The critiques of graduate education have been building in recent years: Too many programs, scholars warn, enroll too many people who struggle to make ends meet while in graduate school, take on too much debt, and outnumber the tenure-track jobs they are being trained to fill.
At the Johns Hopkins University, administrators watching the shifting landscape have decided that the time has come to respond.
The humanities and social-science programs in the university’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences compete for top graduate students with fellowship packages that fall far short of those offered by rivals. Students who do enroll often find themselves in financial straits over the summer, when stipend money runs out. That can thwart research plans and lengthen the amount of time it takes to earn a Ph.D. Seeking to fix these problems, administrators are proposing to raise graduate-student stipends.
What Johns Hopkins is finding, however, is that fixes require trade-offs. And, in turn, trade-offs invite controversy. To increase stipends for graduate students and attract top candidates, programs would have to cut enrollment. That means fewer graduate students to work as teaching assistants and fewer people to contribute to vibrant debates in small seminars.
When a draft of the proposals reached graduate students in the fall, they joined faculty members in speaking out against them, saying that the price to pay for the changes was too steep.
Katherine S. Newman, dean of the Krieger school, says its limited finances meant that it had to make a tough call: “Take in fewer students, so we could support them at the robust levels that they need to be fully devoted to their research year-round and be competitive in an unprecedented job market.”
Other institutions have made similar choices. In response to the economic downturn, Columbia University cut its incoming cohort of graduate students in 2009 by 10 percent across its programs. Columbia had planned to return its graduate-student enrollment to prerecession levels once the economy turned around, but officials decided otherwise. The university instead increased the financial-aid packages that graduate students receive, which put the support in line with peers’ offers.
Elsewhere, the Graduate Center at the City University of New York has said that it would cut enrollment across its graduate programs by one-fourth by 2015, so that it could put more money toward helping Ph.D. students succeed through higher stipends and other assistance.
With the preponderance of pressures that graduate programs, particularly in the humanities, are facing, Johns Hopkins and those other universities are doing important self-analyses, some scholars say.
“The question that’s being raised about how many students to accept is certainly a conversation that we should be having nationwide, and we should be having it as undogmatically as we can,” says Leonard Cassuto, a professor of English at Fordham University who writes about graduate education for The Chronicle.
Closing the Gap
At Hopkins, current graduate students in the humanities and social sciences get $8,000 to $10,000 less than students at peer institutions do, Ms. Newman says.
Students now have nine-month stipends of $22,000. Under the university’s new strategic plan, incoming students would get a 12-month stipend of $30,000, guaranteed for five years. They could compete to receive a sixth year of financial support. Full tuition, health care, and $1,000 per year for travel related to fieldwork or conferences would also be part of the deal. And students would teach for only six of the 10 semesters covered by the fellowship.
To pay for the higher stipends, the Krieger school wants the 14 affected humanities and social-science departments to cut enrollment by an average of 19 percent over five years. For most departments, that would mean accepting about one student fewer each year as the plan is phased in over five years.
Graduate students and professors say the plan would alter their educational and work experience in ways that they find unacceptable. Both groups have called for a moratorium on the proposals.
Tamara Golan, a member of the Graduate Representative Organization at Johns Hopkins, says one of the reasons she came to the university was to take advantage of small graduate seminars that she and others believe will be at risk if fewer graduate students are admitted to programs where cohorts are already small to begin with.
“The trade-off is not worth the extra couple of thousand dollars in the summer,” says Ms. Golan, a second-year Ph.D. student..
Graduate students say that other changes detailed in the plan, which is part of a broader strategic document, might limit their access to faculty members. The plan calls, for example, for rewarding professors for teaching more undergraduate courses. Current students are also worried about having to teach more when the number of graduate students drops, since new students’ deals would include less teaching.
Professors are concerned that having fewer graduate students would mean less help with their research and, like their students, believe the plan would put graduate seminars in jeopardy.
The plan, which was has been in the works for roughly two years as a mix of deans and faculty members weighed in, has already been through numerous iterations, in part to accommodate faculty and student concerns. Ms. Newman decided last month to give departments a choice in timing. They can opt in to the plan this year, in time to offer their fall-2014 cohorts the enhanced stipends, or they can wait a year to begin putting it in place.
Departments have an incentive to accept the plan. Those that agree to start cutting enrollments this fall or next will get extra money from the president’s office to raise the stipends of current students, bringing them to $27,000 in the fall of 2014. The stipends would continue to increase until they reach $29,000 in 2018. That would bring the stipends of new and current students closer to equal, Ms. Newman says.
To help the school stay competitive, the university also plans to adjust the newly increased stipends of the incoming students every two to three years.
“We don’t ever want to fall behind again,” Ms. Newman says.
By the end of the month, individual departments will have met to decide where they stand. The sociology department has already voted to hold off on adopting the plan, forgoing the offer of more money for incoming and current students, and instead will form a committee to discuss alternatives, says Karl L. Alexander, sociology chair.
The goal, he says, is to create a proposal for the dean that specifies a way to raise stipends while maintaining enrollment. “We really are quite supportive of the end game,” Mr. Alexander says. “For us, the challenge is finding a different approach to getting there.”
The cuts in his department, he says, would very likely mean admitting three or four students a year, instead of the typical five or six.
“Those are small numbers but big percentages,” he says. “We operate on a research-apprenticeship model. If there are too few students to go around, then people won’t have the assistants that they need and that they value, and our graduate seminars may be too small to be viable.”
One of the perks of being a faculty member at Hopkins, Mr. Alexander says, is the opportunity to work with “such terrific graduate students. If we have too few of them in residence, our concern is that it will detract from the character and the quality of the experience here for faculty and students alike.”
A Good Fit
At least one department has already decided that the plan is a good fit. When the writing program’s acceptance letters go out, in a month or so, those students will be offered the bigger stipend, while those already in the program will receive the money from the president’s office to increase their stipends.
“It was an offer we couldn’t refuse,” says Jean McGarry, co-chair of the writing program. “I felt a certain sympathy and solidarity with the rest of the faculty, but I couldn’t join them in taking a stance against this, because it’s good for us.”
The support that the new stipend offers during the summer months will allow students in the two-year program, whose highest degree is a master of fine arts, to write more without worrying about finances. They also won’t have to teach during their first year.
“The summer between the first and second year is crucial to the writing process,” Ms. McGarry says. Graduating competitive for academic jobs means having a book published or at least under contract by graduation.
The writing program typically admits 10 students—five in fiction and five in poetry—but that number will drop to a total of eight, Ms. McGarry says. First- and second-year students are taught together, so “that doesn’t seem to be a critical reduction,” she says. “In my mind, we can give each of them more attention.”
Ms. Newman says she understands the concern of graduate students and faculty members and is open to discussions about how to improve the plan.
She says she expects conversations to continue about what constitutes a “critical mass” when it comes to creating communities of doctoral students, and she wants to explore how that might still be achieved when individual programs have even fewer students. Various forms of interdisciplinary work could be an option, she says.
Also still up for discussion is who will lead discussion sections for undergraduate courses when there are fewer graduate students. One possible solution, Ms. Newman says, is to hire as teaching assistants people with master’s degrees who are not in Ph.D. programs, or to use advanced undergraduate students, as the math department at Hopkins already does.
Ms. Newman will hold a “town hall” meeting with graduate students in early February. Students, who are still upset about only recently learning the details of the plan, have a mixed outlook on the gathering and the future of graduate education at their university.
“We really hope at this venue they will really seriously listen to our reasons why we don’t think this is a good idea,” Ms. Golan says.
Alan Liu, co-chair of the graduate students’ organization, says the group is trying to work with Ms. Newman to develop a fact sheet about some of the plan’s major points.
“Misinformation and poor communication have been issues because the plan has undergone some revisions since its release,” Mr. Liu wrote in an email. He says the organization will take further action once departments decide whether to opt in to the plan and the impact on graduate students is clearer.
Ms. Newman, who has worked at four other institutions since the 1980s, including Columbia, says the changes in graduate education can’t be ignored.
“Change doesn’t come easy to higher education,” she says. “I figure you either get out in front of these pressures and figure out the most robust way to invest in the faculty’s prominence and support the students we take in adequately, or you will get clobbered by change you haven’t planned for.”
How Johns Hopkins U. Proposes to Revamp Graduate Education
Faculty, administrators, and graduate students in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University are debating the merits of the school’s proposals to overhaul graduate education. Here are some of the plan’s key ideas:
- Be more competitive in recruiting students. Give higher stipends to graduate students in the humanities and social sciences, and admit fewer applicants to pay for them.
- Reward undergraduate teaching. Encourage faculty members to take on more undergraduate courses. Humanities and social-sciences professors who agree to teach three undergraduate courses and one graduate seminar a year would get a sabbatical after three years; professors who stick with teaching two courses to each group a year would get a sabbatical after five years. (Graduate students worry they will lose access to top scholars.)
- Fill teaching gap. With fewer graduate students, administrators know they will have to solve the labor shortage of teaching assistants to lead discussion sections of undergraduate courses. No final solution has been set, but officials foresee using advanced undergraduate students or hiring people with master’s degrees who aren’t in Ph.D. programs.
- Prepare students for nonacademic jobs. Graduates who want to pursue careers outside higher education will get help with preparing for that market. The school says it will provide opportunities to develop professional networks in nonprofit, government, and private-sector fields.
