The University of Chicago, that is.
The University of Chicago on Tuesday announced a series of reforms aimed at getting students through their graduate programs faster and with better training for whatever careers they pursue.
In so doing, Chicago is the latest institution to address excessive timelines, completion problems and poor faculty job markets for many Ph.D. students.
These are the opening two paragraphs of Colleen Flaherty, “Bold Move in Graduate Education,” Inside HigherEd,” October 9, 2019.
And how does the University of Chicago plan to get students through their graduate programs faster? By paying them to stay longer. You read that right. Here’s the very next paragraph of the news item:
Chicago’s biggest change, which applies to doctoral students in the humanities, social sciences, divinity studies and social service administration, is financial. Whereas doctoral students are currently funded for up to six years, depending on their programs, the new framework promises all students in good academic standing who enrolled in summer 2016 or later full funding until they graduate, with no limits.
So funding them forever will, according to Provost Daniel Diermeier, cause them to shorten their time in graduate school.
Maybe, though, what they have in mind is pushing people out at a certain time rather than letting them hang around. If so, the article doesn’t mention it. The article mentions only one stick along with the carrot and it’s this:
If full funding is the carrot to finish one’s degree in a timely manner, minimizing financial distractions, there is a stick — at least for departments. Currently, program cohort sizes aren’t strictly linked to completion. But they will be going forward. Now, the total number of Ph.D. students in the four divisions affected will be a fixed, yet-to-be-determined number — and new students will not be admitted until current students graduate or leave.
So if graduate students hang around longer, that reduces the slots available for potential incoming graduate students. Ms. Flaherty was right to call it a stick for departments. It’s not a stick for graduate students.
READER COMMENTS
MarkW
Oct 11 2019 at 5:14pm
Aren’t universities better off with slower grad students? If they jam up in the system, this reduces the flow and the embarrassing numbers of newly minted PhD students who can’t find academic positions. And it allows universities to comfort themselves with the thought that these new PhDs wouldn’t be unemployed if only they’d been the sort of go-getters who finished faster. For universities, might not the ideal be a 40-year degree program where students graduate and then immediately retire and never need to go find another job? Or are non-tenured faculty even cheaper labor than grad students?
Mark Z
Oct 11 2019 at 6:13pm
This would only work temporarily though. If you increase completion times by 2 years, after 2 years you’re still pushing out the same number per year as before. In the long run they still have to reduce the number of doctoral students.
MarkW
Oct 11 2019 at 7:29pm
No, it would work long-term. The new limit for Chicago is the total number of students in the system. If you had a max of 40 students in the system and the average time to complete was 1 year, you’d be bringing in an entirely new cohort of 40 new students every year. But if average completion time was 40 years, you’d bring in just a single new student each year to replace the one superannuated grad student who was graduating & retiring.
Mark Z
Oct 12 2019 at 4:39am
That just seems like an unnecessarily circuitous way of reducing enrollment. Why not just keep the duration the same and take fewer students? Just for the free labor? I can’t imagine this wouldn’t seriously deter applicants. Every PhD program I applied to tried to sell itself on how fast they’d get us out the door. Maybe this is just in the sciences, but in my experience students are more worried about being kept there longer than they’d like than being pushed out the door too soon.
MarkW
Oct 12 2019 at 10:58am
I think it depends on the program. In a lot of Humanities PhD programs, there are virtually no academic jobs waiting, and there are students who would probably stay forever if they could (the grad student teaching assistant deal is better in some ways than the non-tenure track lecturer deal — more secure for one thing). But even in the sciences, I know somebody who recently graduated with a PhD in Chem. She did so, though, only because she had a job lined up. Others in her cohort working in her lab did not yet have jobs and did not finish.
Jon Murphy
Oct 11 2019 at 5:40pm
The implication of this stick is that the decision-makers at U Chicago think the departments are holding back grad students. That may be the case. But if it is not, this’ll have the unfortunate result of pushing grad students out the door before they are ready.
My committee and I had a talk at the beginning of the semester where they advised me to slow down and not try to rush the dissertation. If they were facing different incentives and rushed me out, I’d be facing a job market unprepared. Never a good sign.
David Henderson
Oct 11 2019 at 6:30pm
But remember that they now get six years of funding. That’s not exactly pushing them out the door unprepared.
Jon Murphy
Oct 11 2019 at 7:16pm
Very true
Steve Fritzinger
Oct 11 2019 at 6:31pm
Alan Goldhammer
Oct 12 2019 at 9:25am
I suspect that a lot of potential economics grad students never get there, preferring instead to go the MBA route and move into the financial services sector where employment options are more plentiful. I don’t know what the statistics are for university level faculty positions in economics and certainly there are not a lot of new universities opening. Lots of schools are opting not to add tenured faculty positions but hire adjunct faculty who are less expensive and may or may not be provided with employment benefits. Adjuncts usually have to cobble together jobs at several institutions as some schools have limitations on the number of courses the adjunct can teach.
I also wonder if faculty are candid with their grad students about employment prospects. Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler frequently posts abstracts from econ grad students ’employment’ papers (I don’t know the correct term). Has anyone done the research to find out where these people ended up? I know from my own cohort of chemistry grad students in the early 1970s one or two ended up with research university faculty positions. A couple found employment at the non-grad school college level. Most of us migrated to careers that we did not anticipate at the beginning of grad school (in my case pharma regulatory affairs).
At one point some years ago NSF did such surveys but I don’t know whether this is being done these days as it is probably considered non-productive research.
IMO, anything over four years for a PhD is a waste of time and an abuse of grad students.
Jon Murphy
Oct 12 2019 at 11:23am
They’re called “job market papers.”
Yeah. At least with econ, departments will often post where their grads end up. This is GMU’s.
Alan Goldhammer
Oct 12 2019 at 2:14pm
Jon – thanks for posting the link. It looks as though there are a number of PhD grads who may not have full time academic positions. they are listed as postdoctoral fellows, lecturers, or visiting professors. It looks as though those who did get academic positions are at smaller liberal arts colleges (nothing wrong with that!!!!).
Jon Murphy
Oct 12 2019 at 4:07pm
All of those are full-time academic positions. They’re not all tenure track, but they are full-time.
That tends to be where we initially place, but there are GMU grads at a number of schools of all varying sizes and types.
Justin
Oct 12 2019 at 11:00am
One caveat is that sometimes unfunded 7th+ year students will find full-time jobs to support themselves while they finish their PhD’s. For this subset of people, it is plausible that paying them to focus purely on their degree will cause them to graduate faster. I’m not sure how large this population is, but it’s not negligible.
Comments are closed.