Reform the PhD system or close it down! : Mark Taylor

[Reid Cornwell]

There are too many doctoral programs, producing too many PhDs for the job market. Shut some and change the rest, says Mark C. Taylor.

The system of PhD education in the United States and many other countries is broken and unsustainable, and needs to be re-conceived. In many fields, it creates only a cruel fantasy of future employment that promotes the self-interest of faculty members at the expense of students. The reality is that there are very few jobs for people who might have spent up to 12 years on their degrees.

Most doctoral-education programs conform to a model defined in European universities during the Middle Ages, in which education is a process of cloning that trains students to do what their mentors do. The clones now vastly outnumber their mentors. The academic job market collapsed in the 1970s, yet universities have not adjusted their admissions policies, because they need graduate students to work in laboratories and as teaching assistants. But once those students finish their education, there are no academic jobs for them.

Universities face growing financial challenges. Most in the United States, for example, have not recovered from losses incurred on investments during the financial fiasco of 2008, and they probably never will. State and federal support is also collapsing, so institutions cannot afford to support as many programs. There could be an upside to these unfortunate developments: growing competition for dwindling public and private resources might force universities to change their approach to PhD education, even if they do not want to.

There are two responsible courses of action: either radically reform doctoral programs or shut them down.
The necessary changes are both curricular and institutional. One reason that many doctoral programs do not adequately serve students is that they are overly specialized, with curricula fragmented and increasingly irrelevant to the world beyond academia. Expertise, of course, is essential to the advancement of knowledge and to society. But in far too many cases, specialization has led to areas of research so narrow that they are of interest only to other people working in the same fields, subfields or sub-subfields. Many researchers struggle to talk to colleagues in the same department, and communication across departments and disciplines can be impossible.

If doctoral education is to remain viable in the twenty-first century, universities must tear down the walls that separate fields, and establish programs that nourish cross-disciplinary investigation and communication. They must design curricula that focus on solving practical problems, such as providing clean water to a growing population. Unfortunately, significant change is unlikely to come from faculty members, who all too often remain committed to traditional approaches. Students, administrators, trustees and even people from the public and private sectors must create pressure for reform. It is important to realize that problems will never be solved as long as each institution continues to act independently. The difficulties are systemic and must be addressed comprehensively and cooperatively. Prestige is measured both within and beyond institutions by the number and purported strength of a department's doctoral programs, so, seeking competitive advantage and financial gain from alliances with the private sector, universities continue to create them. As is detailed on page 276, that has led most fields to produce too many PhDs for too long.
The solution is to eliminate programs that are inadequate or redundant. The difficult decisions should be made by administrators, in consultation with faculty members at their own and other universities, as well as interested, informed and responsible representatives beyond the academic community who have a vested interest in effective doctoral education. To facilitate change, universities should move away from excessive competition fueled by pernicious rating systems, and develop structures and procedures that foster cooperation. This would enable them to share faculty members, students and resources, and to efficiently increase educational opportunities. Institutions wouldn't need a department in every field, and could outsource some subjects. Teleconferencing and the Internet mean that cooperation is no longer limited by physical proximity.

Consortia could contain a core faculty drawn from the home department, and a rotating group of faculty members from other institutions. This would reduce both the number of graduate programs and the number of faculty members. Students would have access to more academic staff with more diverse expertise in a wider range of fields and subfields. Faculty members will resist, but financial realities make a reduced number of posts inevitable.

Higher education in the United States has long been the envy of the world, but that is changing. The technologies that have transformed financial markets and the publishing, news and entertainment industries are now disrupting the education system. In the coming years, growing global competition for the multibillion dollar education market will increase the pressure on US universities, just when public and private funding is decreasing. Although significant change is necessary at every level of higher education, it must start at the top, with total reform of PhD programs in almost every field. The future of our children, our country and, indeed, the world depends on how well we meet this challenge.

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Mark C. Taylor is chair of the department of religion at Columbia University in New York and the author of Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (Knopf, 2010). e-mail:[e-mail]
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Reform the PhD system or close it down
Published online 20 April 2011 | Nature 472, 261 (2011) | doi:10.1038/472261a
Acessed May 18, 2011

[Derek William Nicoll]

Its a sweeping statment when authors use nomaclatures such as 'other countries'. I assume they are speaking of western Europe, Aus, Canada, Japan... Education in countries other than these are often tantamount to a joke. Let me quote this chap speaking of his teaching expereince in China. 

 

"This job involves working closely with the Chinese teaching staff who come from a different system where the basic standards such as marking are very different to those in the UK. My Chinese colleagues are nevertheless highly qualified, and many have master’s qualifications from the UK alongside impeccable English."

 

Why is he stressing this? If these guys he works with have masters, Ph.D.s etc, and been exposed to quality systems, then what is the problem? He goes on...

 

"Here in China lectures are very traditional and formal. Typically the lecturer will be seated at the front of the classroom with a microphone and PowerPoint. The courses are delivered using text books, and students are guided through the book as part of the lecture.

 

At home UK students would be introduced to a variety of different reference sources, and are encouraged to actively participate during lectures and seminars. At the institutions I work at in China there is no distinction between lecture and seminar, and classes are usually two hours long. This formality starts at middle school, so the students are very used to this approach by the time they start university. Rote learning and reciting facts are the main educational methods in China.

Encouraging lecturing staff to change their approach and enabling students to change in the same way is a challenge, but is an important step. At the same time I need to be sensitive towards my Chinese colleagues, many of whom are highly experienced and senior in their department...The education system in China is very traditional and students do not have much experience of applying their knowledge and theory. A question will often result in a one-word answer, rather than a reflective or analytical reply. At school very few students will have written an extended answer to a question. Back in the UK if you recite a paragraph from a text book you may well fail, but this is what is expected in China."

 

Perhaps I am reading between the lines but my exposure to Asian Universities follows suit. 

 

Reciting passages from textbooks, reading out textbooks in class... I'm sorry this is tantamount to educational insanity, if you buy into critiques, as I do, like thye Uk's Cox Review which ap[peals fopr more interaction between industry and the acedemy

[ [213.219.8.102/pdfs/dti/innovation/cox_review.pdf213.219.8.102/pdfs/dti/innovation/cox_review.pdf]

 

One of the major problems with this and any other reform of institutions, is that it needs consensus and political will to see it through. I have welcomed being part of a new university which seeks to engage develop-ing nations' students in digital creativity - and where countries are crying out for such skills then it is easier than in the west to build new structures and relationships beyond the walls of the classroom, with industry and the local communities, infusing real world dilemmas and wicked problems in to learning etc. But even I am stymied often with the autocratic nature of the Asian university governance. meanwhile chinese students are at home struggling to remember paragraph of paragraph of a massive telephone undergraduate tome on macroeconomics!

 

The discipline and rigour of the Ph.D. degree, with a revised onus on creativity and 'original contribution to knowledge' component only needs empathised in the west - with a view to western academics seeking employment in a wider global market, where the state of development requires employment of methods that were commonplace in the west years ago.

 

We were told at a Ph.D. student presentation night that it was unlikely any of us would work in the university we were studying at. we would most likely peter down into the lower echelon universities. I did work for my alma mater - the main reason being that I had spent much of my Ph.D. in a computer company doing ethnography - my university had already seen the writing on the wall - that pureplay academia was limited (one Ph.D. contemporary who had a first class degree from Cambridge and had a super lucrative award from the medical research council for his Ph.D. ended up retraining as a Chartered Accountant. 

 

The orientation of education is important as is the discipline involved in reaching the highest levels of critical thinking and wordsmanship. These are the benchmarks and values that 'western' Ph.Ds can export worldwide - they are needed.  If the general orientation of the Chinese economy is towards more innovative activity, then learning to blindly copy must be phased out of their education at all levels (as it should in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia etc). The olnly thing that is of vl;aue that should be emulated apart from the Socratic method, inductive learning focus etc. is discipline, creative discipline, critical discipline "on page 534, paragraph 2, a missing full stop Mr. Nicoll...") 

 

 

 

[Reid Cornwell]

Jeffrey, I am not sure I understand your comment. HELP please!

[Jeffrey Watson]

When I see that North Dakota State University has a PhD program in Chemistry, I realize that we've reached a tipping point.

[Reid Cornwell]

One of Taylor's factual premises is incorrect. It was not until 1833 that the degree of specialization, now seen, was fostered. In that year we began differentiating the study of sciences as "scientist" vs natural philosophers. This may seem a minor point, but the nature of the Doctor of Philosophy changed from being a theoretical study of all things (eclectic and multi-disciplinary) examination to a more mechanical, skills based, and narrowly contrived journeyman training. This is not the Middle Age program that trained Newton. The vast majority of students today could muster in more broadly conceived classical education. While my point is accurate it does not change the major premise posited by Taylor.