Looking to earn a PhD degree? PhDs.org's rankings can help narrow down your choices.

Choose from our menu to learn more.

Improving Graduate Education

Resources

The Value of 'Learning Backward' Next Wave, May 31, 2002. "'Learning backward'... is about fixing the problems that are important to you and acquiring the skills and resources you need to solve them. Learning backward happens every day and should be recognized as an integral skill of functional professionals and citizens. Graduate programs that are recognizing this have developed courses and programs to prepare students for lives after their theses or dissertations; lives in which the capacity to fix problems is a critical survival skill."
Intellectual Entrepreneurship: Successfully Engaging Hearts, Minds in Graduate Education To achieve greater diversity, we must increase awareness of the value of graduate education and devise experiences allowing minority undergraduates to explore how advanced study can engage their hearts and minds helping them fulfill their professional visions and ethical commitments. Recruiting a critical mass of outstanding Hispanic and African American students requires a change in mindset. The Intellectual Entrepreneurship (IE) program at the University of Texas-Austin is an example of this new mindset. IE is a program and philosophy of graduate education that promotes the virtues of discovery, ownership and accountability. It challenges students to be greater than the sum of their disciplinary parts to be citizen-scholars contributing both to academe and the community. By demystifying graduate education and enabling students in traditional areas of study to put their knowledge to work in the community, it is not surprising that IE has attracted a disproportionate number of minority students; 20 percent of those enrolled in IE are underrepresented minorities, while the same group comprises only 9 percent of the total graduate student body.
"Learning To Be a Citizen-Scholar" "Imagine a graduate-education system that begins by asking students to think about what matters to them most and then uses their answers not only to create programs of research, but also exciting and varied career possibilities. We call this approach 'passion plus expertise,' and it is the premise behind the 'intellectual entrepreneurship' program at the University of Texas at Austin."
Reforming Graduate Education in the Sciences by Representative George Brown, Jr. A blunt assessment of what needs to change in higher education from one of the people who controls the purse strings. A definite must-read.
Doctoral Education: Preparing for the Future Jules LaPidus, Council of Graduate Schools. "The best advice for faculty members is this: In order to help students prepare for a variety of possible careers, don’t train them too specifically for any one. Instead, provide the kind of education that enables them to know their fields, understand the processes of scholarly inquiry, and have a realistic picture of how they can use these incredibly valuable skills in a variety of ways, in a variety of settings, and in a variety of satisfying and rewarding careers." (Requires Adobe Acrobat)
Reshaping the Graduate Education of Scientists and Engineers A 1995 National Academy of Sciences report recommending important changes in graduate education.
"Ethical Commitments, Professional Visions, and Intellectual Choices: Students Call for Changes in Graduate Education," Communicator, July, 2003 In Spring 2003, Dr. Rick Cherwitz, Founder of the Intellectual Entrepreneurship Program, and English doctoral candidate Julie Sievers began a series of conversations about ethical commitments and graduate education. Approximately a dozen of the University of Texas best graduate students in the sciences, humanities, social sciences and arts took part in the first meeting. These discussions will extend into the 2003-2004 academic year; in addition to occasional articles published in the Austin American-Statesman (as part of the Citizen-Scholars series: http://www.utexas.edu/ogs/rc/citizen_scholars.html), the goal is to share what is learned with the larger academic community both locally and nationally. Questions being raised as part of this "Ethics Project" appear at: http://www.utexas.edu/ogs/rc/ethics_project.html
Adapt or Die: The Grad School Survey by Stefanie Sanford, HMS Beagle, Dec. 10, 1999. "In a preliminary survey, graduate students rate their academic programs, revealing good news and bad. The conclusion: U.S. graduate education is in desperate need of reforms, many of which were initially proposed 30 years ago." (Requires a free subscription to HMS Beagle)
Intellectual Entrepreneurship: A Vision for Graduate Education, Richard A. Cherwitz and Charlotte A. Sullivan, Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, Nov/Dec 2002. The thesis of this article is that successful and resilient academic professionals are intellectual entrepreneurs. They appreciate the enormous value of their scholarly expertise. They construct bold but attainable visions for putting it to use. They are willing to take risks, seize opportunities and marshal all the resources available to them to bring their visions to fruition. They understand the importance of collaboration and teamwork. Moreover, they have the passion and skills to utilize and sustain their expertise in multiple settings over the long course of a career. IE celebrates what is appropriate and valuable about the research orientation of graduate education. In fact, IE implores students, Never apologize for being a scholar. The challenge facing both graduate students and faculty is discovering the value of their scholarly expertise and documenting it for others.
Developing Intellectual Entrepreneurship: For graduate students, communication is a basis for success The Scientist, March 5, 2001. "Doctoral programs do not adequately prepare students for the future.... To solve this problem the University of Texas, which produces the largest number of Ph.D.s annually, established a professional development program. Initiated in 1997, the mission of the University of Texas at Austin Intellectual Entrepreneurship Program is to help students realize the value of their expertise, discover their disciplinary identity, and become successful academic professionals." (Requires free registration)
AAU Committee on Graduate Education Report and Recommendations 1998 recommendations for best practices in graduate education. The report contains a number of good ideas, but what's really significant is that these ideas are being endorsed by the presidents of a number of major universities. The key now is to push for implementation.
Graduate Students Weigh In on Their Programs by Gabriela Montell, Chronicle of Higher Education Career Network, May 14, 1999. Chronicle coverage of the PhDs.Org Grad School Survey.
At Cross Purposes: What the experiences of today's doctoral students reveal about doctoral education Results of a University of Wisconsin survey on graduate education. Key findings: "The training doctoral students receive is not what they want, nor does it prepare them for the jobs they take." and "Many students do not clearly understand what doctoral study entails, how the process works and how to navigate it effectively."
Virtual Center for Research on Graduate Education A web site devoted to research on graduate education, containing information both on enrollment and degree trends and on policy issues in graduate education.
Physics for Fun and Profit "Eager to help grad students make the leap to the business world, Georgetown is trying a radical approach to teaching science." Christopher Shea, Washington Post, May 13, 2001.
Pimping a Ph.D. "A new graduate program turns Chaucer scholars into money-grubbing entrepreneurs." By Michael Erard, Salon, December 13, 1999.
Exploring Ways to Shorten the Ascent to a Ph.D. "For those who attempt it, the doctoral dissertation can loom on the horizon like Everest, gleaming invitingly as a challenge but often turning into a masochistic exercise once the ascent is begun. The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block. At commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33, an age when peers are well along in their professions, and 12 percent of graduates are saddled with more than $50,000 in debt."
Results of the 1999 Graduate School Survey Notes from Geoff Davis's March 16, 2000 presentation of the PhDs.org Graduate School Survey results to the National Science Board in Washington, DC.
Education: Rethinking PhDs Nature - April, 2011. "Fix it, overhaul it or skip it completely — institutions and individuals are taking innovative approaches to postgraduate science training." (Requires free registration)
AAUP's Statement on Graduate Students A statement on graduate student rights from the American Association of University Professors.
Practical Ph.D.s: New programs ready students for real-world jobs by Miriam Horn, US News & World Report, 1999 Graduate School Guide.
Vertically Integrated Grants for Research and Education in the Mathematical Sciences (VIGRE) An important new NSF progrm designed to encourage departments to rethink their graduate, postdoctoral, and undergraduate training programs. The initiative fosters all the right things, and is an important first step in getting the recommendations of the NAS and others actually implemented.
The Activated State: An Argument for Involved Scientists by Peter Fiske, Next Wave, May 21, 1999. Why young scientists should get involved in shaping graduate education.
A New Gene-eration of Bio Grads by Katie Dean, Wired News, July 24, 2000. "The newly formed Keck Graduate Institute in Claremont, California, is designed to prepare students for the bioscience industry, combining elements of different scientific disciplines with technology and management skills. The school -- part of the highly acclaimed Claremont Colleges -- will open its doors on Aug. 1."
Graduate Research, Education, and Training (GREAT) Group The Graduate Education Research and Training (GREAT) Group was established in September 1996 by the AAMC's Executive Council to provide a national forum for professional development and exchange of information and ideas related to biomedical graduate education and training in medical schools.
Educating Mathematical Scientists: Doctoral Study and the Postdoctoral Experience in the United States 1992 report of the National Research Council
Graduate Education: Consensus Conference Report Federation for American Societies for Experimental Biology, 1997. "What are the driving forces that have resulted in ...[the 50% increase in biomedical Ph.D.'s in the past decade]? Can the increased production of biomedical Ph.D.s continue without altering the job market for new graduates? Should this growth be curtailed in order to achieve a new steady state and, if so, at what point?"
Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education The Centers vision of change and advancement encompasses all aspects of graduate education, from financial support, faculty mentoring, time-to-degree, attrition, job placement, etc., to broader issues such as under-representation of students of color and of women in all fields of graduate study, and the special circumstances of international students. Our aim is to build national and international cultural awareness among graduate students and postdoctoral fellows throughout their graduate education.
What Makes Grad Students Graduate? "A new study by a team of researchers at the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute suggests that a key factor may well be expectations management.... The new study — based on survey interviews with students about the factors that helped them finish up — was designed to go 'inside the black box of doctoral education' and to find the factors that are most important to getting students through."
Academic Duty by Donald Kennedy. From the publisher: "Kennedy suggests that meaningful reform cannot take place until more rigorous standards of academic responsibility--to students, the university, and the public--are embraced by both faculty and the administration. With vision and compassion, he offers an important antidote to recent attacks from without that decry the university and the professoriate, and calls upon the college community to counter those attacks by looking within and fulfilling its duties."

PhD'S

Improving Graduate Education