Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools since 2000, announced this week that she would be leaving the position at the end of June 2014.
The announcement comes at a time when graduate education faces a number of challenges, including increased calls for programs to demonstrate their worth. Ms. Stewart said that graduate schools today must expand access to their programs, increase understanding among policy makers and others of the programs’ public benefits, and improve data collection on career outcomes and student trajectories.
Ms. Stewart will continue to work at the council as a senior scholar after she steps down.
The 547-member council has studied curriculum development, research integrity, and student attrition since Ms. Stewart took office. The studies, she said, have allowed the council to develop and publish best practices for graduate programs.
One major challenge that the council will continue to face is fighting the “broad perception,” she said, that a graduate education offers strictly private benefits, to students. Having an advanced degree does tend to correlate with higher personal income, she said, but the council must emphasize the public good of a more-educated citizenry, too, including contributions to economic growth and innovation.
Ms. Stewart said the council would also intensify its efforts to prepare graduate students for future jobs, many of which will lie outside of the professoriate.
Many universities now recognize both the variety of career options outside academe for Ph.D. recipients and the benefits of integrating some elements of professional development into a graduate program, she said. But the council needs to collect more information about what specific skills are important to which fields.
“We need to make professional development an integral component of the graduate-school experience, something that is developed in a way that is highly integrated into, and supportive of, research training,” she said.
Ms. Stewart, who received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said she looked forward to returning to scholarly research and her love for the social sciences. While she will first study Ph.D. completion and attrition, she will eventually turn to research on the career tracking of Ph.D. recipients.
Before becoming president of the council, Ms. Stewart served as vice chancellor and dean of the Graduate School at North Carolina State University.
The council said that it planned to announce a national search for a successor this month.
