An on-line survey of doctoral programs in the sciences may help students decide which graduate programs provide the best professional training for jobs in and out of academe.
The "Grad School Survey" at PhDs.org, a Web site for job seekers in mathematics and the sciences, isn't the first survey to rate doctoral programs in the United States, but it is one of the first to seek students' perspectives via the Internet.
The survey is in its third week (it will be completed on June 20, eight weeks after it was initiated), but results are updated daily on the PhDs.org Web site, which is run by Geoff Davis, a researcher at Microsoft and a former assistant professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College.
As of May 12, more than 2,170 students have completed the survey. According to the results so far, most students feel that they are being well-prepared for academic careers but not for jobs outside academe.
Mr. Davis and Peter Fiske, an experimental physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, developed the survey, which evaluates programs based on students' responses to questions about the graduate-school experience, including mentoring, career guidance and placement, and overall satisfaction.
While the survey's authors don't work in academe, they've used their knowledge of academic matters to forge auxiliary careers as advocates for graduate-education reform. Mr. Fiske, who has a Ph.D. in geochemistry, writes and lectures about science careers. Mr. Davis, who has a Ph.D. in mathematics, founded PhDs.org in 1997 with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The authors plan to conduct the survey annually and are also thinking of a similar survey on doctoral programs in the humanities and social sciences.
Mr. Davis and Mr. Fiske say a 1995 National Research Council study of doctoral programs inspired them to create their survey.
"For years Geoff and I have observed that the N.R.C. rankings of graduate departments seem to have a powerful effect on departments," says Mr. Fiske. "Yet the questions that go into those rankings do not address some of the professional-development, training, and education issues that we thought important. So we decided to develop our own survey -- using data provided by graduate students themselves."
The methodology of the N.R.C. study, which asks faculty members to rate programs at other institutions, is "not really conducive to getting the kind of information that we're trying to get," says Mr. Davis. Students are in a better position to judge program effectiveness, he says. "If somebody sent me a list of 20 departments and asked me, for example -- 'How good are the career-placement services at the University of Indiana at Bloomington?' -- I would have no idea."
While preliminary results of the PhDs.org survey show that many graduate students are pleased with the training they are receiving -- 84 per cent of the respondents say they are satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their training -- the results indicate that some areas need improvement.
For example, more than half of those surveyed so far say their programs are not telling them where recent graduates are employed or adequately informing them about the job market for Ph.D.'s during the admissions process.
"That's an appalling statistic," says Mr. Davis. "Many students are frustrated and upset after they graduate and end up in a career that isn't quite what they expected to be in. Much of their frustration is due to the fact that they feel they were misled, or that no one told them that their expectations were unrealistic. If we're going to continue to educate graduate students responsibly, informed consent is a key consideration."
Ninety per cent of the survey's respondents so far say their doctoral programs are doing a good job of preparing them for academic careers. Responses are mixed, however, about how well their doctoral programs are preparing them for careers outside academe.
Forty-one per cent say their programs aren't preparing them for non-academic jobs, and 58 per cent indicate that they are not being encouraged to enhance their skills through coursework outside the department and internships in industry.
These results are troubling, says Mr. Davis, since fewer than half of all scientists with Ph.D.'s will find jobs in academe.
The final results of the survey will be posted this summer on PhDs.org. The authors will publish on the site a set of department rankings by field, which they hope will be useful to prospective graduate students in the sciences. They will not report results for a particular program unless they receive at least five completed surveys from participants of that program.
They also hope the data will be used by program chairs to improve their programs, and by policy makers who want to know which programs are taking their advice about graduate education and training. Mr. Fiske will also analyze the survey results in an article for Science's Next Wave.
