Evaluating Graduate Programs in Bioethics: What Measures Should We Use?

Help is wanted. There are more than 78 bioethics-related job openings noted in the December 2002 bioethics.net 'positions available' list: currently available are professorships of all rank in medical schools, administrator jobs on corporate Institutional Review Boards, temporary jobs in departments of, well, pretty much every discipline of the humanities, social sciences, allied health and nursing. By any measure, bioethics has a booming job market; data obtained by surveys of prospective employers, for example, showed a one-to-one applicant-to-position ratio in the fall 2001 job cycle. In one sense this is cause for joy—many bioethics programs rely on their graduate programs as a primary source of income, and the prospect of placing applicants is likely to both enlarge and improve applicant pools and class sizes. There have been many claims made by programs in bioethics in admissions literature that highlight the increasing strength of bioethics and of particular programs, unsurprising given the general turn to "comparative advertising" and branding in academic admissions in general (Twitchell 2002).

At the same time, more than 55% of these 78 bioethics-related searches have remained active for more one year, and it has been observed by some potential employers in open sessions at the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities that the applicant pool is poorly suited to the positions du jour. In some cases, schools and companies are searching for "odd ducks." Baylor College of Medicine, for example, placed an ad searching for several assistant professors trained in philosophy at the Ph.D. level, but with sufficient skill in social science to conduct empirical studies involving fairly sophisticated methodology. It is also a matter of much discussion what sort of skills one should favor in a job search for the chair of compliance or an Institutional Review Board: who trains people to take that role, and what degree is needed?

While there is cause for joy in some quarters at the growth of bioethics, and in particular at the development of new kinds of jobs for bioethics scholars who have professional or scholarly training not only in bioethics but also in some other discipline, there is also great concern. Some of it has to do with finding "the right person for the job." But the far louder cry comes from undergraduate, graduate and professional students and from mid-career professionals who are either already enrolled in bioethics graduate training or who would like to be. The most frequently downloaded and most linked-to web pages in all of bioethics, for example, are those that discuss what kind of study, skills, and degree one needs to pursue a career in bioethics.

Virtually every scholar of bioethics has been asked the questions: where should I go to graduate school? Should I pursue law or medical or public health or philosophy graduate training, and at the end of the road, what kind of job will I be prepared for? (McGee 1996) Should I invest myself more in understanding the rigors and methods of Immanuel Kant or Thomas Bayes or Margaret Mead; should I let Chabner orient me to the Language of Medicine or follow Ronald Dworkin and Richard Posner into the sometimes arcane native language of jurisprudence? Are there five kinds of jobs in bioethics? What is a Ph.D. in bioethics and can or should I get one? The simple truth is that there are no easy answers to these questions—but that students deserve the best efforts of mentors to identify the "facts of the matter" about as many of the questions as possible. It is also clearly true that employers need to know much more about the differences between training in the different programs of bioethics, and about how graduates and current students perceive their educational experience during and afterwards (Magnus 2001).

Starting from this...