For some people, going to graduate school may be an important experience
just for the opportunity to explore interesting and important questions, to satisfy
an intrinsic and pressing curiosity about the world or about life, and/or how to make them better. A percentage
of these people, at the PhD level, manage to turn that quest into a lifetime research
career similar to that of their grad school mentors — in academia.
Today however, that percentage (in the life sciences at least), is very small
and shrinking (as a few mouse clicks on Google search will quickly show). Another percentage, also relatively small,
will find employment as researchers in government or in the private sector (most of the latter positions require only MSc or Bachelor's qualifications). Overall then, the news looks bad: there is now a large oversupply of PhD
students spending typically about five years of their lives as research
apprentices within universities, training to be career researchers that the
vast majority of them will never be. And
all while living below the poverty line.
Clearly undergraduates need to think twice and hard about what
they can realistically expect to get from going on to graduate school, especially in
doctoral studies. But as the grad students
in my own department have been asking lately: maybe universities should also think
about how to change what they can expect to get.
This calls on universities to revisit the definitions of their ‘learning
outcomes’ (LOs) for graduate education, particularly for PhDs. Traditionally, these LOs (at least in my own
field of Biology) are virtually all about preparing students to become frontline
researchers: asking good questions, collecting
good data, making important discoveries, and publishing them vigorously. Recognizing that most of them will never be
directly involved with these activities after graduation (and will consequently
soon thereafter be largely out of touch and inexperienced with the latest
advances in methodology), PhD students are now asking (and doubting) whether —
after five or more years of getting groceries from the food bank — they will at least have
good LOs associated with other kinds of broader and peripheral expertise (e.g. in
networking, collaboration and interpersonal skills, teaching, budget management,
grantsmanship, people management, and other workplace ‘smarts’) that will equip
them (and make them competitive) for other kinds of employment, e.g. as corporate executives, teachers, university/college administrators, supervisors in government, and managers in industry
— positions in which they will inevitably not be called ‘researchers’.
Universities then need to address an important question: Does the ordinary working environment of grad
school not already include sufficient opportunity for students to get these ‘broader
skills’ LOs simply by ‘watching, asking, and doing’ in the course of routine research
activities and interactions with colleagues and supervisors? If the answer is no, then there is a second and
tougher question to address: How can universities
do a better job of delivering these ‘broader skills’ LOs for PhD students, without compromising other things that universities aim to do?
An important consideration here is the perspective of the faculty supervisor.
Recruiting graduate students is part of
the employment obligation of faculty, but only secondarily. Faculty have graduate students mainly because
they need them to fulfil one of their more primary employment obligations (and
career goals): to publish research (a
lot of it). Usually this involves
competing successfully as a PI ('Principle Investigator') for research grants (especially NSERC, in
Canada) that will pay for research costs.
And in order to accomplish the latter they need a team of research
collaborators to spend the grant money on and thus generate publishable research. And in order to win these
grants, NSERC requires that the team consists mostly of members that will
receive training as HQP (‘Highly Qualified Personnel’) — particularly, graduate
students, and particularly with evidence that publication success for PhD
students has been effective for their success in landing university postdoctoral
and tenure-track jobs.
The expected training involved here will normally include, in varying
degrees, the ‘broader skills’ LOs mentioned above. But one thing is certain: the priorities and motivations of most
supervisors will necessarily be driven to a very large extent by the
accomplishment that is most rewarded by the university employer (and of course is
also most important to the supervisor’s reputation) — i.e. whatever it takes to
generate a high quantity and/or quality of published research. This product is probably correlated to some
extent with good mentoring of ‘broader skills’ for the grad students within a
lab. But it need not be, and probably
isn’t strongly correlated. Instead,
publication success, and hence the employer reward to the faculty member (tenure,
promotion, salary increases) will be strongly correlated with the number of
graduate students that he/she has supervised, and the proportion that go on
to obtain academic positions.
This necessarily means that the most conspicuous LOs that grad students can presently expect to get will be as research apprentices — essentially, to become career researchers like their supervisors — with some ‘broader skills’ of course
thrown in (including from grad courses, or by ordinary osmosis) — but only as
time permits, and to the extent that they do not compromise the reputational
and employer rewards to the supervisor.
The current PhD graduate education experience then — as with the
faculty job experience — is a product of the culture of academia. Changing the first will require changing the
second, and neither can be changed without changing the culture.
If change is needed, and if it is going to happen, two things will be required from universities:
(1) consultation with graduate students to better define, and/or revise (and
publish) the expected learning outcomes of a PhD graduate education; and (2) ensuring
that these LOs have substance and are taken seriously, by finding a way to make
faculty supervisors accountable for delivering them. But these measures will never get off the
ground as long as granting agencies, like NSERC, continue — as part of the adjudication
criteria for grant applications — to count how many graduate students an applicant
has supervised, and how many have gone on to post-doctoral or tenure-track positions in academia.
