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July 17, 2007
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The grad school scam
From Rich Vedder:
...probably the biggest scandal and scam of all relates to graduate education. A half century ago, it was common for persons to get their Ph.D. in four or five years and some, including myself, did it in under three years (at age 24 yet). Today, a majority of those entering graduate programs do not have their degrees in six years, and in the humanities, a majority of Ph.D. candidates have not completed their degree in TEN years!!! Of those who DO get their humanities Ph.D. within 10 years, a majority have not received the degree after six years. The dropout rates are about as high as for undergraduate education --but the resources used to unsuccessfully educate many students at the Ph.D. level are much greater per student than for undergraduates.Educating Ph.D. students is damnably expensive. Moreover, the students are unusually bright and capable, and if they were not in Ph.D. programs most would be making good money at relatively productive jobs. Thus the resource wastage is unbelievably great.
The Council of Graduate Schools suggests part of this relates to financing, which may well be true. But part relates to the fact that universities love to have graduate students hang around, for at least three reasons. First, in some states, public university subsidies are enrollment-driven, and Ph.D. students are good for big subsidies. Second, university professors don't like teaching survey undergraduate courses, and force graduate students to do that dirty grubby work for them (which is doubly reprehensible, since those students are the raison d'etre of most universities to begin with). Lots of graduate students have meant lower teaching loads for tenure track faculty. Third, graduate students help them get research done, and provide them with intellectual synergies that stimulate their own research.In one respect, of course, having a lot of graduate students around could be cost effective. Substituting cheap labor (grad students) for expensive workers (tenured faculty) can theoretically lower costs. But the reality of it is that the increase in the use of non-tenured faculty in the classroom, including both grad students and adjunct faculty, has been accompanied by falling teaching loads for regular faculty, so it takes more regular faculty to do a given amount of teaching than a generation ago.
Why state legislatures don't crack down on their research universities is beyond me. Deny any state subsidies for students in Ph.D. programs more than six years. Restrict tax exemptions for private schools which have lousy six year Ph.D. graduation rates. The Feds should deny loans to students after four or five years. Schools that do not have, say, 90 percent of those ultimately successful in getting Ph.D.s graduating within six years should lose their accreditation. If law and medical schools get students out extremely well trained in three to six years (including residency in the case of medical schools), why can't graduate schools? This is the Mother of all higher education scandals.
Time to graduation is not the only problem -- the humanities are maintaining and graduating more Ph.D.s than the academic job market can handle, in no small part because grad programs serve tenure-track faculty's ends. Having grad students around is convenient, as Vedder notes (in English departments, they do most of the composition teaching); it's interesting (grad students are considered by many faculty to be more "fun" to teach than undergrads, not least because they afford faculty the chance to teach highly specialized niche courses in their areas of interest); and it's prestigious (in the status-seeking world of academe, a university department without a grad program isn't much of a department).
I could go on but I have to be somewhere. Comments are welcome.
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Interesting data here - I'm assuming it's roughly representative, and it certainly fits my stereotypes!
45% of Engineering and 41% of Business doctorates graduate in 5 years.
9% of Humanities graduates do - driven down by the fact of no English grads in that program graduating in less than 7 - though the sample is comparatively timy; 15 English vs. 164 Engineering.
EEs take a while, MEs and ChemEs graduate in 5 years over 2/3 of the time!
The question then becomes, why the hell can't Humanities grad students get their Doctorates? Is it selection bias? Weirder criteria? Broken review boards?
California already implements some of the reforms that Vedder calls for: the state does not provide funding to UC campuses for graduate students who have been enrolled more than three years after advancing to candidacy (which typically occurs in the third year), and the state only subsidizes out-of-state tuition for three years after advancement to candidacy. So there are strong financial incentives for getting students out in under five or six years. It isn't so clear that those incentives are working.
Here's another possible cost of very long grad school experiences:
Peter Drucker once asserted that a person will probably never learn to be a good manager unless he gains significant management experience before he is 30. I think this is generally true, obviously with exceptions.
Essentially all academic "administrators" are PhDs, and the PhD is also increasingly common in K-12 school administration. If Drucker is right, the probability of these people doing their jobs properly is being reduced by the extension of grad school.
Is there anyone advocating for students? It seems that teachers are protected by tenure, but students who get terrible advisors are really stuck. My daughter has such a problem!!!!! Got her masters degree in record time becasue her advisors was gone on sabbatical so she worked under a different faculty member. Met with advisor only 3 times individually in 5 years!!! She may get kicked out of her program and she is so close. This advisor hasn't graduated anyone in more than 7 years. HELP!
Renee - she should switch advisers NOW. Talk to the dept. chair or dean, explain the situation, and change advisers ASAP. My adviser quit his position, and became an administrator elsewhere (& refused to continue as anybody's adviser or committee chair) when I thought I was a couple of months away from defending. I ended up re-working my committee and spent another year finishing up with the support of the dept. chair and the dean.
Not quite the same thing, but when my dissertation director was in grad school, he lost two dissertation directors to sudden death before he finished, and had to beg someone to be the third. His topic was totally (Ovid's calendar-poem, the Fasti) out of style at the time, though it has since become quite hot, and none of the survivors wanted to have to read it. Plus I imagine there were subconscious feelings of doom involved. He wasn't in grad school all that long -- just unlucky.
Apparently switching advisors is out of the question as she wouldn't be able to take her study with her and would have to start all over again. Also, it is so politcal that she doesn't think anyone would take her on for fear of pissing off her current advisor. She has gone to the department chair and is always told that she must go through her advisor and not directly to him. It is all very polictical!! Her advisor is just a liar, also. When they kicked her out last summer her advisor told her that her appeal to be reinstated had to go through her. My daughter found out that was a lie. The Phd that she worked under to get her masters degree is no longer there although he loves her and has contacted the chair himself to state his feelings. He is on her committee. He emailed me and said that my daughter is one the most worthy students of receivng this degree that he has ever had. There is another student that has been there a year longer than my daughter, and had her masters when she entered the PhD program, and still hasn't recieved her Phd (with he same advisor!!!) Now going on year number 10 for this poor girl. My daughter has been there since 1998. She didn't start on her masters until 1999 because her current advior wouldn't let her start on it her first year!!! She received her masters degree in 2001 under a different advisor as her advisor was on sabbatical. Thank goodness since one of the other students working under this advisor took 6 years to get her masters. We have contacted a few attorneys, but it doesn't sound very likely that it would accomplish anything. I'm ready to go the the University and starting picketing :)
Sigivald, one graduate program is not a significant data set in statistics. The University of Colorado at Boulder is also not a representative university. (Can any single university represent the others?)
Basically, though, what we learn from those figures is that the average difference in time to completion between natural sciences and humanities Ph.D.s is one year. That's not a huge variation, especially considering the types of teaching and funding involved. At my university, natural science grad students do no teaching because the sciences are funded such that adjunct labor isn't necessary. These students instead work in the labs -- the same labs in which they will complete their doctoral research. Finally, many natural science grad students are not required to conceive of original experiments or research angles. They are placed in a lab based on their area of specialization, where they complete research conceived of and guided by a professor.
This is, of course, different in the humanities. Graduate students there often teach one or two courses each semester of their doctoral years. These courses are themselves the product of research and labor of the grad student; they are rarely handed a syllabus. Humanities graduate students are also required basically to complete a publishable book. A friend of mine who received his Ph.D. in the 80s was able to do so with a long annotated bibliography of a library special collection. That sort of work will no longer fly. Humanities grad students must conceive of and complete original research. If scooped, they must switch projects. (In the sciences, a failed or unoriginal experiment will still fulfill graduate requirements. In the humanities, an unproven hypothesis won't make it through the defense.)
I am in no way saying that a humanities program is more difficult than a science Ph.D. program. But comparing them today is like comparing apples and oranges.
"In the humanities, an unproven hypothesis won't make it through the defense"...do you think this is a good policy, or a bad one?
I think it's a good policy in an ideal graduate program. The problem is that too many committees are not active in the intellectual life of their students. When faced with an ambitious -- but perhaps impossible -- thesis, the professors too often let the grad student go off and fail with the least amount of advice or guidence. More often is the case where a university doesn't have faculty in the field of specialization a graduate student occupies. This was the case with my own dissertation: my university didn't have a single active professor working on contemporary American, Canadian, or Caribbean fiction. Only one professor at the place worked on modernist American fiction, and she had moved on to another field long before.
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