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GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).</p>
<p>Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work The Conflict of the Faculties, wrote that universities should handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.
<p>From a math perspective, they are definitely not wrong. While most math grads who are seeking employment in academia are PhDs so they don’t accrue much debt in their grad years, the article is more or less accurate in my opinion. Competition for math jobs is extremely high and there is a huge washout rate, i.e. the percentage of grad students who enroll, the percentage who even graduate, the percentage who even get a postdoc much less a tenure track position all decrease as you go along.</p>
<p>This might effect the liberal arts grad programs a bit more than math or science grad programs. I heard programs like English and History are even harder as they do not get outside funding like science programs do. It’s a shame, but this seems to be the reality of the situation. While doctors, lawyers, these types of grad programs will always be around and be in demand, I doubt many other grad programs will have the staying power they had 50-100 years ago. </p>
<p>There was an article a few months ago about some university in upstate New York, shutting down it’s math grad program. There was a lot of uproar from other universities, but they claimed it was too expensive and the demand simply wasn’t there. </p>
<p>I definitely think in 30 or 40 years grad programs will start to dwindle. Also, even though I knew how difficult it is to get admitted to a high ranked math phd program, I applied twice. I wonder when prospective graduate students will realistically weigh their options in terms of employability. I hear of so many math programs claiming they had way more applications than last year despite the fact that the employment options in the academic world are really bad.</p>
<p>In a lot of the humanities and social sciences it’s pretty much a bloodbath out there. Even my department, a good but not great poli sci department at a middle of the road Canadian university, has only hired PhDs from the top 7-8 Poli Sci grad programs in the US for the few years. The laws of supply and demand being what they are they really have no reason to hire anyone from a lower school than that. It’s a bit scary.</p>
<p>I think the article is really focusing on the humanities - even the author admits this in his own experiences he sees as a professor of religion. </p>
<p>I don’t know. I am willing to go into debt for my Masters, which will leave open better job opportunities, but if I want a PhD I am scared out of my mind. The state of the american market is making funding for the humanities, less and less every year. And then - like he mentions - what about those of us who do really want to specialize in a little known subject. Yikes.</p>
<p>I really like the idea of different forms of ‘theses.’ The current model, while effective, is archaic. If graduate studies are about creating new ideas then why should students be confined to a certain format for their ideas?</p>
<p>I’d actually disagree that the current model is effective; I’m sure it would be near impossible to quantify, but I wonder what the cost/benefit analysis would show on the relative utility of a Master’s or PhD in a humanities field is. I know that the model when I was in high school said the difference was something like “$1,000,000” over your lifetime…but when you’re paying back $100,000 in loans over 20 years, it’s not like you’re saving anything. Has anyone read the article from the NYT from about a week ago on student loans? I commented on it on my site: [broadcast</a> outcast straight talk on student loans](<a href=“http://www.midwestrock.org/broadcastoutcast/2009/04/20/straight-talk-on-student-loans/]broadcast”>http://www.midwestrock.org/broadcastoutcast/2009/04/20/straight-talk-on-student-loans/)</p>
<p>For someone like me, a Master’s makes sense…but how many terminal MAs will really help job prospects that much? MFA programs are so cutthroat, in writing and arts, and the only jobs they really open up are in universities…and so few of those jobs exist. The education system in the US is at an impasse; it costs wayyyy too much for the average person to attend college anymore. I’m from a middle-class, white suburban background, and I had scholarships covering almost all of my tuition for undergrad…and I’m still about $14,000 in debt. I’m not complaining–it’s just I know I was fortunate, and even I came out with a decent amount of debt. I think Taylor is on to something here, but it will probably fall on deaf ears, like most education reform does.</p>
<p>(1) This sounds more like an argument for a seminar kind of course, rather than a wise course of action. Breadth is a good thing, and understanding the variety of influences is good, but you need to have enough focus on something to become proficient. Excessive dilution ruins that. I already know enough people who are broadly knowledgable but functionally useless.</p>
<p>(2) Does not work for science and engineering in my opinion, and it looks like the author knows that. People in these fields need the concentration to be able to accomplish anything, and while the department edges often blur you nonetheless need the departments for development and maintenance of core skills and competencies. Even for humanities this becomes a problem, because it makes it difficult to pinpoint what the person did with their time. A friend of mine got his undergrad in “Liberal arts and sciences” - which means exactly nothing, but he is fun to talk to.</p>
<p>(3) Kind of already happens - most schools are only strong in a few subfields, and most grad students recognize this. That’s why my wife would not have been happy going to Harvard for archaeology but would love to go to UIUC - they are strong in her subfield. Even more so for science and engineering, where budgets for equipment and facilities are limited. Where collaboration is possible, it happens quite frequently - the professors I will be working with collaborate across several universities.</p>
<p>(4) So-so. The written word is hard to surpass as a reference medium. It does me no good to search someone’s interpretive dance video to find the key to understanding atmospheric turbulence at optical wavelengths. Nor am I interested in playing a video game to find out why someone thinks Judas was Jesus’ spurned lover. I think a better answer is publication on demand - print a few copies for the school, reviewers, and writer, and then post it to the internet. Let those who need a copy either download it for a fee or pay for one-off printing and binding.</p>
<p>(5) Schools need to be receptive to this, but it is really up to the student. No one should go into grad school without an exit strategy - what is it you are going to do for a living, how competitive will you be, and what is your back-up plan? You cannot get away from the fact that a PhD is essentially a professional degree in academia - that is what the degree is believed to mean, and that is why there are degrees like the Ed.D. and the Engineer’s degree that are explicitly professional degrees. About the only thing the schools can do is create more alternate doctorates geared towards professional life.</p>
<p>(6) I largely agree with the abolishment of tenure - it protects too many undeserving of it. At the very least it should be restricted to more senior professors as a reward for a substantial body of research and/or teaching. I would not expect it to have a significant dent in actual hiring numbers, as few administrators will take an untried grad over a seasoned professor already in place.</p>
<p>Tenure is a scam, plain and simple. The teamsters back in the days of Hoffa ran things more legitimately than most university departments due when it comes to tenure.</p>
<p>Tenure has problems, however I believe Schools should keep it. Most of the Professors I’ve had in grad school and undergrad worked at their faculty positions in good faith. Abolishing tenure will greatly discourage the very best candidates in many fields to ever consider becoming a professor…especially the professions like medicine, engineering, etc.
The author of this article in the nytimes completly ingnores professional fields. Abolishing tenure will end academic freedom. I also believe that a faculty of non-tenured professors…adjucts…will have no loyalty to the institution where they teach. They will not give the extra mile to help students or other faculty members.</p>
<p>With all this being said, I have certainly been upset to see tenure abused occasionally. Universities can stop much of this abuse by instituing mandatory teaching evaluations for all classes and paying attention to them. They can also force professors who aren’t publishing or patenting to teach a larger load of courses.</p>
<p>By the way, tenure is becoming harder and harder to get. Often it is only going to very senior people in the field who have loads of relavent experience and publications. To my knowledge the majority of teaching positions in major universities are not tenure track. I have no problem with this. Tenure should be hard to get.</p>
<p>tenure and tenure-track are two different classifications. tenure-track means you’re hired full-time, with full-benefits, and without a predetermined end to your contract. i think reducing the frequency of actually granting full tenure would do many schools some good.</p>
<p>none of the professors i’ve ever met who i’d consider good at what they do have said that they went into the profession because they wanted tenure. they go because it is what they want to do with their lives.</p>
<p>on the flip side, i’ve met many, many tenured professors who have no business teaching in a classroom. one art history professor i had received so many complaints from top-level students every single year that the instant you told someone in the department you had a complaint about a class, they already knew who you were talking about. it was at the point where the department head said openly to a group of students, myself included, that, “he has tenure and there’s nothing we can really do, but we’ve been encouraging him to take early retirement for the last few years.” fantastic.</p>
<p>anyway… i think studying a subfield of a subfield can still be useful if a student has a strong plan to implement that knowledge in a career outside of the academy. there are a lot of options out there and if the goal is really “to study mesoamerica” and not “to get tenure and have a nice office in a university,” then it’s not nearly as difficult to find work related to your field.</p>
<p>That problem could be ameliorated by simply grandfathering everybody into the tenure system who was already on the tenure track; every junior faculty member of today would still be able to attain tenure under the old rules, but any newly hired junior faculty would no longer be able to earn tenure. If necessary, one could extend this argument to PhD students who may have entered their programs hoping to ultimately win tenure and hence would be subject to the old rules. </p>
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<p>Actually, I’m not sure about this. I might argue that the tenure system, as presently constituted, itself discourages many of more promising candidates to consider becoming professors. That’s because the tenure system is an up-or-out system with a finite promotion clock; after 5-10 years (depending on the school), you’ve either been promoted to tenure, or you’re effectively dismissed from the university to make room for the next batch of new junior faculty. Those who are dismissed will have to try to obtain tenure at some other university or enter industry with fewer marketable skills than if they had simply joined industry right after finishing their PhD’s. </p>
<p>One reform that could be enacted is to simply do away with the tenure clock, or eliminate the up-or-out nature of the system, which are effectively the same remedy. That way, those assistant professors whose work does not merit promotion when the tenure clock would have expired, but whose work is perfectly acceptable by the standards of other assistant professors will be allowed to remain at that rank at the university. That person would then be promoted to tenure whenever his body of work deems that he is worthy of that honor, whenever that may be, which may be never if that person is perfectly happy to remain at the assistant professor level for his whole career, as some people are. Since you raised the examples of engineering and medicine, those professions generally do not force their employees to either be promoted or be dismissed. A doctor or engineer who isn’t interested in promotion and its accompanying responsibilities and is happy to remain as a basic engineer or physician is perfectly free to do so. </p>
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<p>Well, I find this to be greatly overrated. After all, what percentage of tenured professors truly tackle the types of controversial topics that academic freedom may require? </p>
<p>In fact, I would argue again that the tenure system actually decreases overall academic freedom, for it constrains junior faculty to want to publish as much as possible in order to beat the tenure clock race, which generally means working on only the safest and noncontroversial type of research possible, as that is the work that is most likely to be published. Without a tenure system, or at least without a tenure clock, assistant profs would feel more free to cook spicier fare. While that might mean that they might remain as assistant professors forever, that’s still better than a forced dismissal to the expiration of the tenure clock. </p>
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<p>Ha! Well, the fact is, the tenure system does not exactly provide strong incentives for faculty - whether tenured or not - to help students or other faculty members either. Again, junior faculty who are racing the tenure clock generally don’t care about students. They also don’t really care about other faculty either, except to ingratiate themselves with senior faculty and to build collaborative co-authorship relationships. What they really care about is just publishing. Similarly, tenured senior faculty don’t have any incentive to care about anything - neither students nor other faculty - because they can never be fired. </p>
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<p>Well, the problem with that is that those profs will simply respond by being terrible teachers. After all, a tenured prof has no reason to care about his teacher ratings. I knew one guy who would, for his lectures, simply just read the textbook aloud. That’s it. That’s all he would do. The students quickly realized that he was (successfully) driving them away from even appearing at lecture at all, as they could just as easily read the textbooks themselves on their own time, and if everybody stopped showing up to lecture, then the prof would no longer have to show up either, which was his goal. But since he’s tenured, nobody could do anything. The tenure system had effectively exported its problems onto the student body. But hey, if the students do not actually obtain a value-added experience for their tuition dollars, well, that’s not the problem of that professor.</p>
<p><a href=“5”>quote</a> Schools need to be receptive to this, but it is really up to the student. No one should go into grad school without an exit strategy - what is it you are going to do for a living, how competitive will you be, and what is your back-up plan? You cannot get away from the fact that a PhD is essentially a professional degree in academia - that is what the degree is believed to mean, and that is why there are degrees like the Ed.D. and the Engineer’s degree that are explicitly professional degrees. About the only thing the schools can do is create more alternate doctorates geared towards professional life.
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<p>I would argue that another way is to leverage a school’s brand name, along with the accompanying alumni networks and recruiting connections. Since Harvard was used as an example, let’s continue with that example. Harvard has, whether deservedly or not, by far the best brand name in all of higher education. People can and do use the Harvard brand name to enter industries that, frankly, have absolutely nothing to do with whatever they studied. That’s why Harvard humanities students can and do get hired as strategy consultants or investment bankers. </p>
<p>Coupled with that, Harvard almost certainly has the most powerful alumni network in the world, as well as perhaps the most incestuous one at that. Obama has riddled his Administration with many of his old Harvard pals. In almost any industry, you will probably be able to access a group of powerful Harvard alumni. As a case in point, I know one Phd student who wanted to study the qualitative sociology of the finance industry, especially the venture capital/private equity industry. You can basically do that kind of research only at certain schools - Harvard, Stanford, maybe UPenn through Wharton - because you need broad access to the principals, and such access is generally available to people at those schools. {Of course it also means that the person, if an academic job offer was not forthcoming, could get a ridiculously lucrative job at one of those VC/PE firms upon graduation, or, heck, without even needing to graduate at all. I remember the joke was that the person’s income could multiply one’s income by probably 10-20x in the first year alone by quitting the PhD program and trading the stipend for a VC/PE job, and the pay would increase immensely from that point on. } </p>
<p>The other aspect would be the recruiting availability at certain schools, such as the aforementioned consulting and banking firms. Again, as a Harvard student - no matter what program and what discipline - if you want an interview with a consulting firm or, until just recently, a banking firm, you could surely get it. Those firms are always hanging around campus and serve as prime ‘escape hatches’ for Harvard PhD students. Can’t find a job in academia to your liking after you finish your Phd? Oh well, then you can get a lucrative job in consulting. The most selective business jobs are harder to get, but many Harvard PhD students succeed in landing them anyway. For example, every year, some of them will shlepp across the river and sneak into various career functions at the Business School held by hedge funds and VC/PE firms. Granted, because they’re not Business School students, they’re not really supposed to be there, but frankly, nobody really cares. </p>
<p>Nor is Harvard the only example. The above discussion extends to other ‘branded’ schools such as Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Yale, and so forth. But the bottom line is, as the author of the NYTimes article indicated, not everybody is going to obtain an academic placement. Hence, it is legitimate to want a flexible degree that allows you to pursue multiple industries and protects you from risk. Choosing a PhD program is not simply about choosing a research specialty, but also about choosing a bundled package of the university that includes the brand name, the networking, and the recruiting connections. </p>
<p>I’ll leave you with one last anecdote. I know one guy from Turkey who is pursuing his PhD. He’s freely acknowledged that his program is not necessarily the best in his particular field - some other schools are indeed ranked higher. But it is quite likely that he won’t pursue an academic career at all, rather, he’s just going to go back to Turkey and take a job in a government ministry and perhaps one day run for political office. The fact is, voters in Turkey don’t really know what the best PhD programs really are. All they’re going to see is the Harvard brand name. {Lest you think this is just a quirk of foreigners, it should be said that voters in the US don’t know what the best PhD programs are either and would also just see the Harvard brand name.}</p>
<p>I would add that the move towards extreme specialization in these fields is what makes many of them so irrelevant to most of the public/students (policy issues aside). Anecdote: How many times does post-modernity as a mode of analysis enter into everyday discussion (compare that with how many journal articles have been written from the post-modern analysis)? When academics write articles for other academics it prevents many of these ideas from ever entering the public mind (which is the way one really gets ideas to spread/become implemented in the real world). In a more specific sense (and I’m sure many of us have had experience with this), when professors spend so much of their time in sub-specialized fields that only individuals in those fields can understand it takes away the focus from actually teaching these disciplines.When the teaching plummets you can generally expect that students will have less interest in some very interesting/noteworthy fields. Why: The professor’s day to day is spent more communicating with people who already know the material rather than having the professor focus on communication with the uninformed. My solution (and by no means is it perfect, and I would prefer to hear from others with more specialized information as to its flaws) Would be to stop forcing students to take these courses (too many core requirements), and to not make hiring decisions based on research, and instead on teaching ability. If you want more students to really appreciate/ apply, and participate in the discussion you need to force professors/institutions to focus on communicating the relevant issues in a field (the most effective way to do that would be by letting students have greater choice in what fields they take, it would force many of these professors to have interesting courses that attracted students/funding to the department). If the purpose of a university is to foster ideas, and to educate then removing course requirements (for general colleges, not for specific majors), and hiring based on the ability to attract students to a department’s courses would strengthen much of academia.</p>
<p>Sakky…I appreciate what you wrote…don’t agree with it though. Nothing wrong with civil debate. Anyway, there are a few points that I’d like to make.</p>
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<li><p>Everybody has there horror stories of tenured and tenure-track professors who can’t and won’t teach. I do to. I have a undergrad from a good private liberal arts school and a Masters degree from a public school. At both places I saw solutions that I really thought worked to make Professors teach. At my undergrad, tenure was, in part, based off of evaluations from students that were detailed questionaires sent out to current students, alumni, majors and non-majors. There were literally tenure track professors with significant research sucess going up for tenure with the full support of their department that were turned down and forced to leave over bad student evaluations. At my Masters Degree program, every class was evaluated. Class evaluations are no silver bullet, but really poor teachers were few and far between. These types of solutions really worked. Schools should do this before ever considering abolishing tenure.</p></li>
<li><p>I completely disagree with you on engineers and other professionals not being in “up or out” careers at the companies they work for. I’ve worked as an engineer at several corporations for several years. It is all “up or out”. I really believe the professionals need a darn good reason to walk away from the money of corporations. Tenure gives part of that reason.</p></li>
<li><p>In terms of Academic freedom, we aren’t just talking about the sticky subjects. If you take away tenure, you give the university administartion total control. It will be very similar to working at a corporation where they can lay you off at the drop of dime for any reason. Getting rid of tenure will cause profs to lose control of everything from who they partner with, who they publish with, and what relatively mundane subject matter they get to study.</p></li>
<li><p>I you want to stop tenure, stop paying tuition and giving alumni contributions at universities that have tenure. Many good universities in this country are private and many of the good public universities are really pseudo-private where only a fraction of the budget comes from the state. These universities will not be changed unless the money dries up. I quite frankly support tenure, and will continue to financially support my two alma maters that grant tenure.</p></li>
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<p>I really wonder if all these ruckus are also applicable to the Biomedical Field. No prof ever warned me regarding the potential of ‘not landing a decent job’, and I believe they all wholeheartedly support my plan to pursue a PhD-to-professorship. The only piece of advice they ever brought up is for me ‘to do my best’.</p>
<p>Would a PhD in Biomedical vs. BME make a big difference in landing a position? Assuming my research in grad school would focus on the same topic.</p>
<p>I hope this doesn’t include biomedical as well. We have multiple directly-relevant research avenues available to us that the humanities and social sciences do not. For instance, drug development, medical devices, vaccines, public health and non profit/research institutes. The budgets for the biomedical sciences ala NIH are much higher than the counterparts in the humanities and social sciences. I agree things aren’t great in terms of salary and job security in academia but I don’t think that the biomedical sciences are mired as deeply in it as other disciplines are.</p>
<p>Well, good for your school, but certainly we can agree that, at least for the major research universities, such a system is far from the norm. Research universities, unsurprisingly, demand research. Terrible teaching doesn’t really matter.</p>
<p>One might then argue that the tenure systems of the LAC’s are quarantined from those of the research universities. But this is not so. First off, let’s face it, most of the best PhD students would rather place at a top research university than at a LAC. An engineering PhD who is entering academia is probably going to take a tenure-track position at MIT than at a LAC, despite the fact that his odds of eventually earning tenure at MIT are microscopic. He would view it as a savvy career move: spend a few years to take advantage of the resources at MIT and build his social network at the most famous engineering school in the world before probably being forced to move on to somewhere else. Similarly, many of the best junior faculty at the LAC’s will almost certainly jump from a LAC to a top research university if given the offer. </p>
<p>The ability to jump is most important if you fail your tenure review at that LAC? What now? Well, if you want to stay in academia, you have to place at another school, and that school is probably going to desire research and won’t care much about your teaching. Hence, the risk-averse thing to do is to then concentrate on research at the expense of teaching, for research is the currency of choice in the academic job market. More research gives you more flexibility to move from school to school as need be. Or, put another way, let’s say your research is poor, your teaching is great, but you fail your tenure review at the LAC. Now you’re stuck, because other schools may not want to hire you. </p>
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<p>I have never heard of a single engineering company implement up-or-out (other professions such as consulting/banking/law, yes). Who are these engineering companies who will force their engineers to be promoted or be fired?</p>
<p>To be clear, I have heard of engineering companies who implement certain ‘fast-track development programs’ for some of their engineers. General Electric does this. Those programs do indeed force you to meet the development timetable of the program or be eliminated from the program, which often times means termination from the company entirely. The difference is that you don’t have to join those programs. I know many GE engineers who were not part of these programs and hence had no pressure to take on greater responsibilities with time. If they were perfectly happy with their current job with no ambitions of moving up, they were free to do so. </p>
<p>Nor am I talking about a program that terminates a certain lower percentile of workers every year. That is more properly classified as a ‘meets median performance or out’ system, not an ‘up-or-out’ system, for you can remain at your current rank potentially forever. There is pressure for you to remain at that rank, but there is no pressure for you to be promoted or be fired. Again, it is that all-or-nothing quality of the tenure system that daunts many people. </p>
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<p>And with the current tenure system, right now you’re giving the tenure committee, which generally consists of senior faculty and the administration, total control. Again, lots of junior faculty right now don’t dare to investigate controversial topics at all, for fear of offending somebody on the tenure committee and hence being denied tenure. Instead, they investigate safe subjects. </p>
<p>One might then argue that at least the senior faculty will get to work on controversial topics. But the degree to which they do so is ultimately the empirical question that I asked before: how many senior faculty actually do that? I think it’s fairly close to 0%. I agree that they can do that. But do they? If they don’t, then there isn’t really any effective freedom that tenure is protecting anyway. </p>
<p>So, again, it is unclear to me whether tenure actually promotes net academic freedom. Junior faculty probably suffer from a decrease in academic freedom, which is not compensated for by the academic freedom that senior faculty have but never seem to use. Makes sense: if you’ve spent years of your life building research expertise on safe topics in order to earn tenure, then it is only natural for you to continue to work on safe topics after tenure, because that’s what you know how to do. </p>
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<p>I think that’s tilting at windmills. Let’s face it. Major research universities such as HYPSM have vast quantities of resources. They’re not going to be hurt by whatever tiny loss of tuition and donations you might cause, especially when plenty of other wealthy donors are willing to step into the fray. People attend those schools not so much because they support the tenure system, but because they support all of the other activities that the schools have to offer, such as the brand name the career recruiting, and the alumni networks, and the tenure system is bundled into the package. Similarly, one might vote for, and even donate money, to a political candidate with which you actually disagree on a few issues, but you support on other issues.</p>