1. If the goal is an increased sense of a young scientist as a professional, I suspect graduate student unions are actually exactly the wrong model. Which is not to say I oppose them -- given the existing power structure, they have an important role to play in preventing abuses. But I'm wondering about a model where young scholars perceive enough control over their career arcs that unions are superfluous. I'm looking for a different power structure, not just a tool to use against the existing one.
2. Graduate school in the sciences is definitely, without question, nothing like earning a JD or MD. For both of the latter degrees, there's an agreed-upon body of information that you should have mastered by the time you graduate, and how well you did this can be measured by a standardized exam. For the typical Ph.D. program, with the possible exception of clinical psych, which has boards, there are no such standards, certainly not across schools but often not even within a department. As you note, Ph.D. students are constructing knowledge, not merely mastering it; what they ought to know depends entirely on what they wish to build.
3. Your experience of grad classes was a lot like mine, it seems. My point is that I am not sure that this dynamic is a good fit for a credit hour system. The work is generally not assigned meaningful grades; there is no useful way to tell whether the professor has taught anything or the student has learned anything. And when you call academics' attention to this odd fact, they invariably think you have missed the point. I don't think I have; I think the point is that "weekly meeting discussing current problems with superiors and colleagues" is a fine description of a lot of educational work experiences that aren't school.
4. I should emphasize, I am not at all sure how this setup would work in the humanities, since they operate so differently. I suspect that the changes in financing would mean fewer openings for humanists-in-training; frankly, I'd rather see that selection happen before people turn forty, so I'm not sure it's the worst thing in the world.
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2. Graduate school in the sciences is definitely, without question, nothing like earning a JD or MD. For both of the latter degrees, there's an agreed-upon body of information that you should have mastered by the time you graduate, and how well you did this can be measured by a standardized exam. For the typical Ph.D. program, with the possible exception of clinical psych, which has boards, there are no such standards, certainly not across schools but often not even within a department. As you note, Ph.D. students are constructing knowledge, not merely mastering it; what they ought to know depends entirely on what they wish to build.
3. Your experience of grad classes was a lot like mine, it seems. My point is that I am not sure that this dynamic is a good fit for a credit hour system. The work is generally not assigned meaningful grades; there is no useful way to tell whether the professor has taught anything or the student has learned anything. And when you call academics' attention to this odd fact, they invariably think you have missed the point. I don't think I have; I think the point is that "weekly meeting discussing current problems with superiors and colleagues" is a fine description of a lot of educational work experiences that aren't school.
4. I should emphasize, I am not at all sure how this setup would work in the humanities, since they operate so differently. I suspect that the changes in financing would mean fewer openings for humanists-in-training; frankly, I'd rather see that selection happen before people turn forty, so I'm not sure it's the worst thing in the world.