What if We Made Fewer Ph.D.’s?
What if We Made Fewer Ph.D.’s? - Run Your Campus - the Chronicle of Higher Education
Whenever a discussion opens about nonacademic employment for Ph.D.’s, it isn’t long before someone suggests reducing graduate-school admissions. “The market for full-time scholars has fallen off a cliff lately,” this argument goes, “so why not just train fewer of them?”
The strategy to reduce the number of Ph.D. students recurs in those conversations because it’s sensible. When there’s insufficient demand for professors in the marketplace, the simplest response is to decrease supply.
But is that the only or best response? Before we look more closely, let’s first note that graduate enrollments are indeed dropping. As this newspaper reported in March, doctoral programs are admitting fewer students over all, with the most notable declines occurring in the biggest programs, and in the arts and humanities fields. It’s too early to track the effects of those cuts, but they will certainly continue as programs seek to “right size,” as a University of Maryland graduate dean put it.
But what exactly is the “right” size?
If the goal of graduate programs is to produce only enough Ph.D.’s to fill the hiring needs of colleges and universities, then that number is bound to be pretty small. It’s going to be so small, in fact, that it will cause drastic changes in the structure of graduate education.