Doctoral Education and the Faculty of the Future

1. Changing the Education of Scholars: An Introduction to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Graduate Education Initiative

1 Changing the Education of Scholars An Introduction to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Graduate Education Initiative Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Harriet Zuckerman, Jeffrey A. Groen, and Sharon M. Brucker In 1991 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched the Graduate Education Initiative (GEI) to improve the structure and organization of PhD programs in the humanities and social sciences and to combat the high rates of student attrition and long time to degree completion prevailing in these fields. While attrition and time to completion were deemed to be important in and of themselves, and of great significance to degree seekers, they were also seen more broadly as indicators of the effectiveness of graduate programs. An array of characteristics of doctoral programs was earmarked as likely contributors to high attrition and long degree-completion time. These included unclear or conflicting expectations of the academic performance of students, a proliferation of specialized courses, elaborate and sometimes conflicting requirements, intermittent supervision, epistemological disagreements on fundamentals , and—not least—inadequate funding.1 In short, the intention was to improve doctoral education and make it more efficient. This was far from the first such effort to reduce times to degree completion and rates of attrition. Earlier interventions, which provided grants in aid to individual students or to graduate schools to distribute as they saw fit, had conspicuously failed.2 Based on data that showed marked differences among graduate departments in the time it took to earn degrees; data about attrition rates among and within the sciences, 16 Doctoral Education and the Faculty of the Future social sciences, and humanities; and a great deal of experience on the ground, the architects of the GEI concluded that graduate education could be improved only if departments would change their PhD programs . The Mellon Foundation then shifted much of the support it provided for doctoral education away from fellowships for individual students and moved to block grants that would be awarded to major universities and the departments they selected. Ten institutions—the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania , Princeton University, Stanford University, and Yale University— were each invited to nominate four to six departments to participate in the GEI. These universities were chosen because as a group they had attracted the largest number of fellowship winners of the Mellon Foundation’s portable doctoral dissertation awards.3 To be eligible for participation and funding, each department had to develop a plan to improve its doctoral program that would be consistent with the objectives of the Foundation. Departments were encouraged to carefully review their curricula, examinations, advising, and official timetables with an eye toward facilitating timely degree completion and reducing attrition (especially late attrition), while maintaining or increasing the quality of doctoral training they provided.4 There was no requirement that the departments named by the universities be in need of particular help—that is, the departments did not need to have low completion rates and long times to degree completion, nor were they necessarily well-organized, thus meriting additional support. Universities made their own selections with the result that participating departments had a variety of profiles with respect to completion rates and times to degree completion. They did, however, share one major characteristic: a general reputation for turning out high-quality PhD holders. The designers of the GEI encouraged departments to establish incentive structures that would promote students’ timely progress through requirements they had to complete to earn the PhD, such as meeting foreign language requirements, passing comprehensive examinations, and completing dissertation proposals. For example, rather than guaranteeing incoming students that they would receive multiyear financial aid if they met departmental standards, the GEI sought to make annual financial aid contingent on the timely completion of a series of requirements. Funding for dissertation-year fellowships was encouraged, but only for students who had completed all other requirements before their sixth year of doctoral study and who were judged to be within one year of completing their dissertations. Changing the Education of Scholars 17 The Mellon Foundation understood at the outset that it would take time for proposed changes in programs to be agreed on and implemented , that program changes would evolve over time, and that the changes that occurred would differ across the departments. As such, the GEI began with the expectation that the program would run...