With more than 600 graduate-school deans and administrators gathered here for the annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools, amid growing concerns about student debt and an academic job market that offers little hope of tenure-track positions for many, it was not surprising that talk would turn to life after the Ph.D.
A session about tracking down the employment of former Ph.D. students drew a standing-room-only crowd. Speakers at another session laid out how they had garnered resources to help prepare graduate students for future careers. And a Stanford University professor urged attendees to reconsider what professional success looks like in the academy.
Against that backdrop, the council announced that it would conduct a one-year study to determine the feasibility of a large-scale, systematic approach to tracking the career pathways of graduates in the humanities, social sciences, and STEM disciplines—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The council, with grant money from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, plans to survey its 500 member institutions to find out how they track alumni, and will produce a white paper that explores the demand for longitudinal placement data. It will also hold a two-day workshop for graduate deans, Ph.D. students, and researchers.
“For several years we’ve been hearing from deans that they want more information about outcomes,” said Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. “We know without question that in the aggregate the graduate degree pays off. But people don’t go to graduate school in the aggregate. What we don’t know is what people actually do over time with their degrees.”
That kind of data on a program level would give graduate schools the information they need to understand the full range of job opportunities for Ph.D. holders and to improve programs to make students more employable, Ms. Stewart said. Students could also make more-informed decisions about whether attending graduate school is the right move.
The feasibility study will conclude in December 2014 with a report from the council that recommends next steps.
A Changing Legal Landscape
The sessions at the four-day meeting, which ended on Saturday, reflected other issues the deans face, including how to increase the success of underrepresented students pursuing science doctorates, to harness the power of social networks, and to bring ethnic diversity to graduate programs without running afoul of federal and state laws.
Speaking at a plenary session, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California at Irvine, painted a complex picture of what it’s like to recruit students from underrepresented minority groups in the wake of laws like California’s Proposition 209, which bans racial preferences at state institutions, and judicial rulings like the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which holds race-conscious admissions policies to stricter scrutiny.
“The laws surrounding affirmative action are changing and changing quickly,” Mr. Chemerinsky said.
Nearly all of the audience’s questions focused on ferreting out which policies and practices were safe to use to achieve diversity goals. Mr. Chemerinsky, a professor for 34 years, was sympathetic to their concerns. “Diversity is imperative,” Mr. Chemerinsky said. “We need to have diverse classrooms.”
At another session, deans delved into questions about how the new national health-care law would affect graduate schools, but they came away with few clear-cut answers.
That’s because determining whether graduate students are eligible for insurance coverage, which is triggered by a 30-hour work week, can be tough. More than one dean at the session talked about how graduate students could work 20 hours a week as a teaching assistant for one university and then put in another 10 hours a week as an adjunct professor at a different college.
“Does the sum of all their work push them over the threshold?,” one attendee asked. “Is the TA an employee of the institution or the state?”
Redefining Graduates’ Success
But even as the graduate-education landscape continues to shift, there is evidence that some former doctoral students have moved on to become “part of an academic world that turned many of the things they learned about the professoriate upside down,” said Jennifer Summit, a professor of English at Stanford University, during her remarks on preparing tomorrow’s professoriate.
She spoke of young scholars who were trained at elite institutions, like Stanford, who then decided to begin their careers as faculty members at comprehensive colleges. “Let’s invite them back to share what they’ve learned, and let’s listen,” Ms Summit said.
The council’s president, Ms. Stewart, announced this fall that she would step down at the end of June. In an interview during the meeting, whose attendees included about 100 new graduate deans, she reflected on what it meant to her to lead the council’s annual gathering for the last time as its president.
The occasion, she said, made her “think of how fortunate America is to have this kind of battalion of deans of graduate schools who come to work every day thinking about how they can improve graduate education.”
“Deans are still engaged, and they haven’t given up,” she said. “That’s really exciting.”
Correction (12/9/2013, 4:14 p.m.): An earlier version of this article omitted the name of one of the foundations that is supporting the council’s feasibility study of longitudinal tracking of Ph.D. graduates’ career paths. The study is receiving support from both the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
