Whoa. Have you seen this op-ed piece from Sunday’s New York Times yet? You know, the one that starts off with the powerful line, “Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.” As such, Mark C. Taylor argues, it needs to be restructured. Taylor makes six suggestions for overhauling universities, including ditching departments in favour of “problem-focused programs,” developing curriculum that is built like a spiderweb across different fields of inquiry, increasing collaboration among institutions, overhaul the notion of the doctoral dissertation (all praises to that!), imposing retirement and abolishing tenure.
Notably, Taylor also suggests expanding career options for graduate students, since most will never get jobs in the fields in which they’re trained. This only seems to make sense–especially to the readers of Leaving Academia!
And yet, transforming graduate education to ensure that students would be prepared to find work in the private sector, non-profit or public sectors would really challenge some fundamental assumptions about the university (and this is surely what Mark C. Taylor is getting at).
On one hand, I completely object to graduate education going in the direction of undergraduate education, i.e. turning grad school into a job factory. I am old enough to hold close all those values about a liberal arts education that really went out of fashion in the 1990s–that school should be about cultivating the mind and not just producing commodifiable answers, and that inquiry for the pleasure of it is actually okay.
And yet, training grad students in a career vacuum is neither smart nor feasible. To continue to fail to give graduate students training or options regarding their career paths once they leave grad school is a colossal failure. It’s a failure to leave former students feeling useless and isolated, but it’s also a failure to society to not cultivate channels for this incredible talent pool to take their knowledge and talents.
My question is regarding what role exactly should universities, administrators, faculty and departments take when considering how they can expand professional options for their graduate students. Just acknowledging the existence of the non-academic labour market would probably be a good start. But what needs to happen to make sure that grad students leave school with a strong sense of where they can go if the academic dream doesn’t work out for them? What do you think?
{ 1 comment }
