https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2019/10/24/uchicago-phd-policy-tradeoffs/
Has anyone been following this? The changes seem pretty drastic. Also, how will accelerating the time to degree completion impact outcomes?
Finally, interesting to note that lots of Chicago grad students are unhappy with the state of graduate education!
This is great that Chicago wants to reduce the number of humanities PhDs. Recall the recent story that no Columbia U job market candidates got a tenure-track job this year in English. The market is glutted and students do stay in school longer as a result because they have no where to go.
It would have been interesting if the author of the article had inquired of the Anthroplogy, History Sociology and Philosophy Deans why their time-to-completion (9+ years) was so much longer than their peers. And, since the current GAI program bases funding in part on teaching, how many classes does a Chicago PhD student have to teach (for full funding) in comparison to its peers?
“Also, how will accelerating the time to degree completion impact outcomes?”
“It would have been interesting if the author of the article had inquired of the Anthroplogy, History Sociology and Philosophy Deans why their time-to-completion (9+ years) was so much longer than their peers.”
or, what is the value prop for a Phil degree from Chicago vs one of its peer group? Why does a Phil degree take 9+ years when the competition can do it in a little more than half that time? How do faculty explain that opportunity cost to prospies? Does that extra time turn into more Tenure Track jobs upon graduation (and therefore no post-doc)? More TT % than say, Harvard, Princeton (5.9 years) and Stanford?
For one data point, when my D was interviewing at top grad programs (not Chicago, but its peer group), the interviewing faculty always mentioned time to degree. Not sure ‘10 years’ would have been an acceptable answer to her. lol
“or, what is the value prop for a Phil degree from Chicago vs one of its peer group? Why does a Phil degree take 9+ years when the competition can do it in a little more than half that time?”
UChicago seems to have altered the funding as well as the time to completion and it sounds like they will possibly be reducing the teaching load. My hubby got his PhD from Econ in 5 years with minimal teaching so it certainly can be done. The idea that these PhD students need to teach for years is ludicrous. Teaching doesn’t tend to get you tenure, and most will pick up some teaching during their post-doc.
Agreed. Bcos even if the hint true, that still doesn’t explain Chicago’s 10 year PhD term for philosophy. A MA is typical two years, so Chicago should be 7-8 (5/6+2), not 9-10.
Also, reading the full report, they hint at the fact that much of a student’s financing is in teaching; in other words, they have to teach just to pay bills so that there is less time for research/dissertation. Of course, what was disappointing was that there were no numbers associated with that theory in the report. For example, what is the recommended teaching load for a degree (5 qtr classes, 10?), and how many classes have the 10-year students taught?
I just finished reading Boyer’s book on the History of the University and this type of thing has been debated since the days of Harper. What I find surprising is that, for a school known for quant (Econ, Finance), such facts are silent in some of the other disciplines.
You are spot on, but part of the closing chapter in Boyer’s book is that Chicago is a ‘teaching and research university’. (And both have been in conflict since Day 1 of the rebirth of Chicago.)
^ True! The issue of who should teach the undergrads has been an issue for decades at UChicago. It’s always been this place where the notion of a college education has has been discussed in detail (and sometimes ad nauseum . . . ). The College being structured as its own division (by Hutchins, I believe) meant that it had its own faculty for teaching, but the trends of the modern university in general - with graduate students assisting or leading instruction - changed a good amount of that. There has always been a push and pull over issues of instruction, purpose of the bachelors degree (ie need for some specialization vs. a general education) and so forth. Those trends will naturally dictate who does the teaching for at least part of the Core and certainly a good amount of the remaining curriculum.
Right now, all tenure track appts. and a variety of post-docs and special fellowships (if not most of them) will include an appt. to the College for purposes of teaching. Some special fellowships (Collegiate Ass’t Professorships, for instance) are specifically designed for teaching the Hum, Civ and probably Sosc. core sequences as well as allowing the Fellow access to the tenured/TT faculty for collaboration and research. There are also permanent lecture positions for some Core and even some popular specialty courses (such as lower div. Econ); while they aren’t considered to be “faculty” they tend to require a PhD (with the exception of someone like Sanderson who has been there forever) and I believe are hired by the various academic departments rather than the College.
The academic divisions, rather than the College, will have say in the Core curriculum content, and my guess is that’s true even for the “holdover” interdisciplinary Core courses such as Hum and Sosc. For the latter, you can take a variety of offerings ranging from old fashioned political philosophy to “social science methods.” When it comes to Math, Science, FL, and Civ, the respective departments are responsible for content.
It would have been helpful had they provided some numbers, but they are available if you know where to look:
Out of 23 Phil. courses offered this fall, six are taught by three grad students (2 each). Those are mainly junior and senior tutorials with minimal numbers of students. One additional grad student teaches another (larger) course, and the remaining 16 courses are taught by core or visiting faculty. There are 543 undergrad enrollments in these courses, and just over half are in four courses containing 50 or more. Only one of those courses is taught by a grad. student. The remaining three are taught by faculty.
Out of 5,202 total majors (1st, 2nd, 3rd and so on) declared in the College, 159 are Philosophy and related fields. That’s 3% of total majors.
There are currently 51 Philosophy PhD students. Not sure how that breaks down into 1st, 2nd, and so on to Nth years. A couple at least seem to have come out of the MA Humanities program at UChicago or other MA program. BTW, that is a path for a few who need the rec. letter from known faculty in order to gain entry to a PhD program. That’s a path taken by those who need a good rec. letter to get into a PhD program. There will always be a few. Most came from a bachelors or equivalent (one at least has other terminal degrees).
Over the past year, (Autumn '18 to Summer '19), it looks like four have been conferred the PhD, according to the university’s statistical reports.
FWIW, some anecdotes and observations:
These people were all stars, by the way. Each of them had his or her choice of top programs when they applied, were very focused, and had lots of faculty support.
(The achaeologist is teaching full time at her doctoral university.)
“While it is technically true that teaching is not what gets you a high-prestige, tenure-track job, I think teaching is an important qualification for a lot of jobs that newly minted PhDs in the humanities actually get. A large percentage of college students, maybe most of them, are at institutions where undergraduate education is clearly more central to their mission than scholarship, and that’s where a lot of jobs are.”
^ All universities and most if not all LACs have “publish or perish” in place. I recall when my own LAC put that into effect and jettisoned everyone who didn’t have a PhD. Got rid of some excellent instructors, unfortunately. But it was the 80’s and demand for the bodies to fill academic posts had fallen. Meanwhile the supply of PhD’s had increased. They had to go somewhere 
In the humanities, published works will also - sometimes predominantly - include a book or two, and there the length of time to publication is surely several times longer than for a paper. So I can see where teaching becomes quite important during the interim, as long as reasonable progress on the written work is being made.
It’s odd that very few of the philosophy PhD students are running a classroom this fall, given the time to degree is so high. They don’t appear to be caught up with teaching. Are the faculty negligent toward their grad students, or is there an issue with the quality of the students they are accepting? Regardless, they can reduce by 25%. Yale, as one comparison, seems to have only 32 philosophy grad students compared to UChicago’s 50.
“The English student took nine years, but the delay was pretty much entirely a function of his job search. He could easily have defended his thesis two years earlier. When he gave up on a tenure-track academic position, he got his degree.”
At <6 years, Yale is similar to Princeton in time to degree for a Philosophy PhD. Chicago is the outlier for its peer group. And its a big outlier.
So, the questions remain, ‘why do UChicago students take 9-10 years?’ Is the Chicago dissertation that much more involved (and therefore, hopefully, more valued)? Are the faculty not doing efficient and effective advising? Is the University doing its young adult students any favors by enabling them to hang around for 3+ years longer than the peers?
More importantly to this thread, will the new policies (of full funding for as long as it takes) only exacerbate the issue, or will the faculty decide to move students out faster so they can add newbies? I guess time will tell.
wrt teaching: my D interviewed at Dartmouth for a doctoral program and one of their selling points was no teaching required. Thus, we expect you to get out in 4 years. They claimed that their grads did fine obtaining Tenure Track positions. (btw; you could volunteer as a TA, but that would be paid extra over and above your already full funding.)
“More importantly to this thread, will the new policies (of full funding for as long as it takes) only exacerbate the issue, or will the faculty decide to move students out faster so they can add newbies? I guess time will tell.”
To be clear, I think the perception in the academic world is that the market for degree candidates is much stronger than the market for people with degrees who have not had a tenure-directional (if not tenure-track) job for some period of time. And departments keep track of people on the job market – the last thing they want to show is a whole bunch of recent degree recipients who don’t have jobs. So the general social practice is you don’t get a degree until you either have an appropriate academic job or you have taken yourself off the academic job market.
No one is working on their theses trying to make them stronger. They are simply in a holding pattern waiting for some sort of landing slot.
“No one is working on their theses trying to make them stronger. They are simply in a holding pattern waiting for some sort of landing slot.”
Regardless of the “why”, there’s no reason for UChicago PhD’s to be taking longer than other peers in the same field, unless their job placement is head and shoulders above the others. Suspect that’s NOT the case, given that the provost is directly involved in implementing the changes.
That maybe true at Chicago for the reason that you note, but it does not appear that any of its peer group does the same. (Hint: that’s what post-docs are for.) For example both Yale and Princeton get their Phil PhD’s out in <6 years. I believe Stanford is similar.
Chicago’s 10-year plan (particularly in humanities) makes absolutely no sense (with rare exceptions, such as two-years of field research for Archeology, for example). And one could argue that its really unfair to the student to keep them hanging around that long.
“my D interviewed at Dartmouth for a doctoral program and one of their selling points was no teaching required. Thus, we expect you to get out in 4 years. They claimed that their grads did fine obtaining Tenure Track positions. (btw; you could volunteer as a TA, but that would be paid extra over and above your already full funding.)”
How common is this in the US? It is the default in the UK because the funding is strictly time limited (one year for MPhil plus three more for PhD and nothing after that apart from a small amount for TAing, unless you get a teaching position or fellowship but those are tough to get without an essentially finished PhD) but its surprising to me how much variation there seems to be between US universities.
Seems to me that being provided full funding and forced to finish quickly is much more attractive if you aren’t convinced you want to be an academic forever (in fact in the UK when I was doing my PhD, all science students were provided automatic funding for a week long course designed to convince you that there were interesting opportunities for PhDs outside academia - we had presentations not just from obvious things like pharma, but also from banking, consulting, tech, etc.).
^ It would be interesting to know what subject @bluebayou’s D was looking into for a PhD - and when that was. Four years seems like unusual timing these days, given the chart from the Maroon article. But maybe it’s a discipline that wasn’t included in the graphic; that was a respresentation only of the four “traditional” academic divisions.
Most PhD programs in America seem geared toward the academic market. That could be because the research and analytical skills, are needed are applicable regardless of professional outcome. YMMV depending on discipline, but most of the ones I know of usually have a formalized recruiting event. For instance, the Allied Social Science Association holds a huge convention every year that includes a large recruiting function for master’s and PhD candidates in the social sciences. Academic institutions and many others - think-tanks, various public agencies and departments, not-for-profit, etc. - all show up to do their first round of recruiting there. As I recall, most of my pals in grad Econ many decades ago seemed to know the options in addition to academia. IMF and World Bank hired numerous Chicago PhD’s, as well as Treasury, Justice, Commerce, and various Federal Reserve systems, and that was all known without a formalized class. Guessing UChicago has probably upped its game w/r/t professional development of its PhD students since that time, especially as service providers (particularly in finance and consulting) and tech companies have all increased demand for PhD’s. It’s definitely a window that’s opening up when the doors of academia may be closer to shutting.