’m also really glad that the conversation here hasn’t turned into a blaming/bitterness game, and I hope that something good can come out of these discussions.
One of the things that’s always perplexed me about academe is how opaque the system is. I knew about teaching & scholarship, but had no real idea about the culture and the problems that we face in higher ed until probably my 3rd year in my PhD program. Several of my fellow grads & I have lamented the fact that for admissions, grad schools generally do not do interviews. So if we’re talking about admissions process, it really would be nice if it became more of a two-way street, and one where the good and bad sides of the system were more openly and honestly discussed. I don’t know if that would’ve changed my decision, but some of what I learned later would not have come as such a shock.
I think we need to know more about career alternatives, but recognize that most of our mentors have never had to confront that (after all, they’re in the positions we want). In my program, we do occasional talks about other things we can do with our degrees, but it is hard to keep the whining out of those conversations sometimes. The other thing I think departments need to do (at least in history) is to make connections with places where their grads could secure jobs in alternative fields. It’s one thing to think, “Oh, I could go work for a museum/publisher,” but another entirely to know how the culture works and how to get a foot in the door, or what those alternative paths might require from people who pursue those careers.
I completely agree with this point: “The contemporary university cannot function without its armies of graduate students”…
[...] the problem is that there are too many adjuncts and graduate students teaching and the full professors who do teach would much rather work on their research than force [...]
Hi everyone. I have been reading this blog for a few years but haven’t commented yet. I JUST started a joint M.A./Ph.D. program in English and one of the things that the DGS said to my incoming cohort at orientation was to seek out opportunities to diversify ourselves as we professionalized. She then went on to give us some specific examples available in our department and related departments (serving on administrative type committees, editing/publishing internships, ESL education, etc.) She ended this little talk by saying, “I am sure most of you know about the dire situation in the job market, but if you don’t feel very informed, please come see me.” And she meant it. So, at least this piece of the puzzle is happening in some places.
I was lucky enough to have really, really good advising about grad school during my undergrad career. I was not going to attend any program unfunded, and I have been reading about (and hearing about) the atrocious state of the job market for the last few years, so at least I won’t be shocked later on.
Maybe I will feel differently later (I am not required to teach this year) but I feel really lucky right now, not exploited. I have tuition remission and a fellowship, and between that and my boyfriend’s salary, I don’t have to take out loans to live and go to school. I know I am at a particular (idealistic and early) moment in all of this, so I thought I would weigh in as one of those adults that knows what they are doing even if it’s stupid and risky!
BES, i don’t think going to graduate school in English when you are fully funded is either “stupid” or “risky.” But negotiating the job market is psychologically exhausting and almost always deeply disappointing in ways that are impossible to describe. The problem I have with the major league sports analogy above is that it’s not the case that the “very best” scholars get the most desirable jobs … as if it were even possible to measure who the “best” are, or who has the most potential to be a star scholar. Most of the people I went to graduate school did get jobs. Almost none of us got great jobs — they were primarily in terrible geographic locations and / or had 4/4 teaching loads. I know a lot of people who have made these jobs work, in one way or another. But this involves a lot of soul searching, reconsidering one’s priorities, and so on. I, for one, just quit my job the year before I was up for tenure because of my job location (husband’s job was in awesome other city, we have 2 young kids, etc). NOBODY I know has been able to find that wonderful second job, even though every one of us was told to take the first t-t job we were offered with the idea that if you publish a lot, do everything right, you will get awesome 2nd job. Sorry, that’s a lie. And it’s the one that people fail to mention.
I object to the sports analogy for the same reason you point out karet. I agree with Dr. Crazy that these analogies often seem intended to make being a scholar sound more exciting than it is–like it’s all about talent and passion and you’ve either got it or you don’t. And I agree with frogprincess that the wrong analogy can frame the discussion in a way that is dangerous. Yes, that’s right…I said dangerous. Words do things.
But I do also agree that an analogy is not what we need here. We need to deal with the actual situation.
My field is quite different from, say, English, which makes it difficult to comment but maybe what I have to say is useful because it’s different. Someone mentioned requiring a terminal master’s degree. My field does require that PhD students enter with a terminal master’s degree and many people actually come in with what amounts to a professional degree (the master’s in divinity).
These degrees are employable on their own and that means, should the PhD or the tenure track not work out, a person has other options. Rather than thinking about the terminal master’s as a way to weed people out, force them to mature, or discourage the fainthearted, one could think of it as another layer of professionalization, perhaps even of diversification. It provides broad exposure to other parts of the field and training in how to address the larger field–that is, beyond the tenure track. The master’s in that case, is ultimately for the student’s own good and it does something that a couple more years in the PhD can’t accomplish.
Put another way, we don’t require the master’s to make it harder to get into the PhD. We require it because it serves a useful pedagogical purpose. If terminal master’s programs in other fields could be conceived that way, they might be what’s best for graduate students. That requires conceiving of the field broadly–as BES mentioned, the whole world of writing and editing, of teaching at the secondary level, etc.
The idea of a terminal M.A. — or just some option to add another layer of professionalization — is a good one but would probably require some rethinking and redesign in a lot of programs. The terminal M.A. in English I earned before starting the Ph.D. has been as useless to me in finding nonacademic employment as the Ph.D. I just finished. I’m going on the market again this fall but without any delusions this year about the prospects, and so I have also started looking into writer-editor positions. The people hiring for these positions don’t care about my academic publications or that I’ve taught writing to undergraduates for the better part of the past decade. They want proof that I can write newsletters and press briefings and “reports containing general information for a variety of audiences.” I can make a case for how my background does qualify me to do these things, but hey seem either to want someone with a B.A. who can grow into the position, in which case I seem overqualified, or someone with industry experience, in which case I am underqualified. I think it would be helpful to have something more concrete to point to.
So my thinking is this: My Ph.D. program allows people to earn certificates in critical theory and in teaching, although even the latter is not very useful outside of an academic CV because it’s not the same as the teaching certificate you need to teach in a public high school. So, in the interest of being practical and making alternative career paths realistic, why not offer graduate students, both M.A. and Ph.D., the option to earn a certificate in professional writing (or whatever the equivalent of that would be in other fields)? It would be, as Anastasia says, “another layer of professionalization.”
I brought this up with our placement director after my unsuccessful first try on the academic market last year. Hir response was that it would be a waste of time — “graduate students have enough work to do just to be competitive as scholar-teacher candidates.” Frustrating!
Hi everyone. My perspective is that of a Canadian Ph.D. student in Education (Post-Secondary Studies), starting my program this week. I am most interested in the first question: what is our responsibility to graduate students? Here are my thoughts on this:
1) Professional development
I feel it is the responsibility of the institution to acknowledge that everyone who enters the program is not aiming for a career in academia. Even many of those who are will struggle to secure a job, and so professional development workshops are certainly not going to hurt anyone.
2) Honesty about the job market
I do think that faculty should talk to their grad students about the reality of the job market and for those who are serious about seeking a TT position, help them do what they can do to make themselves competitive candidates.
3) Think international
I think it also advisable for those students who are able, to think beyond geographical boundaries, and consider working abroad-wherever that may be. Graduate programs should encourage and provide incentives, via course credits, financial support, etc. for students looking to broaden their horizons and learn about higher education systems on a more global level.
4) Teacher Training
Coursework in educational theory and teaching skills should be incorporated into existing graduate programs, or certificate programs created to supplement them.
Gwynne hit the nail on the head when she commented on how “opaque” the system is. As a third year Ph.D. student I am still uncovering all the nooks and crannies of this world and man, I wish I had known this stuff years ago. Someone above mentioned the idea of admission interviews to get into grad school, and I think this would be a great idea. I went from my undergrad to a M.A. with the full intention of continuing on for a Ph.D., but I had no idea what I was getting myself into. All I knew was that I really liked my field and wanted to be a professor, and nothing else. That was it. I was completely clueless. The two years I was at the school getting my M.A. was like being in limbo – no one talked to us about professionalization, alternative employment options, or even continuation to a Ph.D. We were really swept aside.
During my first semester as a Ph.D. student, we actually had a class about the discipline, including professionalization and the job market. Of course, this was information I wish I had had three to four years earlier. I would have probably have chosen to still go to grad school, but I would have went about it in a completely different manner.
All in all, early honesty. Thinking about going to grad school? This is everything you need to know…
In economics, there’s a book that is shoved on anybody thinking of going to graduate school. It’s called, “The Making of an Economist” by David Colander, and it’s full of horrible interviews with then-current graduate students. I don’t know about the new updated edition, but if you still want to go after reading the first edition, then maybe you’re making the right decision. Maybe all disciplines need a book like that.
(First year professors are gifted with the Young Economist’s Guide to Professional Etiquette or A Guide for the Young Economist, which give very good advice on things like how to do a referee report.)