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

Re: incentives and names

[brainwane]

Thanks for your reply!

I think most of my cohort in college (physics, math) either applied to grad school or ended up doing something completely unrelated to science (business school, law school).

I'm curious - how many of your cohort were first-generation college students? My intuition is that it's harder for first-generation folks to know the opportunities in grad school and to decide to go there instead of industry. But also this is all anecdata anyway!

because the only thing most people have been doing up to this point has been school, we expect grad school to be like that, with (a) well-defined problems that have well-defined answers, and (b) continuous oversight and metrics that define progress (e.g., problem sets and exams). *pause for anyone who has actually been to grad school to laugh hysterically* And because we've been trained to do well in a system which has (a) and (b), and not trained at all in a system which lacks either, it's hard to transition.

I tried to make a related point at a conference in February where I was surrounded by grad students, postdocs, and professors, and I GOT SUCH PUSHBACK. Thank youuuuuu.

Re: incentives and names

[cahn]

*nods* Yeah, almost none of us were first-generation college students that I can think of. It was also a university-cultural thing; I went to the kind of place where, we used to joke, it cut off a lot of career paths because the only acceptable careers were law, medicine, business, consulting, or academia. It was a joke, but there was a lot of truth to it. A lot of us ended up in industry after a while, but I can't think of anyone who went directly unless it was on the business side. (And still anecdata, as you say!)

I tried to make a related point at a conference in February where I was surrounded by grad students, postdocs, and professors, and I GOT SUCH PUSHBACK.

WHAT?! I mean, I can kind of understand getting pushback from professors, but grad students???? You know, maybe they're too much in the middle of it? I don't think I would have been able to articulate this in grad school myself, it was just more of this confused feeling of "I don't understand why I'm not as good at school as I used to be!" It wasn't until I was out of that environment and had something to compare it to, I think, that I could see how different it really was.

Re: incentives and names

[eirias]

I definitely agree that getting out and having a point of comparison help to put the PhD experience into context. Thinking about where I was professionally when I wrote this, I was in my first grown-up job, working for an MD, and it was becoming super apparent that his training was incredibly different from mine. I learned more about that in years to come, when I spent a bit of time doing data work for the academic support staff at our med school. Gosh, I realized, this degree program seems less independent and self-driven than an American BA program! In some ways it is more like a very hardcore high school!

I do still think it’s surprising for PhD students to have *no* insight into the structurelessness of their world, though. I remember that it was frustrating for me even when I was in it.