stray thought about preparing scholars

[eirias]

I know a fair number of people who found graduate school, shall we say, not that satisfying. This may not surprise you if you've ever known any graduate students, but it probably should. Grad programs filter their entry pool pretty heavily on traits like academic achievement and interest; among the set that makes it in, you'd think hating school should be a fairly rare occurrence. What's going on here?

The canonical answer is that the unhappy ones are doing something wrong. The culture of higher education places the burden for success squarely on students, especially at the graduate level: no one can do the work of learning, or of career planning, for you. And there's some truth to that, for sure. However: graduate stipends are small, compared to the salaries of entry-level jobs that students would likely qualify for, and the justification is that tuition is part of compensation. When mentorship is weak or lacking, when professors' failure to read and comment on submitted work renders its completion meaningless, when standards for success are so ill-formed that decisions seem arbitrary -- those things, in a sense, constitute a reduction in pay.

So I started wondering the other day: why do we treat graduate school as school in the first place? Instead of pretending that learning to be a scholar is anything like learning to be a lawyer or a surgeon, why not move to a model more like other jobs -- where people are paid entry-level salaries for a few years while they learn enough to be hired later as independent workers (aka postdocs, instructors) and managers (professors)? I am not sure that it would have to cost more; compensation that currently goes back into the Graduate School could go instead toward salary for TAs and RAs, which, given professors' frank acknowledgement that graduate coursework is a waste of time, seems entirely appropriate to me.

My hunch is that this model would take some pressure off the mentor-mentee relationship, which is often fraught with expectations that go unmet. Rather than trying to turn everyone into Supermentor, it seems more sensible to adopt a structure that acknowledges reality -- your professor is just another boss -- and encourages scientists to take responsibility for their careers by paying them and treating them as young professionals instead of as students.

Comments

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I think it's in what you say: that we treat it like it's school, but really it isn't. I mean, some of it is, but it's also all this doing-things-independently stuff that you may not have really had to do through school -- less of jumping through hoops, more of identifying them youself. And it's research, which isn't like classes. And it's relationships. And it's your life, with all of these identity issues around profession and family that undergrad doesn't stir up for most people. So filtering on people who are good at school may be at best orthogonal to filtering on people who are good at The Grad School Experience (at best, because people who were great at doing what they were told & jumping through hoops may flounder utterly in the less-structured grad school environment). But still, everyone calls it school (it's in the name!)>

I think the bad-mentor-as-reduction-in-pay idea is interesting.

That said...I'm not sure "your professor is just a boss" helps things. I mean, maybe the mentor thing comes with personal entanglement that the boss thing doesn't, but people who aren't good mentors will not suddenly be good managers. And people who work for bad managers are generally miserable, regardless of sector. I don't think the need for management, hence managerial ability, necessarily decreases.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Ohhhh, I'm not expecting bad mentors to suddenly become good managers -- I think that's unrealistic in the extreme, especially when there's really no way to bring incentives to bear. That's why I think reframing the relationship might be helpful: when your expectations and reality don't meet, if you can't shape reality, you need to work on the expectations.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I didn't think you were expecting that, when it's phrased that way, because clearly that's ludicrous ;). But it looks to me like you are expecting that implicitly, both because you refer to professors as managers in your analogy, and because someone is still going to have to be doing the managing in your system and it's not clear to me who else that might be. (Your hypothetical entry-level grad-not-students, whatever we call them, still need to be managed, the same way entry-level workers in any other industry need to be managed.) Perhaps I am missing something in your system, but it looks as if it still requires the same minimum level of managing, and does not create any more likelihood it will be there.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

The current system takes as given that young scholars ought to be able to get by with very little guidance. I think that would be a principled stand to take, were they not students -- I think that being a student implies a certain right to mentorship and support that employees do not have. If you want to give me on-paper tuition dollars and call that compensation, I'd better be getting some work out of you, is what I'm saying.

I'm not arguing that my system would lead to better management. (Terrible management is still management; Dilbert's boss is a manager, even if he's lousy.) I'm merely wondering what would happen if we dropped the pretense of close mentoring and replaced it with salary befitting someone with a bachelor's degree. It might not make science trainees any happier -- though I do think it could be salutary for some to hear explicitly, "Nobody cares whether you make it, so go buy some self-help books" -- but it might remediate the sense of unfairness that permeates the soured mentor relationship. It would at least make it truer that failure is the fault of the trainee -- which is something academics will tend to believe, whether or not it is true.