Excellence in doctoral education: defining best practices

College Student Journal, June, 2007 by Marianne Di Pierro

Formal training and support for students and faculty are requisite if the doctoral educational process is to succeed. Doctoral students, despite their seemingly self-assured appearances, often struggle in silence with issues of developing a proposal or writing a literature review, and new advisors, with little more than their own dissertation experience to serve as guide, frequently discover themselves as denizens in uncertain worlds. Faculty training generally takes place under the tutelage of seasoned professors who initiate new advisors into the process; however, at best, the procedures often do not expand beyond the personal experience and guidance of these mentors. This is not to dismiss that guidance and expertise--certainly the master/apprentice model has been successful for centuries; however, contemporary education requires other models that interface with evolving demands.

Addressing the needs of both doctoral students and graduate advising faculty is requisite if we are truly to improve graduate education and make inroads into a process that has, for the most part, resisted productive change. At the heart of doctoral students' struggling lie serious concerns that challenge the notion of certainty that they are indeed worthy of embarking upon doctoral study, a notion that frequently serves to undermine even the most stalwart and that holds serious implications for students from underrepresented groups who may experience yet another deeper level of angst in the face of sociocultural challenges and pressures. For new advising faculty, the demands of leading a student through the dissertation process, sans the benefit of formal training and support, can be exacting. The absence of employing this dual approach that considers both faculty and student needs accounts for many of the flaws in doctoral education.

Research and Policy Implications

The Graduate Center at WMU serves as a conduit between the Graduate College and the university at large because of its direct interactions with students and graduate advising faculty, and as a result of its research. In many respects, it sits inside of the doctoral educational process and, therefore, it occupies a unique perspective that permits for it to see across a spectrum of doctoral programs and their processes. Moreover, it discerns best practices as those exist within various departments and serves to disseminate information that may be useful to other disciplines. As a result, it has contributed to the implementation of policies and procedures that enhance doctoral education. It has transformed The Graduate College from a policy-generating body to one that conducts both formal and informal research--the findings of which are integrally related to the development of university policies and procedures that strengthen the graduate education process.

The implementation of a formal annual review of progress ("Annual Reviews of Graduate Students," 2004) for master's and doctoral level students is one example of a policy that has as its main objective a core centered in retention, and also in due process (Wiener & Hustoles, 2004). Another example is the recommendation that the dissertation committee member approval process be improved by requiring that formal approval at the college deans' level is secured prior to any committee meetings with the student: experience has shown us that committees frequently work together without the benefit of a formal approval, which, if denied, results in the reconfiguration of the dissertation committee at a late stage in the student's doctoral education and potentially protracts time to degree.