Doctoral Education Is Flawed. What’s One Solution From the U. of Chicago? Capping the Size of Ph.D. Programs.

The University of Chicago’s recently announced plan to reform its doctoral-education programs takes aim at a host of flaws in graduate education nationally, but one of its most intriguing solutions is this: capping the number of Ph.D. students it admits.

The size of the cap hasn’t been defined, but it will apply to doctoral students in the humanities and social sciences, in addition to Chicago’s divinity and social-service administration programs. It will take full effect in 2021.

It is part of a broader strategy, including giving doctoral students full funding for the duration of their program and decoupling their teaching duties from their funding, Daniel Diermeier, the provost, wrote in his October 8 announcement of the new model. The changes are intended to curb attrition and shorten the time it takes doctoral students to finish their degrees.

Those were prime issues in a report Diermeier commissioned on the state of graduate education at Chicago, but they’re familiar to doctoral-program administrators and students the nation over.

The cap means that each division will have a set number of doctoral students, as determined by the provost’s office and divisional deans. Each dean will allocate spots to individual programs in her division. And once a program’s roster reaches that predetermined size, no new students can be admitted until other students graduate or leave the program.

But what are the trade-offs? And will the approach work in remedying longstanding problems in graduate education?

Time, Money, and ‘Life Factors’

While he was generally complimentary of Chicago’s plan, Robert B. Townsend, who directs the Washington office of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and oversees its Humanities Indicators data-tracking project, says aspects of that plan pursue goals that may end up conflicting with one another. Tighter limits on the number of students a program can hold, he says, might cause attrition in some cases.

“Between the caps and the funding,” Townsend says, “I suspect it will make it more likely that some programs will have to tell somebody, ‘I’m sorry that these other life factors are intervening, but we can’t just hold a spot open for you if you can’t be working full time on your dissertation.’”

Those “life factors” — such as medical, pregnancy, or other forms of family or personal leave — more often account for longer time to degree than do funding woes, Townsend says. But Chicago’s plan to fully fund its doctoral students’ education hinges on the assumption that money is the main problem. “That causal connection” between funding and time to degree “hasn’t really been made very effectively,” he says. “I’m not sure they’ll quite get what they’re paying for if that’s what they think they’re paying for.”

In addition, determinations about the optimal size of a program — and how many students it admits today — won’t reflect the job market in the next decade, as those students graduate, Townsend says. “I’m just slightly skeptical about how that will actually work in practice as a long-term prospect, having seen the job market ebb and flow through at least three cycles from the late ’80s to the present.’”

To Leonard Cassuto, author of The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It and a regular Chronicle columnist on graduate-student affairs, Chicago’s plan is a welcome intervention. “We need to experiment with more things,” Cassuto says. “This seems to be worth a try. And if it works, then it’s worth more than a try.”

But he warns against hewing too closely to the strictures of a cap. “Anything that’s mechanical may not admit exceptions that require human attention,” he says. “I would hope that Chicago or any institution that tries a one-in, one-out model would have a certain amount of flexibility built into it, because graduate school in the arts and sciences is not a huge enterprise. It doesn’t have to be run purely mechanically.”

To Cassuto, time to degree and its corollary, late-stage attrition — which he distinguishes from “early” attrition, or scholars leaving their program in the first few years after discovering it isn’t for them — are major ethical concerns for graduate education in the arts and sciences.

“Graduate school is school. It’s not some byproduct of faculty research at school. And as school, it involves mutual responsibility. The students are taking on a responsibility, but the institution is taking on a responsibility to the students. And when late-stage attrition happens, it’s a sign that that responsibility may not be being fulfilled,” Cassuto says.

The plan reconceptualizes graduate teaching as “mentored teaching experiences,” with built-in faculty supervision and feedback so that grad students can become better teachers. That could solidify another of Chicago’s responsibilities to its students, says Townsend.

“Certainly when the job market was much better, too many doctoral programs used the doctoral students as expendable labor,” Townsend says. “They didn’t give them a whole lot of preparation. They just sort of threw them in the classroom.”

Supply and Demand

In debates about the state of graduate education, the role of supply and demand is a recurring sore spot. Critics fault graduate programs for admitting, in the aggregate, many more students than the likely number of positions that will be available to them in the job market when they leave.

A survey conducted by the university’s Committee on Graduate Education highlighted the differing views on that issue. Chicago’s faculty members said the key factors in determining the size of their cohorts were funding, the quality of the applicant pool, and their own capacity as professors to advise students.

“By contrast, we learned in our conversations that some Ph.D. students believe that the job market should play a key role in determining cohort size,” a report on the survey observes. “We therefore recommend that graduate programs engage more effectively with the topic of how the job market should relate to cohort size in their fields.”

Some critics of graduate-school admissions, particularly in the humanities, side with the students. They see institutions as culpable for admitting far more students to their programs than will be able to find tenure-track jobs when they graduate.

But James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, says it’s reductive to consider Chicago’s plan a direct response to supply-and-demand economics in the academic job market. He and the AHA believe that Ph.D.s can and should populate the nonacademic work force. Initiatives like Chicago’s, Cassuto says, could indicate a shift in that focus.

“For way too many years, graduate education in the United States has been predicated on the idea that we are supplying professors, and the demand will be for professors. Certainly graduate school supplies professors,” Cassuto says. “But except for one postwar generation, it’s always done more than that. It’s prepared people for work in all sectors.”

In that way, Chicago is following one of Cassuto’s own suggestions, made in a 2016 report, “Reforming Doctoral Education,” that he wrote with Robert Weisbuch for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. One of the report’s prescriptions was to “promote a cultural change in the definition of the Ph.D. degree, as providing disciplinary expertise applicable to all social sectors to augment the narrow goal of replenishing the faculty.”

The Chicago model also includes an array of other initiatives inspired by concerns raised in the report by its Committee on Graduate Education: the expansion of teaching and dissertation-completion fellowships, funding earmarked for increasing the student body’s diversity, and the creation of a four-month UChicago Launch program for recent graduates or those who choose to leave their studies. UChicago Launch is designed as a boot camp for careers outside academe and includes a summer-internship placement.

“This is clearly an innovative, dramatic transformation in thinking about both the funding structure of graduate education in the humanities and social sciences, and of how we think about issues like mentorship, teaching experience, pedagogy, and what a graduate student is being prepared to do,” Grossman says. “This is not just about capping. It’s all about how they think of what the purpose of graduate education is. It clearly is going to be controversial. And that’s fine.”

‘A Difficult Thing for Us to Deal With’

While Chicago administrators are bullish on their experiment, the students it will affect are less so, says Laura Colaneri, a Ph.D. student in the university’s department of Romance languages and literature.

“I’m really worried,” she says, “by the fact that this is sort of an experiment, and we don’t necessarily know how it’s going to work out. It’s suddenly going to be implemented across a bunch of divisions, and we don’t know if it’s going to be damaging to the community.”

Colaneri is a member of Chicago’s Graduate Students United organizing body, which has worked since 2007 to form a graduate-student union. Members of the group perceive the new model as an affront to that goal.

“Every time we receive one of these emails, this is viewed as an attempt to sort of take the wind out of the sails of the union rather than a genuine good-faith attempt to help us,” Colaneri says.

“It’s a contradiction, it’s a difficult thing for us to deal with. Because obviously, I want to say, ‘Great, I have funding for more time, I don’t have this pressure of leaving, which is awesome,’” Colaneri says. And yet, she adds, the new model doesn’t address what graduate students truly want. “We’d say, ‘Yes, we want further funding,’ but would we be saying, ‘Yes, we want caps on the Ph.D. programs?’ I don’t know that that would be the case.”

One of Graduate Students United’s major objections comes with the introduction of “mentored teaching experiences.” The new name, Colaneri says, “is really just a legalese way of trying to frame what we do as not work.”

“I find that almost almost comical,” Colaneri says, “and we’ve started sort of snidely saying to one another as we go off to teach, ‘Oh, I’m off for my mentored teaching experience.’”

Colaneri and her peers are frustrated by what they feel is a lack of input in the decision-making process. Many students and faculty members, she says, learned about the changes from an email Diermeier sent announcing them. And while the Committee on Graduate Education, whose report informed the new model, was co-chaired by a graduate student, Colaneri says that perspective wasn’t representative of many of her peers.

“We feel like we don’t have a say in what happens to us and everything sort of comes down from up on high,” she says. “We learn about these enormous changes to our program and to our funding and to our lives for the next several years through an email to the entire university.”

Diermeier, the provost, acknowledges his plan is “a bold attempt to define a different paradigm of how to do this.” He’s already fielded a few inquiries about it from other curious graduate-program administrators, who say they’ll be watching Chicago’s effort closely.

“We can all learn from it,” Cassuto says. “We can learn from this, whether it succeeds or fails.”

Megan Zahneis is a reporting fellow for The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter at @meganzahneis, or email her at megan.zahneis@chronicle.com.