Tag Archives: graduate school

American Sociological Association committee on doctoral program rankings

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While the ranking of undergraduate programs is contentious (read about Malcolm Gladwell’s latest thoughts on the subject here), the rankings of doctoral programs can also draw attention. In February, a five-person American Sociological Association (ASA) committee released a report about the 2010 National Research Council (NRC) rankings of doctoral sociological programs (see a summary here).

The ASA committee summarized their concerns about the NRC rankings:

Based on our work, we recommend that the ASA Council issue a resolution criticizing the 2010 NRC rankings for containing both
operationalization and implementation problems; discouraging faculty, students, and university administrators from using the core 2010 NRC rankings to evaluate sociology programs;
encouraging them to be suspicious of the raw data accompanying the 2010 NRC report; and indicating that alternative rankings, such as those based on surveys of departments’ reputations, have their own sets of biases.

The explanation of these issues is an interesting methodological analysis. Indeed, this document suggests a lot of these rankings have had issues, starting with the 1987 US News & World Report rankings which were primarily based on reputational rankings.

So what did the committee conclude should be done? Here are their final thoughts:

At this time, the committee believes that ASA should encourage prospective students, faculty, university administrators or others evaluating a given program to avoid blind reliance on
rankings that claim explicitly or implicitly to list departments from best to worst. The heterogeneity of the discipline suggests that evaluators should first determine what characteristics they value in a program and then employ available sources of information to assess the program’s performance. In addition, the ASA should help facilitate, within available means, the dissemination of such information.

So the final recommendation is to be skeptical about these rankings. This seems to be a fairly common approach for those who find issues with rankings of schools or programs.

How might we get past this kind of conclusion? If the ranking process were done by just sociologists, could we decide on even a fuzzy rank order of graduate programs that most could agree upon?

How to improve the graduate student-faculty adviser relationship

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An English professor has discovered that there are a lot of graduate students (and former graduate students) who are upset with what they perceive to be lack of information given to them by their graduate advisers. The professor suggests how this relationship between graduate student and adviser could be improved:

That failure rests absolutely on us. We’re the teachers, and the initiative is ours. The communication gap between graduate teachers and graduate students is an intramural version of the crisis facing academe writ large: Professors are only lately waking up to the need to take their assigned part in the continuing and necessary discussion of the role of the university in society today.

We need likewise to rethink our role in the education of our graduate students. Professional-development seminars, which I discussed last month, help stake out common understanding between professors and graduate students, but communication only starts there. Advisers need to advance it. We shouldn’t wait for students to ask what’s out there careerwise. It’s part of our job to tell them. To mend the gap, we must mind the gap—or else corrosive anger will widen it…

I’m not sure I’d let the teachers off the hook so easily, but we should pay attention to the reader’s larger point, namely: Graduate students, as well as their professors, have responsibility for the choices they make.

School is a place where teachers tell students what to do. At the same time, school is supposed to prepare students to make choices for themselves. In between those two realities lie a lot of teaching and learning—and professional development. Both professors and students have to adapt to the rapidly changing conditions before us: We both must learn how to work together so that our students can leave us with every possible advantage. We all need to keep our eyes open.

On the whole, it sounds like there simply needs to be more conversation within graduate schools about the possibilities and pitfalls that graduate students and practitioners of particular disciplines will face in a changing world. The experience a faculty member might have had 20 years ago may not repeat itself but at the same time, the graduate student shouldn’t take that past experience as a factual story about how things always work.

A missing part of this conversation seems to be the interests of the graduate department and the school/university at large. Graduate departments generally want to produce students who go on to good jobs at Research 1 institutions. These departments are rated on this productivity, particularly by their peers at other Research 1 institutions. Would a department who puts a majority of PhDs in private industry when the norm for the field is Research 1 jobs be punished or be looked down upon? What incentives could be put into place so that departments would promote a broader range of options for students with advanced degrees?

Something might be said here as well for students building close relationships with several faculty. Advisers are important, particularly for the thesis and dissertation stages. But it is helpful to have other perspectives as well, something that is not possible if a student is tied to only one faculty member.

Former US Rep, Rhodes Scholar, says Rhodes Scholar applicants have difficulty addressing the big issues

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One of the debates surrounding college education in the United States is about its purpose: should it provide more job training (specialized, professional programs) or a broader approach (liberal arts, interdisciplinary)? Heather Wilson, a former US Representative and Rhodes Scholar, argues that current Rhodes Scholar applicants (and college students in general) would benefit from a broader approach:

I detect no lack of seriousness or ambition in these students. They believe they are exceptionally well-educated. They have jumped expertly through every hoop put in front of them to be the top of their classes in our country’s best universities, and they have been lavishly praised for doing so. They seem so surprised when asked simple direct questions that they have never considered.

We are blessed to live in a country that values education. Many of our young people spend four years getting very expensive college degrees. But our universities fail them and the nation if they continue to graduate students with expertise in biochemistry, mathematics or history without teaching them to think about what problems are important and why.

Wilson suggests that ability or smarts are not the issue. Rather, it is a matter of perspective: why does a college student desire to become a world-class doctor or scholar? Can these students help address the questions that humanity has raised for millenniums?

This sounds like someone making a good case for the liberal arts. Instead of specializing at the undergraduate level (which comes in graduate programs anyway), students are encouraged to take classes in a number of subjects they may not otherwise encounter. Throughout this broader curriculum, students learn about the varied approaches for answering these big questions and how different disciplines would propose solving the big issues.