Call me twisted, but I love reading dissertation drafts. In my work as an editing coach, I like to observe students as they develop their thoughts through several drafts of an argument.
I especially cheer for clients who, coming from backgrounds with few opportunities, fought for a chance to obtain an education later in life. It’s tough to listen to teachers’ criticisms and do homework all while searching for a job or maintaining a 40-hour work week. So I applaud those for-profit universities that are trying to offer convenient educational alternatives to this underserved part of the population—if that’s what they are doing.
Many of the graduate students seeking out my editing services come from for-profit institutions. That’s because their clientele largely consists of people who have been out of school for a long time, who often struggle with the research, the writing, and the whole intense learning process a little more than younger students do. It’s also because many for-profit institutions require graduate students to hire a professional editor, and those students have experience from their own work lives of seeking out professional services like the one I offer.
But I have noticed with growing consternation that my clients from for-profit institutions find themselves without the mentoring and guidance they need as graduate students. Recruiters from for-profit colleges promise students that they will be helped through the learning process, but once enrolled, some students find that they are entirely on their own.
One of my clients was working toward a doctoral degree in education in order to render her social work more credible and marketable to potential sponsors. “Rita” (I’ve changed students’ names to protect their privacy) had college-age children, and her prior education lay decades in the past. Her dissertation proposal was hardly intelligible when I first received it. I wondered how she had reached this point in her graduate program with such utterly insufficient writing skills.
Rita did not know how to paraphrase, how to quote, how to cite correctly in American Psychological Association style, how to write a transition from one paragraph to the next, or how to balance sources with her own commentary. She was entirely unprepared for the demands of her degree program. Had nobody sent her to writing labs along the way?
Typically, in my editing routine, a dissertation-length document goes through about three reviews with separate tasks. In Rita’s case, I may have edited her entire proposal about 10 times. At first, all I focused on was correcting spelling and grammatical errors and simplifying extremely convoluted syntax. Only then, as I began to grasp the gist of her argument, could I move on to style, coherence within paragraphs, and overall organization. I must have worked on the original 74-page proposal for 60 to 70 hours—at what turned out to be an hourly rate of about $2.
During several further reviews, I often returned the document to Rita, asking her to do additional research, clarify something, or confirm my identifications of unmarked verbatim quotations. Working together closely, we used style sheets, my extensive commentary, and several meetings to whip her dissertation proposal into respectable shape.
Rita’s proposal was accepted. Her further research and chapters arrived on my desk in a much more refined condition than the proposal had. She finished her dissertation, it was approved at first submission, and she has since enjoyed considerable success with her social work on a local level. Considering all the mentoring I did—well beyond a hired editor’s regular job tasks—leaves little credit for her advisers and committee in her success story.
I completed my own graduate work at Georgia State University. Maybe I was lucky, but I made close connections with all three members of my advising committee early on in my studies. Each of them guided me through rough patches in my work and encouraged my high-flying dreams.
When I wrote, revised, tossed out, and reworked each chapter of my own opus, they read and reread, met with me, and gave extensive feedback. Their examples as scholars and their encouragement pulled me through much doubt and resignation. They gave their time and were truly involved in my education. If that’s possible at a relatively low-budget state university, shouldn’t it also be possible for the kind of tuition charged by for-profit programs?
It seemed to me that the members of Rita’s dissertation committee had failed in their responsibilities to her and left this astoundingly motivated woman to struggle alone. That made me wonder: Do they spend more money on promotion than on education? What do their faculty handbooks say? For which tasks, exactly, do they pay their instructors?
An institution with a mission that caters to nontraditional students should employ instructors who are especially dedicated to mentoring. Students who have been knocked down a few times, have struggled to provide for their families, have possibly taken a few blows to their self-esteem through layoffs and prolonged unemployment, need encouragement. They need it more than young, idealistic kids fresh out of high school who still believe that the world is theirs to conquer.
In my experience working with graduate students from for-profit universities, the accusation that they are degree mills has substance. Most academic institutions set rules to ensure quality of research or academic ethics. For-profit programs are greatly preoccupied with rules, too, but not the kind that guide students about things like research content or plagiarism.
I would fruitlessly expound to my clients about the need for additional research or greater attention to academic honesty in their work. At first, I hoped that my clients’ dissertation committees would reinforce my admonitions. Instead, when students forwarded to me the responses they’d received from their committee chairs, the only rules that seemed to preoccupy them were grammatical ones. They would write notes like “‘whether’ must be followed by ‘or not’ without exception” (a “rule” learned in elementary school that is usually wrong). The committee chairs demonstrated no concern for holes in a student’s research content or for evidence of plagiarism. I was flabbergasted.
My client “Tony,” working to obtain his doctorate in business administration, had apparently received little instruction on academic-honesty policies even by the time he had reached the dissertation-writing stage of his studies. Completely carefree, he copied and pasted into his own work the greater part of another Ph.D. candidate’s dissertation. He filled in his own interpretations here and there, generated some data, and added some quotes from recent scholarship.
When he hired me, he was disappointed to learn that I would not simply rephrase large passages for him. He thought he was on a proper path of scholarship. His for-profit institution required him to use an automated online system that checks the congruence of a student paper’s content with other sources. His main concern was to lower the percentage of congruence that that plagiarism checker tool had found up to that point.
I began to guide Tony through the process of generating his own hypotheses, determining the focus of his research, and developing a unique angle toward his chosen subject. Slowly we managed to replace most of the copied passages and make the dissertation largely his own work.
Before I was comfortable with the result, the time came for Tony to send a draft to his committee. Their responses revealed to me that they had been entirely aware of his de facto theft of another scholar’s ideas. In fact, one of the professors had been the one to suggest that Tony merely placate the virtual plagiarism checker by rewording large sections.
When, after all of our work on generating unique content, the plagiarism checker returned an 18-percent similarity with other sources instead of the permissible 12 percent, the advising faculty members advised that Tony reduce the number of legitimate, properly credited quotations by paraphrasing. They never mentioned revising the still-pinched parts of the dissertation. I eventually had to end my business relationship with Tony. Desperate to finish, he would not agree to eliminate the last few plagiarized passages.
I suspected laziness on the committee’s part in Tony’s case, but I was willing to give his committee members the benefit of the doubt. Then “Margaret” came along, also a student at a for-profit business school.
Her dissertation was in much better shape than Tony’s or Rita’s from the beginning. We both expected her proposal to be greeted with strong approval. The committee’s commentary, however, gave her flashbacks of second grade: Its remarks consisted entirely of prescriptions regarding the maximum length of sentences and paragraphs.
From what I’ve seen, the online-class format and the distance-education structure, as it is presently executed at most for-profit institutions, does not foster relationships of trust between graduate students and professors. The bond created when an experienced scholar takes a student under his or her wing is a crucial element for that student’s research success. The comfort of sitting in a mentor’s office, talking about research concerns, and hearing the adviser’s encouragement in person cannot be replaced by a purely virtual relationship.
Without someone to turn to, without a proper sounding board, research is far too arduous and far too lonely to sustain. My professors always gave me a safe place where I could admit my frustrations when I had reached a dead end.
Certainly, some people learn entire languages solely from grammar books or know every historical fact of World War II only from reading about it. But that type of isolated learning rarely produces brilliant new scholarship. Maybe the mission of for-profits is not as lofty as that. Maybe they aim only to fill checklists of required classes and hand out certificates of completion at the end. To inspire a disillusioned unemployed father of three to embrace and excel in a new profession, a little more is required: a little less distance and a little more guidance.