Doctoral Education and the Faculty of the Future

Introduction

Introduction Ronald G. Ehrenberg and Charlotte V. Kuh American colleges and universities are simultaneously facing large numbers of faculty retirements and expanding enrollments. Budget constraints, especially those at public higher education institutions, have led colleges and universities to substitute part-time and full-time non-tenure-track faculty for tenure-track faculty. Although this substitution will reduce the demand for new full-time tenure-track faculty , the demand for faculty members will likely be high in the decade ahead. This heightened demand is coming at a time when the share of American college graduates who go on for PhD study is far below its historic high. Moreover, groups that historically have been underrepresented in PhD study, women and people of color, are composing a growing share of the pool of college graduates. Although the female share of PhD holders has increased substantially in many fields, these increased shares have not translated into equal increases in female representation in tenure-track faculty positions at major research universities . The share of PhDs going to U.S. citizens of color has increased at a much slower rate than that going to women, and both the shares of new American PhDs and faculty positions at American colleges and universities that go to people of color are still way below what would be 2 Doctoral Education and the Faculty of the Future predicted based on the number of American college graduates who are women or people of color. The declining interest of American students in going on to PhD study is undoubtedly due to a number of factors. These include better labor market opportunities associated with professional degree programs, such as those in law, medicine, and business; long completion times to degree and low completion rates in PhD programs; how doctoral education is financed; the lengthy apprenticeship needed for doctoral study, which makes it difficult for students to complete degrees in a timely fashion; the need for (often multiple) postdoctoral appointments before PhD holders in many science and engineering fields can even contemplate a permanent academic position; the decline in the share of faculty positions that are tenured or on tenure track; and the failure of many PhD programs to adequately prepare their students for nonacademic employment opportunities. At the same time, the share of PhDs earned in the United States by foreign students has substantially increased over the last thirty-five years, especially in key science and engineering fields. Many of these foreign PhD holders have remained employed in the United States. Through their roles as research assistants during their graduate study, postdoctoral researchers, and doctoral degree holders in academic and nonacademic employment, they have contributed substantially to our nation’s scientific progress and to our college and university teaching programs. Concern has been expressed, however, that the growing enrollment of foreign students in American PhD programs “crowds out” potential American citizen PhD holders and discourages them from pursuing PhD study. On the other hand, the aftermath of 9/11, the growth of research infrastructure and research support in other nations, and the growth of other nations’ higher education systems all cast doubt on the ability of the United States to continue to rely on foreign PhD holders to meet our nation’s need for scientific researchers and to fill future faculty positions. Given all of these issues, in October 2006 the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute brought together a group of researchers from a wide number of science and social science fields, academic administrators , and policymakers for the conference “Doctoral Education and the Faculty of the Future.” The sessions at the conference focused on efforts to increase and improve the supply of future faculty, and covered topics ranging from increasing undergraduate interest in doctoral study to improving the doctoral experience and the representation of underrepresented groups in doctoral education. The chapters in this book are revisions of the papers presented at that conference.1 Introduction 3 Improving Doctoral Education The first section of Doctoral Education consists of five chapters concerned with ways to better understand and improve the processes of doctoral education. Numerous private foundations, government agencies , individual researchers, and universities have worried over the last two decades about how to improve doctoral education, and the chapters in this section summarize some of the major efforts and their findings . Each paper reports conclusions based on substantive empirical research. In 1991 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched the Graduate...