The graduate-school enterprise has not exactly been a magnet for philanthropy in recent years. During these times of unprecedented economic and political challenge to higher education, once-stalwart supporters seem to have paddled away from our storm-tossed ship.
Among other losses, doctoral education has seen the withdrawal of former benefactors such as the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (now the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and focused on K-12 education) and the Mellon Foundation (which has subordinated its support of scholarship to a wider social-justice mission).
That’s why it’s noteworthy to see a new player enter this embattled sector. The Gardner Institute is a nonprofit organization supported by foundation grants. It has a deserved reputation for its longtime work curating the “First-Year Redesign,” a suite of offerings designed to help colleges develop their own plans to orient and retain first-year undergraduates during a period of their education when they’re at greatest risk of quitting.
Now Gardner is expanding its reach. This spring it went public with a new educational initiative: “The Graduate Student Experience” — unveiled at a March conference in Asheville, N.C., attended by representatives of more that 50 graduate schools from around the country. I visited the gathering, and came away optimistic.
In announcing the conference and describing its rationale, the institute said: “We think it is time for a more deliberate set of efforts to increase student success using a holistic perspective that addresses student retention, progression, and completion rates, mental health and well-being, and career preparation. We are inviting your participation in the inaugural convening to discuss improving the graduate school experience in order to better serve our national interests as the gold standard for global graduate education.”
The Graduate School Experience has some of the same contours as Gardner’s first-year project. Both aim to help institutions ease the difficult transition for students to a new educational experience. The mission, in the words of the institute’s founder, John N. Gardner, is to “gather data on the curricular and cocurricular dynamics of the student experience, discuss the meaning of the data,” and then use it “to help the institution decide on a plan and implement it.”
But the new venture won’t stop at the first year of graduate school. “Our aim,” the institute announced on its website, “is threefold: to reduce graduate student withdrawals and separations, enhance student experience and well-being, and strengthen post-graduate outcomes.” It envisions finding ways to support graduate students from their first year through their graduation and search for employment.
It may be melodramatic to describe graduate students as an oppressed population, but it’s also accurate.
For Gardner and his team, this is a matter of social justice. That goal has driven him during his long career as an educator, beginning with his first teaching experience in segregated South Carolina while serving in the armed forces, and continuing through years as a professor and administrator before he founded the organization that bears his name. Gardner sees graduate students as “an underserved group” within the university. The purpose of the March conference, he said in an interview, was to “build a community of practice” to bring attention to their concerns, including problems of cost and access.
It may be melodramatic to describe graduate students as an oppressed population, but it’s also accurate. Alyssa Crittenden, the keynote speaker at the conference and vice provost for graduate education and dean of the graduate school at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, spoke of how rising costs — not only tuition and fees, but also living expenses — have led to ballooning personal debt that restricts the career options of many graduate students. She also cited inequities (socioeconomic as well as racial and ethnic) that limit access to graduate programs, and the loss of work/life balance (which she called “harmony”) that is especially familiar to graduate students in the laboratory sciences.
Even little moves can make a big difference in easing the pressures on graduate students. Reducing fees for registration holds (when a graduate student’s tuition payment is late in arriving from an external source, for example), or training faculty members at all career stages to be better mentors for graduate students, could have an outsized impact.
To truly reform graduate education will require detailed knowledge of its infrastructure — what Crittenden called the “hidden curriculum” for administrators. Her point, speaking as a graduate dean herself, was that deans cycle in and out of the job, and when they come in, it takes them quite awhile to learn what little things need fixing (like fees for registration holds), and how to fix them. For instance: What if a change like that has to go through the faculty senate? Who must you speak with to get it on the senate’s agenda? By the time deans figure this stuff out, they’ve stepped up or down, and someone new comes in and has to learn it all for themselves. Meanwhile, change languishes, or just never happens.
The Graduate Student Experience aims to empower administrators by revealing that hidden curriculum. By turning administrative lore into shareable knowledge, you make it easier for leaders to reform and update their programs, which is the essence of the institute’s approach to helping institutions, separately and together. What’s needed at this point, Gardner said, is “a coalition of the willing.”
“I am not a lone ranger,” Gardner said. “We need partners.” Of course academics tend to get nervous about the idea of centralized approaches to graduate education. American academic culture emphasizes the independence and self-governance of individual graduate programs. Crittenden emphasizes “educational sovereignty” — a concept that mixes self-governance and inclusiveness. Accordingly, she stressed the need to bring students into the process.
As a work in progress, all of this sounds pretty good. In a talk at the conference, Drew Koch, chief executive of the institute, called for the collection of solid data on pressing challenges facing graduate education — including identifying the less-obvious ones.
Koch offered a good example in the proliferation of new master’s programs — and the concurrent leap in their tuition costs. That’s not necessarily a good or bad thing; it depends on the quality of the programs and whether the M.A. graduates perceive any career and salary benefits. Colleges carefully study undergraduate satisfaction with their educational experience, but master’s students don’t get the same attention. Are those programs providing valuable training or are they merely a cash cows? Right now we simply don’t know, because we’re not looking closely at this fast-growing sector.
We can learn a lot about graduate education by looking at it from the student’s point of view.
More trenchantly, Koch showed that, between 1996 and 2016, the cost of a master’s degree rose more than 60-percent faster than the cost of a bachelor’s degree. (No doubt the rise has continued since.) Given that most master’s students pay tuition, that’s an access issue that doesn’t receive enough notice.
But there was another cost issue that didn’t receive any notice at the conference: the funding of Ph.D. students. The unfunded — or partially funded — doctoral student was, as one conference attendee remarked to me, the elephant in the room.
Over the past generation, some universities (mostly the wealthier ones) have moved toward offering full funding for every doctoral student, and admitting smaller cohorts. But that shift has only taken place at universities that can absorb its cost. Most universities — including most of those represented at the conference — don’t fully fund all of their doctoral candidates. Just as higher education generally should not be represented by a few celebrity institutions at the top of the prestige ladder, neither should the experience of the richest universities stand for all graduate education.
The Gardner project offers a potential antidote to the usual piecemeal or top-down reform strategies. We can learn a lot about graduate education by looking at it from the student’s point of view. Graduate school still costs a lot — and as this inaugural conference showed, we’re not always aware of how much, and in what ways. Economic cost is surely important, but it’s not the only kind of cost that graduate students bear.
For that reason alone, I would be glad to see the Gardner team enter our troubled vineyard. But I’m also relieved to see that the group wants to learn before they act, and glad that they don’t want to act alone.
This new project is more idea than practice now — but it’s an idea that holds promise, and the Gardner team has vowed to continue with it. Graduate schools can learn a good deal from the best practices at the undergraduate level, said a conference attendee, Morris Grubbs, assistant dean and director of graduate student professional enhancement at the University of Kentucky. The institute is “uniquely positioned” to make a much-needed difference, he said. Let’s hope so.
