Getting Smart About Higher Education Involves Doing Your Homework
So you've gotten the good news: "Overproduction" of Ph.D.s is, by and large, a myth. Many fields are experiencing painful shortages of Ph.D.s. Bioinformatics is one, notes Peter Syverson, vice president of research for the Council of Graduate Schools. "We're not producing any Ph.D.s in bioinformatics because, every time someone takes two classes, they get hired" by industry, Syverson says.
Even in those fields where there is a perceived oversupply, "they're (Ph.D.s) not being overproduced, they're being underused," argues Dr. Robert Weisbuch, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
But not underused, apparently, to a significant degree. Unemployment among Ph.D.s has been estimated variously at less than 5 percent, less than 2 percent and less than 1 percent.
So this is good news, to be sure. But does that mean, for all you prospectives out there, that you can simply relax, put the process of choosing a discipline and a program on cruise control?
Absolutely not.
"It's a complex question because what you're, in effect, doing" — given the median time to degree of 7.3 years for all disciplines — "is making a decision about conditions that'll be in effect in, say, 10 years," says Dr. Lydia English, program officer for higher education for the Mellon Foundation and director of the Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship program.
That's an enormous time commitment, one that requires a lot more from the prospective than simply asking for a favorite professor's opinion. But a recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts has found that's precisely what most graduate students do.
In a survey of 4,000 graduate students at their third year and above, students in 11 disciplines — philosophy, history, English, math, art history, sociology, ecology, geology, psychology, molecular biology and chemistry — reported choosing to pursue the doctorate at the urging of a favorite professor — or just because it seemed to be the next logical step. Far too many doctoral candidates felt
they enrolled in their programs with only the vaguest of notions of what graduate education entailed or what their professional futures might be.
Expert observers in the field of higher education agree: Students only rarely ask the questions that would allow them to determine whether a given field or school constitutes a good "match" for them.
Dr. Maresi Nerad, associate professor at the University of Washington and author of "Ph.D.s: Ten Years Later," offers some valuable advice: "Do a lot of homework," she says. "Go first on the Web. Start with National Opinion Research Council site and look at the results in the annual Survey of Earned Doctorates. Then compare that to the Peterson guides and then really look and begin asking the departments the hard questions."
Nerad also suggests the following checklist:
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Comments posted here may be reprinted in Diverse: Issues In Higher Education magazine, and may be edited for purposes of clarity and/or space.
