Grad School Necessary To Maintain U.S.'s Global Position, Report Says

According to a new report from the Commission on the Future of Graduate Education, graduate students give the U.S. an edge in the global arena.

But there's a catch: 40 to 50 percent of doctoral students never finish their degrees due to lack of funding and resources.

The commission behind the report is calling for a federally funded traineeship program to support grad students.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has more:

Under the competitive program, students pursuing an area of "national need," as identified by the federal government, could receive a $30,000 annual stipend and have tuition and other educational costs covered for up to five years, at a total cost of $80,000 a year for each student. The commission says the proposed six-year program would initially cover 25,000 students at a cost of $2-billion for the forthcoming fiscal year and then expand to a $10-billion program covering 125,000 students in the 2016 fiscal year. The traineeship is billed as a natural extension of the America Competes Act, which was passed in 2007 to beef up the nation's investment in the sciences and is currently up for reauthorization.

The report also recommends that universities push their students to graduate:

Universities, for instance, need to keep pushing to improve the completion rates of graduate students--which hover around 50 percent in most fields at the doctoral level and are unknown at the master's level, the report says. In fact, the report calls that task "the single most important thing that universities can do at both the undergraduate and graduate levels." One thing that might increase degree completion, the report says, is for graduate schools to help graduate students "recognize the rewards of earning a degree."

The Washington Post outlines more revealing statistics from the report, including graduate high student dropout rates:

Attrition runs high in Ph.D. programs despite "rigorous selection processes" in graduate schools and "high achievement levels" among those seeking degrees, the report found. Attrition is highest in the humanities: 12 percent of doctoral candidates complete their degrees within five years, and 49 percent within 10.

According to the report, the U.S. could lose other countries if it does not take steps to invest in its post-secondary students.

Internationally, the U.S. share of the global international student market has shrunk since 2000, and competition abroad is increasing. Europe and Asia are investing in graduate education as essential components of economic development, and have begun to outpace the United States in doctoral production, especially in science and engineering. Potential international graduate students have more options today as to where to pursue their graduate studies and their careers.

What do you think? Are you in grad school, or would you consider going? And if you have gone, what has your experience with funding been like?

Comments

[realitytrumpsbull]

02:53 AM on 05/02/2010

I think education is as much a business, as it is anything else, and these folks invest a lot of time, effort, and energy achieving these exotic credentials, but, when it's all said and done, does college really measure up? If you trained up in a company, took some targeted professional courses, could you not essentially achieve the same educational level by different means than spending eight YEARS at college? What does a Ph.D really get you, other than a swift kick, and a stern warning?
Medicine, I could understand, but I think some degrees are basically just about bogus, and irrelevant to the working and professional world, where the money is, where it counts, essentially. I also think people are leaving school, including grad school, pretty badly in debt, meaning that whatever other plans they might have had in life will be pending a successful payoff of all their loans and obligations. What's the tuition cost, at some of these schools?

[Craigipedia]

04:46 PM on 05/01/2010

I'm about to start at Georgetown in the fall for an MA in Global History. To simply live there and go to school for ONE year will be around $50k. I will then complete my degree at King's College London - for a cost of about £25k (including living there). This is startling. The UK has no private colleges (justbone actually) and it invests in it's schools so as to keep costs down. I will probably reward the UK by staying there for many years and starting my family there. The US is just lightyears behind. I can't afford to stay in my own country, which I truly love, because our government insists on enriching the banks with insane loans

[wendelswerk]

12:14 PM on 04/30/2010

I have a simple solution: Tax all corporations that hire college graduates. Take that funding and spread it out to grad schools and grad students. Companies directly benefit from the pool of educated students (its another form of corporate welfare) and yet we have to pay back the loans from our salaries. Companies get the talent, banks get rich from the interest on the loans, governments collect your taxes, and colleges keep their doors open. You? you get a piece of paper and the bill.

[JStading]

04:08 PM on 05/02/2010

So no corporations will hire college graduates for entry level work and all graduate degrees will be instantaneously worth less, since the tax will be passed directly to the graduates via lower salaries.

I didn't need a MA in economics to figure that one out.

[wendelswerk]

12:11 PM on 04/30/2010

Let's face it ya'll. The Reagan Republicans (many of you in grad school now were too young to be engaged in their silly debate) sold America a bill of goods that since education benefited you personally that you should be responsible for paying your own education. So they began to underfund and in many cases cut funding for grad school. The key was to enrich the banks by handing out loans like it was government cheese (1970's thing ya'll). So the banks get richer, you get poorer and then businesses get to hire you and make money off your education and talent. How rich is that?

[olesenj]

11:15 AM on 04/30/2010

What are the areas of "national need"?

[palindrom]

06:41 PM on 04/30/2010

Hard sciences, largely.

[Weathermaker]

02:02 AM on 04/30/2010

I think a lot of progress can be achieved if we structure differently the way we pay PhD students. Normally, the pay increases very little during a PhD. If we were to increase the pay every year so that a senior PhD student makes as much as a postdoc does, I think more people would stay and finish their degree. This makes perfect sense. In my senior years as a PhD student, I was more productive than any postdoc. In fact, I had to teach them almost everything... not only the experiments, but the science behind them. So why not pay a 6 yr PhD student at the same level as a postdoc? It will make the financial burden of being in grad school MUCH easier to handle.

[Renee Hargrove]

12:10 AM on 04/30/2010

It's just so expensive. I had to take out loans in order to get my master's degree--which is required for my job--and now I'm struggling to pay off the loans. The pay increase that came along with the new degree isn't enough.

[claire2]

10:42 PM on 04/29/2010

This increased support for graduate level education would help to raise the bar, the literacy level. The focus on degree completion would be esp. useful.

On the disparaging comments about the humanities at the doctoral level: profs of literature do have a cultural impact; they offer students enhanced reading and writing skills that make them better employees (as well as enriching their lives).

The current poverty of our political discourse shows us every day the severe shortage of people capable of nuanced reading of all sorts of texts (social, literary, cultural). Just my opinion, but I think that countries, as well as individuals, would be better off in the long run if they pursued a broader horizon than just the almighty dollar.

[Kay Mohlman]

09:14 PM on 04/29/2010

I don't know why Barbara Lovitte's "Leaving the Ivory Tower: The Causes and Consequences of Departure from Graduate Study" (2001) has apparently gone out of print, but it's a serious study of this issue written by a dedicated scholar who left graduate programs herself before finally completing her PhD. The structure of academic departments and programs as well as financial and other issues play a role in why people choose to leave. See http://www.amazon.com/Leaving-Ivory-Tower-Barbara-Lovitts/dp/0742509419/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_3

[yorkriver1]

08:12 PM on 04/29/2010

How robust is the job market for PhD's? Depends on the discipline, humanities probably rough, hard sciences probably better job opportunities.

[deepintheheartoftejas]

08:06 PM on 04/29/2010

The reason for people not completing their doctorates are complex and many. I spent 5 years in grad school. Ok, I admit the last year was pretty listless, and I got little accomplished. Eventually I dropped out to take a job in the private sector that was about 3 times my grad school salary, in the mid 90s. A lot of ABDs I know are like that.

Yeah, I guess you could call it a "funding" issue. If they'd paid me 60k or 70k instead of the $22000 I got my last year, I might well have stuck it out to the end, but it's a very very minor, a very small regret that I didn't finish. But, also, I had friends that took 10+ years to complete their ph.d. and that's depressing in its own way.

I'd much rather see the government subsidize a basic college education for everyone. Too many people drop out of undergraduate programs because they're working 2 jobs to support themselves, getting 4 hours of sleep a night. That's a far more strressing problem than people dropping out of grad school

[RachelMc]

07:38 PM on 04/29/2010

i dont think im going for my master's. i neeeeeeeeeeeeed a break. then MAYBE i will attempt.

[wendelswerk]

11:58 AM on 04/30/2010

If you quit now you won't ever go back. Hang in there and finish. Usually an MA takes about a year maybe a year and a half. Get it done while you have the energy and time.

[RachelMc]

12:54 PM on 04/30/2010

but see thats just it. i dont have the time nor energy. i am so unmotivated and i think i can go back if i want to later like most ppl i know who worked for about a year then wen back.

[actionspeaks]

06:56 PM on 04/29/2010

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[Uncle Bill]

06:43 PM on 04/29/2010

College freshman in entry psychology are the lab rats of humanity and grad students are the pack mules as far as American higher education is concerned. I must object to the focus on "national need" which I fear will in practice become "programs most useful to corporate HR departments in the next quarter"
Law schools, medical schools and many graduate programs increasingly resemble trade schools with less emphasis on basic research and expanding the sum of human knowledge and more on research that can be distilled into 1. a pitch that the average MBA can comprehend, and 2. that said MBA can picture as producing commercially exploitable intellectual property or a commercial commodity.

[palindrom]

06:44 PM on 04/30/2010

Law schools, med schools and business schools pretty much _are_ trade schools. They're called "professional schools" to distinguish them from pure academic programs. They can and do have research and scholarly production going on -- especially medical and law schools -- and some have parallel PhD tracks, but they're something of a different animal.

[Uncle Bill]

07:23 PM on 04/30/2010

The problem with your distinction is the ever tighter integration of commercial product development and academia- http://books.google.com/books?id=55ilSwp2bLAC&dq=corporate+research+in+universities&printsec=frontcover&source=in&hl=en&ei=3mXbS9e7CcP38AaUitXlAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=12&ved=0CEEQ6AEwCw#v=onepage&q=corporate%20research%20in%20universities&f=false
The bell tolls for thee.

[gakabani]

06:40 PM on 04/29/2010

This is due to low levels for funding high-tech research or even arts, the red tape, and the lack of infrastructure in many universities. Then my students tell me, why am doing here? Is this worth it? Many prefer to go into business or simply dropout. No one is hiring by the way.