When Dr. Cherisse R. Jones-Branch went to graduate school, she didn’t know what an academic CV looked like, let alone how to make one. Both of her parents had master’s degrees, but she was the first in her family to earn her doctorate.
Now she’s planning a professional development workshop on the topic as the inaugural dean of Arkansas State University’s reconstituted graduate school and the James and Wanda Lee Vaughn Endowed Professor of History. She started as dean on July 1 in the thick of the coronavirus pandemic, a time of heightened uncertainty for her students’ studies and job prospects.
“I reflect on my own experience in the way I think about how to best help students on this campus,” she says. “I think about what I didn’t know that I wish I had known. And I’m also interested in more than student academics. I’m interested in student wellness, because that’s a component we’re not talking about often enough. What does it mean to be a graduate student, particularly in this moment?”
That’s the quintessential question graduate school deans are asking themselves amid COVID-19: What is it like to be a graduate student right now? And how can colleges and universities keep them enrolled?
For several decades, research has shown that about half of graduate students leave their programs before completing their degrees. Meanwhile, graduate students are six times more likely to experience anxiety and depression as people in other fields, according to a 2018 study in Nature Biotechnology. The same study found that about 39% of graduate students reported being moderately to severely depressed compared to only 6% of the general population.
And those are the numbers before a global pandemic shook up higher education.
According to Dr. Regina Vasilatos-Younken, “Time to degree and continued academic progress are challenges for students under normal circumstances, given the considerable demands of graduate study.”
