Making a Living and Making a Life: The Professional Development of Ph.D.s
Lewis M. Siegel
Former Dean of the Graduate School
The existence for many years of tight academic job markets in a number of disciplines has led to a serious mismatch between the number of Ph.D.s produced and the number of faculty positions in those fields, since institutions often relate production of Ph.D.s more to their need for researchers and teachers than to job market demand. As we revisit our notions of the scope and structure of doctoral education, we must-as emphasized at the end of my message in the previous issue of The GRIND -ensure that the graduate student is treated primarily as a student and not just as a source of labor. As part of this effort, we need to concern ourselves with the issue of professional development. Beginning with a realistic look at the careers that our Ph.D.s actually pursue, we will be poised to rethink the biases that currently shape professional development practices within doctoral programs and to ask the hard questions that will continue to direct positive changes in this arena.
National surveys show that the majority of Ph.D. students begin with the goal of becoming faculty at research universities like Duke. Over time, interest in other options, including positions at non-research-oriented institutions, increases. The Graduate School has collected data on jobs held by students who have earned Ph.D.s over the past 15 years. While 80% of our Ph.D.s in the humanities have obtained academic positions (63% of the total are in tenure-track faculty positions, and of these, about half are in research or Ph.D.-granting universities), the majority of Ph.D.s in the physical sciences and engineering do not go into academics. In keeping with the national trend, overall, fewer than half of Duke Ph.D.s find work as tenure-track faculty in a college or university.
This is due, in part, to the mismatch in the job market that I mentioned earlier. The prestige associated with Ph.D. programs has led to a large increase in the number of these programs, such that reducing program size in elite institutions does not automatically decrease overall production of Ph.D.s in a given discipline. These pressures have led to an ever-increasing number of part-time and non-tenure-track faculty and postdoctoral students. Consequently, even if Ph.D. production were to be capped, the pipeline for future academic job openings is already full in many fields. On the other hand, there are a variety of jobs outside academe that could potentially use the type of analytical training the Ph.D. provides. For example, in technical fields, new types of jobs emerge all the time. In a number of engineering, physical science, and computational fields, however, there is a great shortage of U.S. students undertaking graduate study. This gap is being filled by an influx of international students. At the same time, the home countries of those students are developing their own Ph.D. programs, with the potential of sharply reducing the supply of international students engaging in doctoral study in U.S. universities. Finally, given the long time that elapses between beginning doctoral study and attaining the degree, is it possible to predict future job markets at all? There is no way to easily determine the proper level of Ph.D. production.
Consideration of the job market leads to the question: Is Ph.D. education in the U.S. now attracting the “best and brightest”? Given the presence of alternate career opportunities that are both attractive and do not require the long preparation time, relative penury, and uncertainty of outcome associated with Ph.D. study, a clear “yes” answer would be surprising. In addition, these factors have made it increasingly difficult to attract minorities and women to the many Ph.D. programs in which they are significantly underrepresented, a fact that has tremendous negative implications for the diversification of the doctoral workforce and the future faculty of our colleges and universities.
Students increasingly find the life of faculty in research universities unattractive. If they wish to continue in academics, how can such students learn about what life is like at a variety of educational institutions? The Preparing Future Faculty program was initiated over a decade ago by the Graduate School to meet the needs of those Ph.D.s who will go into academic jobs that primarily involve teaching. Are we, as an institution that prides itself on the quality of its undergraduate instruction, providing our doctoral students with the pedagogical training they need? At present, much of the T.A. training in departments is oriented toward the narrow needs of the current undergraduate program rather than the broad pedagogical training of doctoral students. To help with this problem, the Graduate School has recently instituted a program called Pathways to the Professoriate , which is designed to help students learn the principles and practices of classroom teaching. We continue to offer ongoing workshops in the instructional uses of technology and work with departments to improve their T.A. training programs, including, where possible, a structured sequence of instructional responsibilities that, over time, will better prepare our Ph.D.s for teaching careers.
If they wish to or are forced by job market forces to seek career options outside academia, doctoral students face a broader array of difficulties. Academic culture is oriented around academic careers, and the faculty is often not supportive of students with other career aspirations. There is concern by the faculty that preparation of students for anything other than research (and possibly, teaching) within the discipline is not really the responsibility of Ph.D. education. Thus, doctoral students are often not informed about or trained for other career options, relative to their perceived preparation for academic careers. Employers themselves also express concern that the focus of Ph.D. training on independent research does not, by itself, adequately prepare students to develop the skills needed to find employment in many non-academic settings. At Duke, solutions such as career symposia designed to expose graduate students to a broader array of career options and joint-degree programs with Duke's professional schools begin to address these deficits of traditional doctoral education.
Given the available prospects for today's Ph.D.s, should career guidance for multiple sectors of work be part of the responsibility of the Graduate School to its doctoral students? Should doctoral training prepare students for a variety of roles within academia? How can we break down the barriers between disciplines, so problems that require an interdisciplinary approach can be effectively attacked? Most of the problems in the “real world” involve cooperation and communication between people with training in disparate disciplines.
These are only some of the issues that contribute to the current rethinking of doctoral education in the U.S. There are many, many others, such as how to reduce the high rate of attrition in Ph.D. programs; how to stop the long trend toward increasing time to degree in most disciplines; how to improve and reward mentoring; how to increase the breadth of graduate education without increasing time to degree; how to improve training in teaching; and how to provide interdisciplinary education in disparate disciplines, such as biology and mathematics, where the preliminary training and ultimate expectations of the core disciplines are so different. Some of these will be the subjects of later communications in The GRIND . This is an exciting time to be in graduate education and to be at a university which is poised to be an agent for positive change.
This article originally appeared in The GRIND, Spring 2004 Issue.