For some time, there have been discussions about the role of the PhD in the system of higher education. A recent Science opinion piece highlights the issues among STEM fields.
We are experiencing a period of rapid innovation in the undergraduate space in the US, partially because of the impact of tuition pressures of the baccalaureate. It was stimulated by the potential of online platforms to improve access and efficiency. It was propelled by the excitement surrounding experiential learning, project-based class organization, and the intrigue with competency-based education.
There is much less discussion of innovation in PhD education. However, there are issues to consider. The concerns tend to span many of the disciplines and fields.
One of the key issues concerns the very mission of a PhD program. Is the PhD program solely designed to build the professoriate for the next generation? Are we training future tenure-line faculty essentially to replicate the careers of their mentors? Just looking at the national data on this matter, the proportion of newly-minted PhD’s entering tenure-line positions is highly variable across fields. Some fields, for example, computer science, contribute PhD’s to private industry at very high rates. In their careers they often conduct advanced research. For other fields, those who enter nonacademic jobs use few of the research skills or content knowledge they gained in their PhD programs.
A common complaint among PhD students is that faculty mentors prefer PhD students oriented to academic careers. The faculty measure their own success by the number of placements in top departments. However, there is little coordination between the production of PhD’s and the demand for assistant professors in universities. What obligations do universities, for such programs, to limit the size of their PhD student body to sizes that give high probabilities of graduates landing tenure-line positions?
A common observation is that PhD programs often effectively provide research skills and deep content knowledge, but little else of value to one’s career. Just as was true for the current faculty, for many programs there is no formal education in pedagogical methods, in the practice of supporting one’s research through grant proposals and other funding mechanisms. It’s easy to generalize that comment to skills needed in nonacademic, research-oriented careers.
Some faculty view their graduate students as key supports in executing their own research agendas. The value of PhD programs to those faculty is that they multiply their own research productivity. Some universities view PhD students as cheap labor for teaching undergraduates. Such logic seems to place little value on the obligation of the faculty to form the character and intellect of their PhD students or on the role of a mentor to shape a younger person who wishes to pursue a career of the mind. What obligations do universities have to communicate clearly the quid pro quo’s of being a graduate student?
Some of the issues above rise to the level of ethical treatment of PhD students, in my opinion, when we don’t fully disclose to students the likely outcomes of their PhD training. In this regard, efforts to become more transparent to potential applicants seems wise. How many of the graduates of the program have tenure-track positions; how many are in research positions in other domains; how many are in jobs that have little use of their PhD training? With such information made available to applicants, the risks of less-than-optimal outcomes of a PhD program can be part of the application decision.
Ethics in PhD Education always guides student different concepts in ethical, business and legal concepts in research. There are lots of students who do PhD program or doctorate from home country or abroad all thinks about jobs in teaching or consulting job in universities or organisation. PhD education is more concern to generate expertise in our subject. Thanks for sharing ethics in PhD education.
Hi… Robert!!!
It is a nice concern in PhD Education.Ethics in PhD Education teaches students ethical, business, philosophical and legal concepts that emphasis on theory and research. Many students take PhD programs thinking of jobs in teaching, consulting, or research positions with legal organisations and universities, but they don’t convince students with their quid pro quos. When we have completed doctorate, our PhD designator misrepresents the level of expertise in the domain; some may assume the doctorate is in the same discipline like in which certification or licensure was awarded.
PHD education is concerns to achieve expertise in particular subjects. Thanks for sharing such a nice blog.
Excellent points. We need to think about character and life formation not just for undergrads but also for all grad students. I believe that since the Med School is more clinical and”practice’ based we may already be doing some of the things you say need to be addressed. It might be very good to include the Med School in these discussions about graduate training as some programs and goals they have might be applicable to the issues you address for other graduate programs.. Just a thought.
Thanks so much for this very thoughtful piece, Provost Groves. Much of what you say here came up as well in conversations we had in Georgetown’s Department of English a couple of years ago as we explored the possibility of establishing a PhD program, and many of the best insights that we had then went into the design of the Mellon-MLA Grant Project on the Future of the Humanities PhD, which is housed in the Graduate School and which will kick off its three years of work this coming fall semester. Looking forward to the good work ahead.
In my experience, as a student and a mentor, good Ph.D. training is exceedingly dependent on the abilities and attitudes of the research mentor. Fiddling around with program structure, course offerings, seminars, rules, procedures, etc. can be beneficial but at the end of the day the Ph.D. is about doing research, in a research group, working closely with a mentor. It is not true that such experience is only valuable in preparing for an academic career, it is critical for many other career paths as well. Whether the Ph.D. candidate’s research group is capable of providing training for diverse career options, and whether the leader of that group (the mentor) both embraces and promotes a multi – career path philosophy for his / her students is the main issue. An important caveat is whether the host institution provides impetus and rewards for Ph.D. mentors that do embrace this philosophy and manage to succeed in its implementation. Regrettably, in large part, this institution does not. Why not reward and further support Ph.D. mentors that put their hearts and souls into their students, that have bonafide track records in placing their students in multiple diverse career paths, that *don’t* use their students as mere fodder for their own research agendas. Why not ask them *how* and *why* they follow such a path ? Institutions usually do not collect metrics on such things, ours certainly does not. Yet there are many mentors that fall into this category, and Georgetown has more than it’s share. Promoting and supporting such mentors, learning from them, and using that knowledge to then mentor younger faculty in how to become “good” mentors, would do just as much (likely more) for improving Ph.D. training then focussing on poor mentoring and selected examples of Ph.D. program failure.
Best
Paul
Thanks for contributing to this discussion. As you know, humanities PhD programs have been the subject of much criticism over the past few years, thus our work with the Mellon/MLA grant: Connected Academics. One reaction is to shut PhD/H programs down or cut down on the number of admits. This “solution” seems wrong-headed, elitist and paternalistic to me. It will lead to further narrowing of the type of students who are able to pursue PhDs in the humanities. When I talk with “non-traditional” (first generation, working, non-Ivy League) students about this as a possible solution, they are appalled. They value doctoral work regardless of future employment concerns. Why not do what you say here: recruit PhDs in the humanities (and all fields), but offer full disclosure about the job market? Full disclosure, of course, would mean full disclosure not only about the limits of the academic job market but about the alt-ac job market available to PhDs. (To anyone interested, see https://connect.commons.mla.org/ for more about the project.) Some other issues that keep surfacing as I talk to graduate students and graduate faculty from across the country are: assembly line programs that do not account for individual education plans; unnecessary course requirements that keep faculty employed but increase time-to-degree; very poor or non-existent mentoring, especially ABD; little or no support for writing the dissertation; and a cut-throat mentality that impedes community building among graduate students.