eirias | stray thought about preparing scholars

stray thought about preparing scholars

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.

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There are a decent number of schools where the graduate students have unionized to some extent or another. (I, personally, find it very amusing when politically-liberal schools try to object to their students organizing.)

It isn't quite the same, as they still get stuck with ass-low salaries, but they can push for better treatment.

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I'm not convinced graduate school for scholarship is that different than, say, earning a JD. THis may only be true for the first years -- at least in the sciences and engineering fields, there is a lot or relevant coursework left, before one can reasonably begin research. Were I to go back, beyond any refreshers, I'd need a whole lot of exposure to new concepts (mathematical basis of CS practices, field theory, more advanced statistics, network theory, etc.) before I'd be ready to work on a thesis.

If I were to go mathematics, rather than CS, I'd need a huge number of classes to cover what is considered basic to a PhD level candidate.

For

eponis, while I don't think she strictly needs many of her subject courses, she certainly needs her language courses before she's ready for her thesis.

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The big break, as I see it, isn't that graduate students are professionals and should be treated as such (which is, btb, quite possibly true), but that the class structure and format at the graduate student level is not only completely unlike that of undergraduate education, but the variance from one school to another is also out of synchronization.

At UI, my undergraduate level classes were all of a instructor-student format. While some things were addressed by the class (solved together on the board, or whatever), there was always a divide that the instructor was in charge, and the students were there to learn. This remained true of both the large/lecture classes and the small/discussion classes I was in.

In the graduate level classes, the classes were almost all collective. While the instructor was considered an expert (and except for my compiler class, which no one grokked), even lectures were presented to equals, feedback, challenges, and critiques were encouraged, and there were no sacred cows. This was even more prominent in the upper level graduate classes I took[1], compared to the lower level ones.

As for

eponis's classes, there seems to be a huge difference in style between her masters (at Y___) and her PhD (at B_______) classes. There was a lot more mentoring/positive feedback in her masters. There is also a huge difference in program (Y and B also have very different focuses in their education -- Y was more research and academics straight out of the gate, whereas B is philological and requires a huge investment in that before comps).

Being prepared for graduate work at the first did not necessarily leave her in a position to correctly anticipate the nature of the latter.
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[1] Including the one I took my freshman year. Oops. The class had no prerequisites listed and I liked graph theory so, I took it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Full disclosure: I never went to grad school as it's an utter waste of time in my field (so, arguably, is a bachelor's), so I may be talking out of my ass.

It sounds sort of similar to those horrible classes at our beloved alma mater where the professor clearly had no interest in teaching a bunch of undergraduates at all. This was obviously because the professor wasn't being paid to teach, he was being paid to do research (or more accurately to secure grant money) so for the most part could give a flying fuck about teaching anyone other than their own grad students (if them). Since reviews were file 13ed (or at least not given any weight) they never taught. Of course, this overlooks that having unhappy undergrads undermines the department in a host of other ways, but it's the way it happened. It was the rare professor indeed who actually taught - why do you think the undergrads continually nominated the same person in each department for various teaching awards? That person was the only one who tried, so won by default.

So let's look at the mentor/mentee relationship. My understanding is that the mentor more or less had to agree to having a mentee or they wouldn't get one. Is that correct, or are professors 'urged' to have at least one mentee each year or does this vary by school? I think pretty clearly that if they are forced to have one, the same scenario holds.

To return to the original question though, we use that as our model because we always have for whatever reason, and it works well enough that nobody has sought to change it. After all, who cares if a certain percentage of the grad students in a given field fail to achieve a degree? It just reduces the competition for a finite amount of positions and grant money. And if the professor is a terrible mentor, so what? The school doesn't care too much, and if the professor happens to be tenured then they can't do a lot about it anyway.

The thing is, there's effectively no incentive for the structure to change- certainly, the people in charge(i.e. professors) have tons of economic incentives to keep the current dysfunctional system.

Professors appear to have a steady stream of highly skilled workers willing to put in long hours at subsistence wage, and should any of them dislike it...well, there are plenty more applicants willing to fill the slot. It's not even like there's an expectation of having to be Supermentor, it's more like an expectation of having indentured servants. Why would a professor want to encourage the treatment of grad students as young professionals? It'd just make them uppity and less willing to put up with the crap.

Just came across this entry now.

I found out recently about a particular incentive to change: the national security complex. The US government wishes more people with US citizenship would pursue graduate degrees in mathematics and the sciences. And they'd like for the underrepresented genders and ethnicities to be well-represented in that group.

I don't know how to change the funding stuff, but even just changing the name we call this endeavor would make a difference.

I think one reason that good students who grow up in the US and go to college in the US don't do this is that they hear "school" and assume that:

* they will have to pay for it (because it's called "school" and students have to pay to go to school -- they don't realize, until someone tells them, that usually graduate students are paid a stipend)
* grad school is mostly about taking more classes (because it's called "school" and taking courses is what you do in school)
* the only reasons to go to grad school are to get an academic career (very debatable) or to meet colleagues so you can drop out together and cofound a startup (because that's a prominent story for the math & CS people)

So if I were trying to get more people to pursue postgraduate research work, I wouldn't say "are you thinking of going to grad school" -- I would say something like "are you thinking of getting a paid research apprenticeship?"

Man, I wish that's how it worked. I often complain that universities treat PhD students like me as students-like-the-undergrads when it's convenient, and instructors-like-adjuncts when THAT is more convenient to the management structure. Cynically, I think that's the biggest advantage to the university system of treating students as, well, STUDENTS rather than apprentices or employees who provide valuable work in our own right: if you frame the benefit we get from our research as training, you don't really have to pay us for it.

(Here via

brainwane, and then I recognized you from MeFi...)

Edited 2020-06-25 17:25 (UTC)

* grad school is mostly about taking more classes (because it's called "school" and taking courses is what you do in school)

I really think that most future grad students (including me, when I was in that category) have no idea what grad school is really like. (I mean, we were told, but we had no practical idea of what it meant.) It's not anything like "more school," it's really, as you say, a research apprenticeship.

The thing is, 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.

In this sense I don't know that being a "young professional" is much like grad school at all. I've also been a young professional (transitioned out of academia after grad school) and it's much more structured than grad school; you've got deadlines and specific work that has to be completed for the customer by X time. This was actually one of the reasons I transitioned out of academia; I find that kind of environment a lot more conducive to doing work than the more free-form self-motivation of academia.

(Also, a separate tangential issue is whether the culture of the particular university and research group / advisor is supportive. I think the number one predictor of people I knew as to whether they were happy in grad school was whether they had a good advisor. And also, all my professors, including the good ones, would have been terrible bosses in an industry setting.)

I found out recently about a particular incentive to change: the national security complex. The US government wishes more people with US citizenship would pursue graduate degrees in mathematics and the sciences. And they'd like for the underrepresented genders and ethnicities to be well-represented in that group.

So IDK, 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). At least in my experience, it was more the applied/engineering fields where people were reluctant to go to grad school, and there I agree refiguring what it's called would help a lot.

Until I read your comment, I feel like I never put together how student-athletes and graduate student instructor/researchers are both treated in this contradictory way, and have common cause.

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.

*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.

Well hello there! I am amused and tickled that this ancient post brought you here, but welcome.

Cynically, I think that's the biggest advantage to the university system of treating students as, well, STUDENTS rather than apprentices or employees who provide valuable work in our own right: if you frame the benefit we get from our research as training, you don't really have to pay us for it.

Yup. I might not stand behind every entry in this journal (which is now old enough to vote) but I pretty much do still think the structure of grad school is perverse.

Ohhhh, wow. Yes.

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.

You know, a conversation like that with my undergrad advisor is how my scientific career started. He called me into his office and said, you are good at this! Did you know you can do it for a living? Only then did he bring up the need for a PhD.

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