ARTICLE pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
Reactions to Changing Times: Trends and Tensions in U.S. Chemistry Graduate Education Heidi G. Loshbaugh,* Sandra L. Laursen, and Heather Thiry Ethnography and Evaluation Research, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309, United States ABSTRACT: Calls for reform in graduate education have emerged from professional societies, educational research, and foundations, with particular concern for how graduate students are prepared for their future professional environments. This qualitative research study explores current issues in Ph.D. chemistry education, including how U.S. chemistry departments have responded to calls for change in graduate students’ professional preparation. The study is based on document analysis and openended interviews with 22 chemistry faculty and administrators at 14 highly ranked chemistry departments. Many of these departments were beginning to implement changes in response to multiple and competing forces. Pressures on faculty to generate research funding had reportedly reduced time for one-on-one mentoring, but many departments were offering more student support outside research groups. Departments that had made targeted efforts to diversify their faculty and student body reaped rewards in recruiting and collegiality. Younger students and faculty were driving changes in departmental practices and cultures intended to address work-life balance. While some changes were widespread and others more scattered, many of the changes appear to be well aligned with recommended practices. Yet most departments were undertaking these reforms without holistic strategies, long-range plans, or methods for assessing the results of their changes. KEYWORDS: Graduate Education/Research, Professional Development, Student/Career Counseling
’ OVERVIEW OF U.S. GRADUATE EDUCATION IN CHEMISTRY For a century, American doctoral science programs were unrivaled in quality. The future, however, will challenge U.S. graduate education to remain competitive. In anticipating these challenges, national calls for change have emerged from commissions, professional societies, universities, disciplinary bodies, and federal reports.1 7 Needs grow for a highly trained scientific workforce, but academic and nonacademic jobs require skills and expertise that recent doctorates say they lack: for academics, teaching, and grant writing, and more generally, interdisciplinary work, management, and leadership.8 12 For over a decade, these workforce gaps have been echoed in student reports. Many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduate students report that their graduate preparation was inadequate for later teaching, teamwork, leadership, and management roles in and out of academe.13,14 Such failures to professionally prepare doctoral students may disproportionately affect women and minorities.15 20 Additionally, much evidence indicates that young faculty—women, most notably—reject careers in academic science in particular based not on disinterest but on perceptions of difficulties in balancing family life against a tenure-track faculty job.14,21 23 While general to doctoral education, many of these concerns are well documented in chemistry, by researchers outside the discipline9,17,24 26 and within it.27,28 As early as 1947, the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Committee on Professional Training (CPT) acknowledged that Ph.D. programs “could do a better job” of preparing graduates for industry careers.28 In 1998, a survey of nearly 2400 Ph.D. chemists revealed that industrial chemists were less satisfied with their graduate programs than academic chemists.28 Both groups Copyright r 2011 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
gave their programs relatively low marks on career advising and professional development, including networking and teamwork. Distinctive among STEM fields, some two-thirds of chemistry Ph.D.s work outside academe.3 Thus, we might expect chemistry departments to have heightened awareness of the full range of desirable professional attributes for graduates, perhaps explaining chemistry’s inclusion in a number of recent national initiatives to revise doctoral education.19,29 31 Such initiatives have identified “beneficial practices” and strategies for implementation of improvements to curriculum, advising, interdisciplinary training, internships, career preparation, outreach, and recruitment and retention of more diverse students. While they may agree on the importance of a broad and versatile doctoral education, chemists are no more likely than others to agree on how to achieve it. In essays resulting from the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate,3 several distinguished chemists similarly diagnosed what is needed from contemporary chemistry Ph.D. education—portable skills, breadth of knowledge, and the ability to confront challenging, interdisciplinary problems—but prescribe different cures. Their differences encompass both content and structures of graduate education. Kwiram32 proposed deep reorganization of content and duration of doctoral education, but delivered through largely untouched curricular structures. Breslow33 saw potential in conscientious execution of traditional program elements. And Stacy10 argued for new forms of doctoral education to better recruit new talent and provide leadership in academe, industry, and at chemistry’s interfaces with other disciplines.
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Clearly, questions about how chemistry Ph.D. students receive workforce preparation are critical to the discipline’s future. Insight is needed into what influences each student’s career decisions and how these individual decisions collectively yield a distribution of scientific talent across multiple work sectors. Our study investigates career preparation practices in chemistry programs, exploring how Ph.D. students learn about their profession, their fit within it, and how those understandings shape their career selection. In addition to gathering personal perspectives from students and faculty, we have sought departmental perspectives to understand the broader context of Ph.D. students’ education and career preparation. Through interviews with chemistry department chairs and graduate program leaders, we have explored such research questions as: • What issues do departments identify as important for the future of their graduate programs? • To what extent do these issues align with or respond to issues identified in recent research and national initiatives on graduate education? • What departmental or institutional structures and common faculty practices support graduate students’ career selection and preparation, and what additional unmet needs are reported? In this article, we discuss the range of chemistry departments’ responses to the documented challenges of preparing Ph.D. chemists for their future professions. In exploring whether and how chemistry departments responded to calls for change, we uncovered other forces driving changes in graduate education and chemistry departments’ priorities.
sites were typical of well-regarded graduate education programs and were taken as a group to reflect both patterns and variations in the disciplinary state of the art. Some were participants in several of the studies cited in our literature review, indicative of forward-leaning practices in graduate education, while others were traditional in approach. Indeed, even some departments that appeared to be innovative based on written and online materials appeared less so when actual practices were described in interviews. Thus, while our research questions necessitated a search for some educationally progressive departments, we see no systematic bias toward reform in the sample ultimately obtained. Qualitative data come from participant responses to questions on a semistructured interview protocol. In 2008, three researchers conducted 22 telephone interviews, asking participants to describe departmental strengths, weaknesses, and challenges; graduate student support; and typical activities, including seminars, examinations, mentoring, and processes for research group selection. The subjects’ professional and personal training and experience informed their responses; researchers had opportunities to ask follow-up questions on issues with particular bearing on this research study. The digitally recorded interviews were 30 55 min long and each was transcribed to provide an accurate record for textual analysis. Qualitative research, particularly on topics where little empirical research exists, is inherently exploratory and descriptive. In contrast, quantitative data, such as from a survey, can illuminate a subject based on a set of forced choices, essentially answering the question “What?” Although invaluable for gathering data from a large sample and thereby revealing major trends in known areas of concern, quantitative methods can be limited in their ability to uncover detail, provide perspective, or reveal new issues. In contrast, through qualitative ethnographic methods, we can gain deeper and more nuanced understanding of a subject by giving respondents the opportunity to answer questions such as “Why?” and “How?” Fourteen departments is a fairly large number for a qualitative sample. The subsamples of one to three respondents per campus are modest in size but, because their departments selected them, informants were assumed to be trusted to provide knowledgeable and balanced departmental perspectives. Interviewees provided rich and detailed descriptions based on their professional and disciplinary expertise. However, the findings should not be generalized to other populations without further investigation, such as surveys with large samples that allow for statistical testing. As part of data analysis, qualitative researchers test emergent findings for plausibility, continually reviewing data to critique findings for validity.38 Such data verification can occur through cross-checking between transcripts of different interviews; through inter-rater reliability checks between team members to question, challenge, and confirm findings; and by sending analytical findings to interview participants and field experts to seek their feedback on how “real” the findings seem. This study employed all three methods of validity checking. Qualitative researchers can enhance the generalizability of their findings through comparison with other studies,39 such as the degree to which the findings match or “fit” other similar situations,40 or the extent to which particular study components, such as units of analysis or constructs, may be used as a basis for comparison with other studies.41 Here, key themes emerged from the transcript analysis, both within and across institutions. In spring 2009, we sent a research brief reporting emergent
’ METHODS Here we report on the “mapping” portion of a larger study of chemistry Ph.D. education. Mapping is an inductive qualitative research method used to gather data about a subject in context and uses parallel data gathering and data analysis. Initial data provide an increasingly precise understanding of the subject and allow researchers to refine later investigation. To understand how U.S. chemistry graduate departments are engaging with reform, we first conducted a thorough literature review, studied Web sites, and sought advice from over a dozen chemists and other experts in graduate education reform. We identified departmental characteristics indicating responsiveness to reform: opportunities for preparation for teaching, interdisciplinary research, broad mentoring, industry seminars and internships, graduate student support groups and resources, and training in communications, leadership, and management skills. We explored institutions with highly regarded doctoral chemistry programs, as assessed by quantitative markers including research grants, national ranking,34 size of faculty,35 and the numbers and demographics of graduates per year.36 We invited 22 departments to participate; 14 accepted and designated one or more representatives, including department heads, graduate program directors, and experienced faculty members, to speak with us. The study sites were selective graduate chemistry programs. Four institutions were private; the remainder public. All were classified as “Research Universities/Very High Research Activity”.37 They were geographically distributed and varied in the size and composition of student body and faculty, most of whom had graduated from competitive research programs and were successful academics, having been hired and tenured in top-40 research institutions. As such, these 709
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findings to interview subjects to compare identified themes against their experiences. Feedback from participants, expert informants, and other chemistry colleagues indicated that our findings resonated with their own observations. Our data also reflected themes seen in other sources including foundation reports, prior research on graduate school settings, and studies done by the ACS CPT.
For example, in about 50% of departments, cumulative exams— “those little monthly tests”— had been abandoned as markers for student progress, often based on reported student dissatisfaction. Chemistry departments were also implementing new programs to meet student interests, such as courses to develop professional, leadership, and management skills. One respondent described graduate students’ career savvy, noting that “millennial” students42 45—those born as early as 1978 and as late as 2002—demonstrate
’ FINDINGS Change is clearly underway. Analysis of the mapping data reveals a range of responses to calls for reform. Each department had implemented some changes, none holistically. All departments were grappling with attracting and retaining more diverse students, and a few had done so quite successfully. All departments were engaged, with varying enthusiasm, in interdisciplinary research. No department was immune to new expectations and life-style practices of younger generations; some departments were energized by the changes brought by younger students and faculty. Training for the classroom, increased mentoring, communication skills, proposal writing, industrial careers, and ethical practice were among department-based efforts to better meet graduate students’ needs. Graduating independent, analytical thinkers with transferable skills was a chief goal.
[A] desire and willingness to participate in [professional development].... The whole idea of being the lone scientist is really not even in their consciousness, in the same way that it may have been previous[ly]. [Millennials are] very social, and, as they’re going through [graduate school], they are thinking about [skills they will need], and their parents are talking to them, too.... [Our institution is] giving opportunities to students so they are able to develop these skill sets, because there’s definitely a need and a desire. Younger chemists had also driven changes in how departments addressed work-life balance. Their concerns included time on the job, shared parental responsibilities, the needs of dual-career couples and parents, and the pace of professorial lives. One department had visibly shifted toward a more seamless blend of personal life and work life:
Interdisciplinary Research Activities
Participants reported that interdisciplinarity had developed deep roots in their departments, and their comments reflected a range of faculty views about this change. Some respondents described new research interests with faculty and graduate students from different fields; one called interdisciplinary work “the name of the game”. Another faculty member saw crossing of disciplinary boundaries as beneficial for enrollment: “In terms of our graduate education, this has provided a lot of opportunities for students... and has turned out to be a pretty good recruiting tool.” However, at other institutions, chemistry faculty dismissed interdisciplinarity as “the latest flash in the pan”. Respondents described new intellectual and collegial relationships being forged across disciplinary boundaries, yet these benefits incurred a cost: the breakdown of linkages among colleagues across the classical chemistry divisions.
We’ve got faculty recruiting events where everybody brings their kids; there’s 13 or 14 children below the age of 3 or 4 in the department right now (laughs).... We have a couple of couples in the department too, so you’ve got babies being passed around the hallway. As we elaborate below, respondents suggested that these family friendly practices benefited faculty and provided graduate students greater exposure to how professionals can manage complex contemporary lives. Varying Experiences with Diversity
All respondents discussed the need for greater diversity in U.S. science programs and described a range of approaches to changing departmental demographics, although with little consensus. Some institutions actively sought more diverse faculty and student populations and implemented support to enhance recruitment, including targeted scholarships, mentoring, and graduate student groups. Others acknowledged that diversity was low in their department but asserted that their minority enrollment was similar to that of peers:
[Our] buildings are often organized by equipment rather than by department.... If I’m going to run into somebody in the coffee room, it’s unlikely to be a chemist. If we’re going to talk about something, we’ve got to find a way to be able to understand each other’s area, so that tends to lead to interdisciplinary collaboration.... The trade-off [is] there are only 24 hours in a day, and so, because I see those people more, it means I see my p-chem [physical chemistry] and inorganic colleagues less. So, [interdisciplinarity] does have a fraying effect on the department if you’re not really vigilant to try to maintain relationships.
Minority applicants—we do a lot to try and get them to come here, do a lot of summer programs so that they can come here and realize that this actually is a place where they might both like it and see that they could succeed. I don’t know what our percentage is right now, but it’s not terrific. We’re competitive with the numbers that are out there.
Generational Differences Drive Change
Representation of female students ranged from about 10% to about 50%. Most chemistry departments described the women in their programs as strong graduate students, conducting good research and driving beneficial changes across the program. One graduate chair noted, “My best students have all been captive girlfriends or wives, very talented women who could have gone anywhere in the country but had a husband or boyfriend in our
Movement into cross-disciplinary work was not the only change underway. Interview participants described younger chemists as change agents, noting that students and faculty in their 20s and 30s hold different work-life expectations than older researchers. This had led to new academic, workplace, and social practices in departments. Rather than enduring trial by fire, students spoke up about what they like—and what they do not. 710
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city [with a job] that was too good [for the couple] to abandon” for a more competitive graduate program elsewhere. Some departments provided targeted resources for support groups and travel funds for female graduate students; others had noticed that women routinely comprised the leadership team of the allgraduate student group. Chemistry programs where the demographics surpassed typical proportions of underrepresented groups had discovered beneficial returns on their diversification efforts. When a department had deliberately created conditions to develop a critical mass from a particular demographic group, its recruitment and retention concerns receded. “We hear, in terms of recruiting students and keeping the population of students that we get, [that] looking as diverse as possible totally pays off”, said one chair. One program had undertaken a deliberate departmental change process to address issues for women faculty, as part of a larger institutional initiative. They discovered that implementing new policies to address faculty needs also improved graduate student satisfaction and benefited recruiting. An administrator noted, “We have a very liberal policy on parenting leave. It doesn’t matter which spouse; everybody gets a term off. I literally have a steady state of about two faculty per semester who are off tending children.” This respondent further observed that seeing “whole lives” accommodated in departmental practice was beneficial. There’s no “question in my mind that the physical, visible, honored, full life of people affects the perception of the graduate program.... It’s more than a trickle... I think it’s tidal.” A colleague suggested that both the climate and composition of this department were atypical:
in retaining young faculty when the pressure to recruit them away has been extraordinary. Another institution had a strong reputation among minority students. This department’s catalyst for change was an African American professor who served as a beacon and role model. “At first there were a few students, then a few more kids came and liked what they saw, and pretty soon we had 30 students.” As with the department we previously discussed, representatives from this campus described the “visible” benefit of diversity. When a minority student [arrives]...and see[s similar] faces, they feel much more comfortable...[as well as] the reverse: a student who goes to a place and doesn’t see anybody who looks like them [can be] pretty uncomfortable.... Some do [succeed], but many can’t. We have students who transferred from such institutions [and describe] how uncomfortable it [was] for them. Our atmosphere is conducive to and comfortable for [minority] students. For that very reason, it’s self-generating. Faculty here had worked to develop a department-wide culture that emphasized caring for every student’s scientific development: It’s taking care of the students... treating students with respect regardless of where they come from, whether they are domestic or international, whether they are African American or not African American.... Treating all students with a level of respect and encouraging everyone’s growth as a scientist. That’s very key.
In our specialty there are three women; that is so unusual.... The atmosphere is different. We’re very collegial, not because there are more women, but [because] the whole [climate review] process really made people think about their words and what was important. I’ve seen my students who have graduated leave here—especially the women— and say, “Wow, it is really different here.”
For example, one essential practice was to guide graduate students through unfamiliar processes so that a setback did not become a trigger for failure. Often there can be so much “background noise”—all these little peaks that really do not mean anything but that can really cloud what you are seeing, like all of this extraneous data—those are things that can be very dissuading to students when they’re entering into graduate programs. Trying to develop a program that just cuts out that background noise in such a way that you can allow students to grow and become the scientist that they can become—that is what’s important.
Unfortunately, having a supportive experience did not necessarily prepare students for life after graduate school: “I kind of worry about them [when they leave], like one really wonderful student who had a very negative experience at a conference. I felt bad because I felt she was not prepared for that.” Both male and female respondents noted that the quality of research and education taking place in a more diverse environment provided a competitive advantage:
Data from departments with higher numbers of students from underrepresented groups suggest that a changed departmental climate benefits recruitment and retention of vulnerable populations.
That’s [something] I’ve been proudest of. [This department has committed] to change on a variety of levels to make it better.... Not just try to get better in the traditional chest-beating sense—but, “What really does make and will make research better?” “What and how are the many different ways that we could get there?” It is that and improving the atmosphere and the happiness of the graduate students; those things are not mutually [exclusive].
All That They Bargained for?
Many administrators described shifts in the practice of science that they felt had significantly affected faculty work. While acknowledging that “it’s a great time to be doing science when stuff is going on”, they asserted that professorial work is “a completely different universe” than it was a generation ago. The pace of science, the expectations are higher, the huge shift to [be] entrepreneurial, to start up companies. Everybody’s supposed to do all that kind of stuff, which was completely absent 25 years ago. So, it’s just a completely different job than it had been at one time. Not that that’s good or bad—it’s just different.
Moreover, a climate of nurturing the whole person was also a good retention tool: It’s the combination; it’s a very strong group of young people [who] are completely open [about] having lives. It creates an environment that has allowed us to be successful 711
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Maintaining a competitive department required significant funding to set up, operate, and maintain laboratories. “Every three years you have to buy some amazing new toy that you don’t have any money for.” As one chair put it, “Money is always an issue; it will always be an issue.” To support research in a tight funding environment, more and more faculty time was devoted to writing grant proposals. Administrators described among their pressures “the amount of time we spend raising money”. In seeking federal grants and industrial partnerships to fuel discovery and fund programs and graduate students, competition among institutions was fierce. Departments ranked in the top 10 were acutely aware of the perils of slipping; those on lower rungs were equally aware of the difficulties of moving up. Looming economic woes added to administrators’ concerns.
Table 1. Departmentally Supported Professional Development Initiatives Types Skills
Example Initiatives Chemistry literature groups Enhanced seminars or courses in professional communication: writing and presentations Leadership and management preparation Training on ethics in research
Career Information Exposure to nonacademic careers through industry internships Formal preparation for teaching Support
Mentoring and advising (formal or informal) Graduate student support groups Departmental handbooks of standard practice and
As the federal government’s grant money has become harder to find, I have more and people coming to tell me that they can’t make ends meet in their group right now. And so, if we’re to maintain [our] excellence, we can’t allow people’s groups to shrink because they’ve temporarily lost the grant. We have to find a way to tide them over. To do that on top of a budget cut and on top of a very tight financial situation to begin with—that is creating some real stress for the near future.
policies
doing great chemistry research, but all of these other kinds of [attributes]: collaboration skills, writing skills, speaking and presentation skills. This speaker’s department paid deliberate and collective attention to providing these skills:
Given these pressures, some faculty members were concerned that graduates would not willingly seek faculty appointments. Across the spectrum of top-40 schools, we commonly heard that faculty lives seemed unappealing to students. The chair of one elite program stated:
We constantly try and see if we can do better in that regard— so it’s something we work on all the time. And probably, actually, as far as any faculty meetings or discussions, or committees to evaluate things, that’s probably one of the things that gets evaluated the most regularly.
One thing that’s very clear is that [graduate students] worry a lot more about [academic life] than I’ve ever seen before.... When I go places and give seminars, I often have a bunch of graduate students [attend]. Mostly what they want to talk about is how hard is it to get funding, get a job. They say, “I’m thinking about industry because academic life doesn’t look like it’s much fun these days”—that is the recurring theme.
The research group remained an important venue for developing professional skills, yet many departments had begun augmenting the support traditionally provided by the research group with other career development opportunities. Many respondents identified activities their departments had begun or were developing at the time we conducted interviews. Table 1 lists those activities that align with recommended “beneficial practices”.3,4,6,8,19,29,30 Some practices were rare and others relatively common. For example, one institution described a formal program of industry internships, while graduate student support groups and departmentally provided information about nonacademic careers were each reported by nine departments. Many departments had implemented new mentoring and advising processes. The traditional role of a principal investigator serving as the major advisor for a lab group had broadened to incorporate newer understanding of how students are shepherded through graduate school. Rather than allowing students to be “locked in the lab and see your advisor and nobody else,” a respondent described departmental efforts:
Another noted that students “get a very narrow view by looking at our faculty and saying ‘Gee, that doesn’t look very fun; these people are working 80 hours a week! I don’t want to do that.’” To expose students to different career options, this department provided a seminar series of speakers from industry and a spectrum of higher education institutions. In contrast, one administrator dismissed the notion that faculty life was unusually challenging, questioning the “perceived difficulties in academic life, perceived being the key word there.” As these contradictory views indicate, faculty were definitely thinking about their roles as educators, researchers, and role models, and what these trends meant for the future of their field.
[We] make sure the students know they have other people to talk to besides their advisor.... If you need someone else to talk to, you’ve got your committee, and frankly, me, as chairman of graduate studies. We’re much more aware of possible needs the students would have for counseling or just people to talk to.
Shifting Responsibilities for Graduate Student Development
In addition to addressing these changes in science, departments reported implementing new educational features for graduate students. While Ph.D. graduates were universally expected to leave as independent researchers and thinkers, faculty and administrators realized that research expertise alone was inadequate for graduates’ workplace success.
One administrator observed, Mentoring is definitely a strength, a willingness to take students where they are and help them become scholars in science. Having a very open environment—by that I mean
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faculty members [who] are willing to work with other members. There’s a lot of collaborative research going on, but there’s also a lot of faculty members who are willing to mentor and chat with students who are not in their group and give [those] students time.
examinations had dropped from 73% to 58%, and foreign language requirements had largely disappeared.46 Our evidence reveals that student advocacy for different benchmarks is one factor explaining this tendency. Similar though perhaps less widespread trends appear to be underway in other disciplines.47 As several respondents reported, highly individualized work mirrors disciplinary expectations for graduate students to be independent researchers but can make for administrative challenges in tracking student progress toward completion. CPT reported that the percentage of departments offering laboratory rotations had increased, as had the percentage of departments that moved students into a research laboratory within 6 months.46 Our data likewise indicate some movement of departments toward this model, which is viewed as helping students and advisors alike ensure a good “fit” of the student to the research group, and thus consistent with research-based recommendations about integrating students into the discipline and department. Chemistry departments remain largely white and male, even as proportions of Ph.D. students and graduates from other demographic groups are growing. The CPT report likewise notes the overall low numbers of female and minority faculty across departments. Our data provide insight on how departments are creating change—or sometimes reinforcing the status quo. The departments that were most successful in attracting more diverse student populations have undertaken careful climate reviews and implemented changes based on data from those reviews. Intense recruitment is not enough to make a difference; departments must commit to internal changes to make new populations feel welcome and included after their arrival. CPT survey data illuminate departments’ formal practices and policies. Less clear is how accurately the survey reflects on-theground realities. A policy’s existence does not ensure its effective implementation—as our qualitative data elucidate. For example, several interviewees described formal policies requiring that graduate students meet annually with their thesis committee to assess progress. However, given the autonomy granted individual faculty in supervising students in their own labs, our respondents also acknowledged the difficulty in ensuring that these meetings actually occurred. Another administrator rued that simply offering professional development opportunities, such as writing workshops, did not guarantee student participation. Like the quantitative CPT survey, our qualitative study offers a largely institutional perspective, as reported by senior department members. Both approaches highlight features important to disciplinary observers or industry recruiters but may miss those important to students. To better understand the interplay of chemistry departmental practices with processes that take place at the individual and research group level, we are currently collecting interview data from early- and late-stage graduate students, faculty, and staff to examine how Ph.D. students choose and prepare for careers. From this evidence, we draw a sketch of current practices in graduate education, a sketch that reflects recent changes and links to the broader landscape of science research and education. We conclude that our respondents from chemistry Ph.D. programs were broadly aware of concerns raised in recent research on Ph.D. students’ career preparation8 20,24,26 28 and addressed by national initiatives.1 5,19,29,31,48 50 Whether emerging from the pressures on recruiting and competitiveness or from familiarity with recent research, many departments are taking active steps to fill gaps previously documented in Ph.D. students’ professional preparation.
However, meeting these needs for students can conflict with other demands on faculty. As chemistry faculty members are expected to generate more funded research activity, they have less time for training, advising, and mentoring in their research groups. The biggest negative in graduate education right now is funding. Faculty are so busy chasing funding and having to write up papers in order to justify the funding that they’ve obtained, that there is very little time for mentoring, sitting around and reading the literature, and talking to students about science.... [This creates an] inability to allow students to explore, to give them the freedom to make mistakes. Many faculty just don’t feel they’ve got that because of the time clock running on the next grant renewal. One chair observed that relationships between students and faculty suffer when faculty face multiple and competing priorities: A pretty significant impact on students is the fact that many faculty now are expected to do a much larger number of things than they had to in the past, and so there’s just less time to mentor their students. The extent [to which] my colleagues are, not to put too fine a point on it, falling down on the job, is probably just because they have these demands that there’s just no way to get out of.
’ DISCUSSION Clear themes arise from our data that reflect departments’ responses to changing times. Trends in workforce needs, student and faculty demographics, and the shifting landscape of science itself are all driving forces in what departments offer and how they package it. Departments that had deliberately engaged in change activities often had strong, persistent, and dedicated advocates for seeing change through. Some advocates were encouraged and supported by their institutions, while others were not. Some of the 22 departments that we sought for interviews had also participated in prior nationwide studies of graduate education, which sometimes catalyzed further self-examination and improvement. However, as initiatives ended or individual advocates’ involvement waned, interest in these changes could diminish, and some changes did not last. Many of our qualitative findings help to explain quantitative results reported by the ACS CPT, which last surveyed 196 Ph.D. departments in 2006.46 Reflecting the growing trend toward interdisciplinarity, CPT found that some 20% of programs were no longer organized according to traditional chemistry subdisciplines. Our data reveal the resulting costs and benefits: while blurred disciplinary lines can yield exciting research collaborations, scientists can find other professional bonds loosening. CPT survey data show that fewer departments require students to jump through formal hoops; they are instead moving toward individualized benchmarking of student progress. Between 1996 and 2006, the share of departments requiring cumulative 713
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Journal of Chemical Education Within our sample, noteworthy changes included new departmentally based programs to offer professional skills development, career awareness, and student support, in addition to traditional research group activities. Also striking was the success that some departments had in diversifying their faculty and student bodies. Changes reported by physics departments47 are similar in nature, suggesting that national research and action efforts to improve graduate education are also percolating into other disciplines. One chemistry chair wrestled philosophically with the nature of change in Ph.D. education and what happens after students graduate. Although one question about reform is “What should we be doing?” another critical question is
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’ ACKNOWLEDGMENT We thank all those who agreed to be interviewed for this project and those who provided advice and directed us to resources. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Award DRL-0723600. All assertions are those of the authors and not of the National Science Foundation. ’ REFERENCES (1) Greene, R. G.; Hardy, B. J.; Smith, S. J. Issues in Science and Technology 1996, 12, 59–66. (2) Nyquist, J. Change 2002, 34, 13–20. (3) Golde, C. M.; Walker, G. E. Doctoral Education in Chemistry. In Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline. Carnegie Essays on the Doctorate; Golde, C. M., Walker, G. E., Eds.; Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: Stanford, CA, 2006; pp 135 139. (4) Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications (CPSMA). Graduate Education in the Chemical Sciences: Issues for the 21st Century: Report of a Workshop; Chemical Sciences Roundtable, Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology, Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications, National Research Council, National Academies Press: Washington, DC, 2000. (5) AAS Education Policy Board. Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society [Online] 1997, 29, 1426 1465. http://www.aas.org/ publications/baas/v29n5/edrpt.html (accessed Mar 2011). (6) Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP). Reshaping the Graduate Education of Scientists and Engineers; National Academies Press: Washington, DC, 1995. (7) Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP) and Policy on Global Affairs (PGA). Rising above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Future; National Academies Press: Washington, DC, 2007. (8) Nerad, M.; Rudd, E.; Morrison, E.; Homer, L. Confronting Common Assumptions: Designing Future-Oriented Doctoral Education. In conference proceedings [Online], Doctoral Education and the Faculty of the Future, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, October 8 9, 2006. http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/cheri/conferences/doctoralEducation.html (accessed Mar 2011). (9) Smith, S. J.; Pedersen-Gallegos, L.; Riegle-Crumb, C. Am. J. Phys. 2002, 70, 1081–1092. (10) Stacy, A. M. Training future leaders. In Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline. Carnegie Essays on the Doctorate; Golde, C. M., Walker, G. E., Eds.; Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, CA, 2006. (11) Mitchell-Kernan, C. CGS Communicator 2005, 38 (10), 1–3. (12) Stewart, D. W. CGS Communicator 2005, 38 (7), 1–3. (13) De Welde, K.; Laursen, S. L. Open Educ. J. 2008, 1, 49 61. (14) Thiry, H.; Laursen, S. L.; Liston, C. J. Women Minorities Sci. Eng. 2007, 4, 391–419. (15) Nerad, M.; Cerny, J. CGS Communicator 1999, 32 (6), 1–7. (16) Conefrey, T. J. Women Minorities Sci. Eng. 2000, 6, 251–264. (17) Lovitts, B. E. Leaving the Ivory Tower; Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham, MD, 2001. (18) Rosser, S. V.; Zieseniss, M. J. Women Minorities Sci. Eng. 2000, 6, 95–114. (19) The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Diversity and the Ph.D.: A Review of Efforts to Broaden Race & Ethnicity in U.S. Doctoral Education; The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation: Princeton, NJ, 2005. (20) Taylor, E.; Antony, J. S. J. Negro Educ. 2000, 69, 184–198. (21) Mason, M. A.; Goulden, M. Academe 2002, No. Nov. Dec., 21–27. (22) Laursen, S.; Rocque, B. Change 2009, No. March/April, 18–26. (23) Austin, A. J. Higher Educ. 2002, 73, 94–122. (24) Golde, C. M.; Dore, T. M. At Cross Purposes: What the Experiences of Today’s Doctoral Students Reveal about Doctoral Education; Report prepared for The Pew Charitable Trusts: Philadelphia, PA, 2001.
“Are we doing it well enough?”... If I care about what the world looks like, to the extent that chemistry can help alter that world in a positive way... are we putting out people who can broadly respond to whatever is out there? My answer to that is, in order to do that, chemistry needs to reach out, not to lose track of its fundamentals, but to reach out to the interface of disciplines that it touches. And if we can keep those people [we teach] from not being a mile wide and an inch deep, but actually being somewhat less than a mile wide, but deeper, then our education will be doing something valuable. Just how to accomplish this goal, then, is the challenge that chemistry departments face. While the changes that departments have made appear to be generally well aligned with the practices recommended by research on graduate education and fostered in several national initiatives, the changes do not appear to be deliberately driven by a process of seeking out and applying these bodies of evidence. In general, we found low faculty awareness of even very well established initiatives on their own campuses, such as Preparing Future Faculty.49 More often, changes appear to have resulted from a “trickle-down” influence of these initiatives, or through the involvement of specific faculty members or students in these initiatives. Changes thus tended to be somewhat piecemeal in nature. Nor were their impacts systematically examined: not one of the 14 departments in our sample had gathered data to assess holistically how change efforts affected graduate education. Absent such data, it is impossible to rigorously evaluate the effect of the implemented changes. Nor can we predict whether and how they will be sustained. Ironically, the slow and piecemeal nature of the reported changes may help them to last, as change had occurred through small, cumulative, and gradual steps, not via major overhaul. Nonetheless, that change is so widespread indicates chemistry departments’ recognition that, to remain competitive, their educational practices must evolve with both national needs and students’ interests. As researchers and national initiatives continue to share their findings, and as some departments begin to adopt the effective practices identified in these studies, now may be the time for a new round of innovation in assessing outcomes for Ph.D. students and in tracking the impact of specific program initiatives. While the strategies that departments select will differ depending on their own goals and audience, their decisions and actions should be based in sound data, in the best tradition of science.
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