Is there a crisis in graduate education? Sorting through the myths and realities - Special report: graduate & professional degrees

Black Issues in Higher Education, July 3, 2003 by Kendra Hamilton

There's plenty of bad news circulating about graduate education. Critics claim the United States is overproducing Ph.D.s, churning them out in numbers that the academic job market can't possibly absorb. Combined with the rates of attrition, the ever-lengthening time to degree, and the number of unemployed and underemployed doctorates in the work force, the picture looks bleak for anyone contemplating what has long been regarded as an academic prize.

But how much of this is myth and how much is reality? Is there really a crisis in graduate education?

A glance at the statistics seems, at first, to give the field to the "crisis" camp. According to the annual Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), U.S. universities have been producing more than 40,000 doctorates annually for around a decade. Only about half of those newly minted Ph.D.s have academic job commitments the year they graduate, a proportion that's held steady for around 20 years.

But that's not the whole picture, according to Dr. Maresi Nerad, associate research professor and director of the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education at the University of Washington. "The system is not broken--it's not defunct," says Nerad, who is also co-author of the highly influential 1999 study, "Ph.D.s: Ten Years Later." People just like to complain about it as if it were, she says.

"There is nothing new in terms of phenomena that are viewed as problematic," Nerad explains. "If you read the literature from 1968, even if you go all the way back to 1905--to a report by a group of graduate deans--you would think they were speaking about nowadays."

What is different--what's, in fact, changing dramatically--is the climate surrounding these issues. All the stakeholders in graduate education--from faculty, graduate students and campus administrative leaders to foundations, government and even the corporate sector--appear to be engaged in a radical rethinking of the Ph.D.

Indeed, this decade is shaping up as one of the most exciting periods of reform that doctoral education has experienced in many years, say observers from the academic, nonprofit and foundation sectors.

But why reform--and why now?

THE PH.D. MYSTIQUE

The short answer is that it's needed--some would say desperately so.

"There is a certain Ph.D. mystique," says Dr. Lydia English, program officer for higher education at the Mellon Foundation and director of the Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship Program. "Not too many people know the steps. And the information is not in the catalog or on the Web site. It's information that you get through informal interpersonal relations with people who are willing to mentor you through the process."

"The most important thing for students is that they have mentors, someone who sees the potential in them," says Dr. John Brooks Slaughter, a former university president who now champions his lifelong interest in mentoring programs as president and chief executive officer of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering.

Typically, the onus is on the student to seek out those mentors, but few students enter graduate programs knowing even that much about the journey they're embarking on.

According to a 2001 study from the Pew Charitable Trusts--"At Cross Purposes: What the Experiences of Today's Doctoral Studies Reveal About Doctoral Education"--students often enter graduate education without a clear reason and, depending on the field, betray a startling lack of understanding of the requirements--written and unwritten--for graduation. For example, nearly 90 percent of English and ecology grad students describe their understanding of departmental requirements as low. By contrast, 96.3 percent of chemists and 94.6 percent of mathematicians describe their understanding of such requirements as high.

The study describes "a three-way mismatch" among the goals that students bring with them to graduate school, their training and the actual careers that they pursue. And it's clear that most of the rumblings of "crisis" originate in these mismatches.

For example, everyone is aware of the weak academic job market--everyone, that is, except graduate students. Indeed, whether one is looking at the Pew's 4,000-plus sample or the National Association of Graduate and Professional Students' (NAGPS) 32,000-plus sample, graduate students have their eyes on the prize of becoming a professor, and interest in that goal is strongest in the fields where the market is weakest. Pew, for example, found 89 percent of philosophy students, 81 percent of history students and 80 percent of English students were definitely interested in faculty careers.

Most of these students hope that they'll wind up at schools like the ones that produced them--doctoral granting, research I institutions. "It's a human and a very natural desire," notes Dr. George Walker, who has just stepped down from a dean's post at Indiana University to head the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. But it's not a very realistic one, he says.