Doctoral Education and the Faculty of the Future

Looking to the Future

The chapters in Doctoral Education have provided a road map for improving the functioning of doctoral education programs in the United States. Money matters, but it is not the only thing that matters; even well-funded doctoral programs have dropout rates that are higher than desirable. Efforts to improve doctoral education should focus on the characteristics of the curriculum, the advising provided to students, clearly articulating objectives and requirements, and integrating faculty and students into a community of scholars. Because the success of a doctoral program often depends heavily on the leadership of a few concerned faculty members, faculty leadership must be rewarded and programs must be periodically assessed to make sure that they remain on the correct track. To assess program performance, data must be regularly collected on program characteristics and on student finances and progress through the system. A key role for graduate schools and their deans is to insist on the collection of such data, to monitor what is going on in the programs , and to share information across programs on the characteristics of programs that are doing well in an effort to encourage improvements in performance in programs faring poorly. Moreover, another key role of graduate deans is to disseminate to both the programs and the administration the information that has been learned about best practices Looking to the Future Ronald G. Ehrenberg and Charlotte V. Kuh 260 Doctoral Education and the Faculty of the Future from analyses conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools and the various foundations and organizations concerned with improving doctoral education. Doctoral education is changing and, although the more traditional doctoral programs are congruent with disciplinary departments, progress on solving important problems increasingly requires interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches. Now, more than in the past, it is likely that the careers of new PhD holders will differ from those of their advisers, as the share of tenure-track faculty positions in American colleges and universities decline and as a growing share of new doctorate holders seeks employment in the nonacademic sector. The skills required to work in interdisciplinary environments in the nonacademic sector are often quite different than those developed in traditional doctoral programs . Doctoral programs need to be aware of the changing nature of the skills that their graduates will need and the jobs that those graduates will likely attain. Efforts to develop interdisciplinary doctoral programs in the sciences, engineering, technology, and mathematics have been stimulated by the National Science Foundation’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) program. The program “seeks to train PhD scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background and the technical, professional and personal skills needed to address the global questions of the future.”1 Initial evaluations of the IGERT program have found that it has altered the educational experiences of participating students , engaged faculty in interdisciplinary teaching and research, and advanced interdisciplinary education at institutions that have hosted it.2 Ultimately the success of such programs will be judged by graduates’ employment outcomes after receipt of their PhDs, and their contributions to new knowledge. While many graduates of such programs will seek nonacademic employment, those seeking academic employment may find that the vast majority of academic appointments are still in disciplinary-based departments. Faculty in such departments may view the graduates’ interdisciplinary training as a dilution, rather than an extension , of their disciplinary training. There is a great variety of these doctoral programs, ranging from umbrella programs in the biological sciences to emerging disciplines such as nanotechnology. The goals and objectives of these programs should be clearly stated, and their success, both in the short and long runs, should be rigorously evaluated. The chapters in this volume are also concerned with the students that U.S. doctoral programs will be educating in the future. Given the great uncertainty about our nation’s ability to count on a continuation of the current flow of talented foreign residents to enroll in and complete PhDs at American universities and then undertake employment Looking to the Future 261 here, increasing the number of American citizens going on to PhDs is essential. Although we are beginning to understand the factors that cause some undergraduate institutions to send a larger proportion of their students on to PhD study than other institutions do, more analyses of this subject are required. Similarly, although we know that providing undergraduates with research experiences appears to enhance their probabilities of going on to PhD...