Editor’s Note: This essay is excerpted from a new Chronicle special report, “The Future of Graduate Education,” available in the Chronicle Store.
It’s dicey to predict the future in the best of times. But at this difficult and disordered moment in higher education, to divine the shape of graduate study 10 years hence is like trying to calculate crop yields while a hurricane is uprooting trees and flooding the fields. It’s hard to see 10 months ahead, let alone a decade.
But amid the gales and rain, some larger trends do stand out. Higher education is small-c conservative, meaning that it tends to resist change. And graduate programs are conservative by academic standards. Even so, we’ve witnessed some striking changes in the past decade — and some of them are bound to continue.
If you were predicting that I would lead with artificial intelligence, let me take that one off the table. Yes, AI will change things, but it’s too early to tell how, or how much. (My suspicion: perhaps less than the apocalyptic doomsayers predict. Educators are a smart and resourceful bunch, and we’ve absorbed the arrival of new technologies before.) Meanwhile, more urgent issues lie before us.
Eight years ago, when I first looked into my crystal ball at the future of graduate education, I hoped that, by 2025, doctoral programs would, among other things:
- Learn to shrink gracefully.
- Focus more on pedagogy, and integrate it into the curriculum, not just as an add-on.
- Acknowledge more career paths and set more-flexible dissertation requirements to suit different student needs.
We’ve advanced in all of those areas, with far more work to do. Since I wrote that 2016 essay, higher ed has experienced some new destabilizing currents that promise to affect doctoral programs far into the future.
Fallout from external attacks on academic freedom. Motivated mainly by an opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion and to critical race studies, governors and legislatures in some Republican-controlled states have enacted laws that snake into the inner workings of doctoral-granting universities in unprecedented ways, even forbidding certain subjects to be taught. The American Association of University Professors, academe’s historical watchdog, has described those moves as an “ideologically driven assault unparalleled in U.S. history.” Ellen Schrecker, a leading scholar of academic freedom recently retired from Yeshiva University, has called them “worse than McCarthyism.”
You don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict that these incursions will continue. As long as American politics remains polarized, the university will probably remain a political football — and academe hardly stands to gain from the kicks that it will receive.
Graduate education will surely prove sensitive to those impacts in the years ahead. Doctoral students who want to study certain subjects will avoid applying to universities in states where they can’t pursue those interests. Likewise, some faculty members will vote with their feet. Most professors can’t easily change jobs, of course. And tenure-track positions are scarce. But the ones who can move — those with the greatest influence — will.
What does all of that mean for graduate education? It will play out field by field. Will a department’s reputation be influenced by the political tenor of its home state? Will particular fields be bifurcated into “progressive” and “conservative” wings? Will scholarship on race and gender disappear entirely from some programs? My bet is yes. The scholarly reputational rankings in 2035 should tell the tale.
Divergence between public and private higher education. Politicization underscores another emergent and continuing trend: Not only are public universities much more vulnerable to governmental assaults on academic freedom; they’re also more vulnerable economically. According to the 2023 State Higher Education Finance report, legislative appropriations to public colleges and universities have gone up and down during this century. They bottomed out in 2012 but have now “fully recovered and surpassed 2008 levels, both including and excluding federal stimulus funding in 2023.” But that recovery has been uneven: “Half of all states have not yet recovered from the 2008 Great Recession, and 32 have not yet recovered from the 2001 economic downturn.”
For graduate education, that means the differences between the haves and the have-nots could become even more pronounced by 2035. At wealthy private universities, graduate students tend to live a better life. They get paid more to work in labs, and they teach less, for better salaries. (So do their professors.) At most public universities, where graduate-student labor is vital to the bottom line, graduate-student employees work more hours for fewer dollars. Not all public universities are poor, of course, and not all private ones are rich. But generally speaking, the gap between public and private has been widening, both politically and economically, and unless something fundamental changes, it’s going to get wider.
University budget woes have eventual global implications. For generations now, doctoral education has proved one of the most valuable and durable American exports. As a result, most American graduate schools have become international enclaves with diverse, polyglot student bodies. That figures to continue for now. But China, which is investing in its universities in a way that recalls the U.S. postwar era — and contrasts sharply with the more straitened American present — has already established itself as a formidable competitor.
Look for China not only to educate more of its own citizens (who have historically made up a large segment of international students at American graduate programs) in years to come, but also to compete with the United States for students from other countries. According to the latest data reported in these pages, international enrollments here “rebounded strongly” in 2022-23, especially in graduate schools: “A record number of Indian students, almost 269,000, studied in the United States.” China remains the “top-sending country” (with 289,500 students on American campuses, just ahead of India), according to the Open Doors report, but Chinese enrollments have stagnated — an ominous sign.
Budget shortfalls in higher ed also have more-immediate local implications. One of the biggest drivers of change in graduate education is what accounting bureaucrats call “responsibility center management,” or just RCM. A more colloquial description of the same idea is “every tub on its own bottom.” It means this: Each unit of an organization is held responsible for balancing its own budget. In the world of RCM, a university’s undergraduate college has to balance its own budget, and so does the law school, and the school of education — and even the graduate school.
But for graduate schools, that’s hard to do. They weren’t designed to stand on their own, and graduate deans control less money than their undergraduate counterparts (and less than they should). Doctoral education in particular is very costly. Depending on the field and how you calculate, it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to educate a Ph.D. student. Such costs were traditionally seen as part of the larger work of the arts and sciences, not the responsibility of a single entity. (In that spirit, some universities don’t even have a graduate school, and instead have an organizational scheme in which departments and programs house their own graduate programs.)
RCM is spreading through academe, and that means that more graduate deans will have to find money to balance their budgets. There are only two ways to do that: Make more money, or spend less. Most prefer to make more, because that means you don’t have to cut programs to make ends meet. That “make more” scenario leads to one of my more certain 2035 predictions.
Continued growth in master’s and certificate programs. Master’s programs have already been multiplying in recent years, and no wonder. Graduate schools need money, and tuition-paying master’s-degree students generate money. So graduate deans across the country have been searching for new master’s programs that can bring in tuition dollars — and will continue to do so.
Certificate programs have the same virtues. They attract students inside and outside the university walls who seek a credential that signals a skill. Current graduate students may want to supplement their central course of study with a cluster of courses that relate to their main discipline. A political-science student may want demonstrable expertise via a certificate in data science, or a Romance-language specialist might want to become a certified expert in writing instruction.
Other certificate students come from outside the university, and bring their tuition dollars with them. There’s nothing wrong with tapping into that source, as long as programs administer such programs with the student in mind, not just the student’s wallet. Certificate programs also encourage universities to become more public-facing, as they supply instruction in areas that local citizens want and need.
The stewards of graduate education have already seized this revenue-generating opportunity. According to the U.S. Department of Education, colleges and universities have added more than 9,000 master’s-degree programs since 2011. The number of distinct fields that have granted at least 100 master’s degrees annually rose from 289 in 1995 to 514 by 2017, a jump of more than 80 percent. The number of certificate programs has grown by 240 percent in the past 20 years.
But who’s watching? There’s the rub. The educational space in which those certificate and master’s-degree programs are growing is largely unregulated. It’s the wild, wild west of graduate study. For the students’ sake, we need some oversight. From 1996 to 2016, the net price of tuition for master’s students — minus grants, that is, or the figure that they actually pay — increased about two-thirds faster than for undergraduates. That disparity warrants attention or it, too, will only worsen in the next 10 years.
A burgeoning graduate-student labor movement. The “spend less money” scenario for graduate deans plays out in a different place: the negotiating table. The seismic impact of the 2022 graduate-student union contract with the University of California system has sparked similar organizing on many other campuses. Look for that union movement to continue — and for its effects to multiply in 10 years.
There’s a simple math to this: When graduate students bargain for higher salaries as teaching or research assistants, it becomes more costly to educate them. (That doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve the money. They have been exploited for years, and paying them a living wage is a matter of social justice. I discussed those issues at greater length in a recent column.)
In technical parlance, something’s gotta give. I’ve spoken to a number of university administrators and union organizers in recent months. They agree on one big thing: We’re witnessing a culture shift. The administrators worry about the pressures created by the suddenly rising cost of graduate-student labor. The graduate students hope that greater financial transparency will translate into more-harmonious collaboration among the different stakeholders, so that they can make difficult decisions together.
That amounts to a new idea of shared governance. Borne of the early work of the AAUP more than a century ago, shared governance usually refers to a partnership between the faculty and the administration. On some campuses, that partnership is real; at others, it’s more symbolic.
The addition of graduate students to a vision of shared governance would be a case of going back to the future. The first large-scale student protests, beginning at Berkeley in 1964 and eventually spreading across the country, were famously motivated by political concerns, especially civil rights and the Vietnam War. But the students also wanted to change their own lives. They wanted to throw off the traditional rules that governed them on the campus at the time — dress codes, parietal regulations, and the like — and live as adults.
Today’s union movement, with its focus on graduate students as workers rather than apprentices, stands as a historical sequel to the ’60s demonstrations. As students demanded personal autonomy then, graduate students demand workplace freedoms now. The thematic through-line, we might say, is student care.
We’ve seen a greater concern with graduate-student care in the past 15 years or so, especially in the form of enhanced professional development. More graduate programs recognize the need to prepare students for the jobs that they’re actually going to get. That will certainly continue.
Catalyzed by unionization, student care will widen its scope in the coming years, I think. First, attentive student care makes good sense as a way to recruit and retain students, including those from traditionally underrepresented groups. Second, student care is the right thing to do. Academics are well-intentioned people on the whole, and sometimes, even in a business as slow to change as graduate education, we can see — and do — what’s best for our students and ourselves.
Undergraduate-student care has mushroomed in recent decades, with a wide focus on improving counseling centers and other forms of support, as well as blatant appeals to a new student leisure class (campus climbing walls and lazy rivers). The results have been mixed. At its best, graduate-student care is more targeted because it treats students as a varied collection of grown-ups with diverse needs. I expect we’ll see more of that. I certainly hope we do. Because during times like these, we badly need it.
