What Will Doctoral Education Look Like in 2025?

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ADVICE

What Will Doctoral Education

Look Like in 2025?
Predictions and hopes for the future of Ph.D. training

By Leonard Cassuto JANUARY 03, 2016

W
hen I imagine the future of
graduate school, I envision
large cohorts of students
finishing their Ph.D.s in four
or five years. Most would choose to teach.
Dan Stiles for The Chronicle
They would decide what part of the
country they preferred to live in and would
field multiple offers from colleges and universities there. Then they would go
off and live happily ever after as professors.

Oh, wait a minute. I miscalibrated the settings on my crystal ball. Thats not the
future. Its the past. And only a brief past instant at that. The Elysium I just
described lasted for about one generation, funded by the Cold War and
stocked by huge numbers of students enticed to college by the GI Bill and new
federal student-loan programs. It ended in the 1970s.

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Weve been emptying the stores ever since, waiting and hoping to recover that
lost time of plenty. But the scales have fallen from our eyes in recent years, so
its a good time to think about what the future might really hold for graduate
school.

The problem is that Im a lousy futurist. As a freshman, I remember

proclaiming more than once that I would never, ever go to graduate school. No
one was trying to persuade me to go, understand, but I was resisting anyway. I
understood my feelings as ambivalence only later in college, after I read Freud.

But you dont need to be a futurist to prognosticate about graduate school. Its
actually better to be a geologist because the changes in graduate school are
typically measured in geological time.

Higher education has always changed slowly, and thats not a bad thing. We
shouldnt expect the university to be blown about by fads. But graduate school
changes slowly even by academic standards.

Today graduate school is gripped in a vise. One jaw of that vise is the ever-
tightening academic job market, and the other jaw is the increasing
corporatization of the academy. Their squeeze is hardly new. Its built up over
the years so that the institution can hardly breathe.

Robert C. Holub, a professor of German at Ohio State University, summed up

these pressures in a talk at a recent conference at Penn State on graduate
study. He cited public disinvestment in higher education and a "distorted"
view of its costs. Public research universities, he said, are now called upon to
be "economic engines for the state," generating economic development (in
terms of patents and other marketable discoveries) while providing "cheap
education for the work force."

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Holub also noted a move to a "different sort of leadership" in higher education.

The faculty no longer sets the values of the institution. Instead, university
leaders now see themselves as agents for the board of trustees, and at public
institutions, the legislature. The naming of the businessman Bruce Harreld as
president of the University of Iowa is good recent example of that shift.

In any calculation based on the bottom line, graduate school will fare poorly. It
is, after all, an investment in the future not just of the academic profession,
but of the society to which academe contributes. Moreover, education is hard
to value. Figuring out what part someones education played in her success is
like trying to unbake a cake.

Geologists try to predict catastrophes like earthquakes. The seismic pressure

on graduate school these days might lead one to wonder whether its in danger
of being crushed.

It seems likely to be compressed, at least, in the decade to come. Ive asked a

lot of people in recent weeks about what the future will hold for graduate
school. Almost all of them said it will be smaller. If were speaking of doctoral
education, thats a hard prediction to argue with.

Masters degrees are another story. Graduate schools everywhere are trying to
increase the size of their masters programs, and theres a concerted push to
develop professional masters degrees that graduates can take straight to the
workplace.

The number of Ph.D. students, on the other hand, is already going down in the
arts and sciences. But there is more than one way to grow smaller. Heres what
I hope: that doctoral programs learn to shrink gracefully.

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I
n the humanities, that means well have to question how we deliver
doctoral education. We need to "aerate" our assumptions about what we
teach and how we teach it, said Sidonie Smith, a professor of English at
the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Speaking at the same Penn
State conference, Smith called on humanists to collaborate more, to move
from the intransitive "think" to the transitive "think with." Digital technology
should make such work easier its continuing importance is a simple
prediction.

Scientists are already used to collaboration, but theyll have to question the
lab-centered, grant-driven model that finances their work. Labs need money to
run, so scientists publish papers in order to get grants, which they use to
finance research that will lead to further publications and help them get more
grants and so on.

Doctoral students provide the labor to turn that giant wheel, but their dim
employment prospects both inside and outside of academe have already
led many labs to admit fewer graduate students and to rely more and more on
postdoctoral labor. Thats the scientific equivalent of adjunctification, and its
just as casual and cruel to scientists who hope for a faculty career. Meanwhile,
grant funding is getting tighter and tighter, and the system is stressed like an
old tree in a hurricane.

All of which leads to another hope of mine for the next decade: that doctoral
programs in the sciences replace more research grants with training grants
(which emphasize teaching) as they redesign their system.

But teaching has its own problems. You dont need a crystal ball to predict that
baby-boom faculty members will continue their slow march toward retirement
during the next decade. But no one (including me) is expecting a wave of new
tenure-track openings. The academic job market will remain straitened, but it

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wont face the kind of crisis that might trigger systemic change. Perhaps that
change will happen when the retirements are complete, in about 2035 or we
might just continue to decline.

One current development that will surely expand in coming years is the
continuing rise of the full-time, non-tenure-track faculty member. The
numbers are clear: Tenured and tenure-track faculty have already been
marginalized by the growth of this new category. What shall we do about it?
The answer: something. Because right now we arent doing much at all.

Michael Brub and Jennifer Ruth argue in their new book, The Humanities,
Higher Education, & Academic Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), that we
must create a second, teaching-oriented tenure track. Should we? My hope for
the next decade is that we start that conversation. Because we need to have it,
both publicly and within departments.

Tenured or not, more of us now teach online. Colleges rely more and more on
distance learning, and much of it is prefabricated. The historian John Larson,
of Purdue University, worries that such courses are incompatible with
graduate training. "We teach graduate students to generate original content,"
he told me, but they are asked to teach multiple online courses in all different
areas. To do that, he said, "You need off-the-shelf materials."

"You dont need to write a dissertation" to teach prefabricated courses, says

Larson. "If you study for six years to get a Ph.D. and your job is a continuation
of graduate-school TA work, that does not produce happiness. And if your
teachers are discontented, that wont recruit the next generation."

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A lack of coherence in teaching throughout the university is nothing new. Even

for an incompetent futurist like me, its a safe bet that the incoherence will
persist. But still I hope for more. Teaching, after all, is part of the graduate-
school mission. In the humanities, observes Larson, its "our way of delivering
scholarship."

I talk with a lot of graduate students these days, and most of them would
appreciate more focus on pedagogy in their training. They want it integrated
into the curriculum, not just as an add-on. Graduate students also want their
education to acknowledge more career paths. A graduate student at a state
university recently told me that she wished her teachers wouldnt make these
alternatives "shameful to contemplate."

S
uch concerns point toward the possibility of a more flexible
dissertation requirement, which can bend to suit different student
needs. The students want it. Their teachers arent so sure. So, will
there be a change in the dissertation in the next decade?

(Pause. Writer clears throat, looks out window.) I cant predict that.

Do I hope for it? Yes, cautiously. Graduate schools move slowly, but theyre
beginning to stir. Larson points out that foundations and grant agencies are
encouraging such changes. A case in point is the recent announcement of the
National Endowment for the Humanities "Next Generation" grants to
reconsider graduate education and "promote greater integration of the
humanities in the public sphere." Such rewards nourish my cautious hope.

But we have a long way to go. For one thing, graduate programs (and all of
higher education, for that matter) have a bad habit of adding features but
never letting go of any. We need to say "at the expense of" more often than we
do.

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Strong graduate-school leadership is another hope. The budget of a graduate

dean is typically among the most overstretched in the university. If we want
graduate schools to meet the future and not get overwhelmed by an
earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, or some other geological disaster, we need to
empower their deans in tangible ways.

Heres the greatest cause for hope: The conversations about changing graduate
school are finally happening. The problems Ive described here have been with
us for a long while, but for years we werent ready to face them. Yes, things
have gotten worse especially since the recession of 2008 but we havent
collapsed yet. Lets fix our house before it falls over.

Leonard Cassuto, a professor of English at Fordham University, writes "The

Graduate Adviser" column for The Chronicle. His new book is The Graduate
School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It, published by Harvard
University Press. He welcomes comments, suggestions, and stories at
lcassuto@erols.com. Twitter handle: @LCassuto.

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This article is part of:

Careers in Academe

Copyright 2016 The Chronicle of Higher Education

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