A recent survey by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment found that the No. 1 reason for follow-up visits by regional accreditors to higher-education institutions is to gain more information about the assessment of student learning. And while the most visible reforms in assessing student learning have taken place at the undergraduate level, debate is heating up about whether a clearer definition of what students should be learning at the graduate level is possible or even needed.
Efforts to create such a definition have their champions and their skeptics. Advocates say too much is implicit in graduate education that should be made explicit; students are too often narrowly prepared for faculty careers many will never have (and may not seek in the first place); and incentive structures encourage faculty to focus more on research and securing grants than on teaching and mentoring.
Through reform efforts such as the Ph.D. Completion Project, the Council of Graduate Schools has been advocating for a stronger institutional focus on outcomes and student progress. The council supports the principles behind these concerns—that graduate education should be more accountable and responsive to students' aspirations and public needs, and that changes in teaching, curricula, and academic structure should be informed by evidence.
Skeptics in the learning-outcomes debate offer many arguments. They say such reforms are more about accountability-for-accountability's sake than about actual improvement of student learning, and that existing assessment models are too simplistic, and developed without cooperation of faculty from a wide range of disciplines. Because graduate education is by definition specialized and the attempts to define common denominators of knowledge and skills across graduate degrees are so general, skeptics add, the assessments will have no purchase for actual graduate reforms. With respect to doctorates, critics note that the Ph.D. requires an original contribution to the field, and neither originality nor field-specific knowledge and skills conform meaningfully to assessment rubrics such as "critical thinking," "analytical reasoning," or "communication."
The national Degree Qualifications Profile, proposed this year by the Lumina Foundation, recognizes the merit of the last objection by leaving out the Ph.D. Nevertheless, the framework boldly attempts to define the master's degree through a list of qualifications that every student should have upon graduation, including knowledge and skills that should be obtained regardless of field. In field-testing such qualifications, it will be important to consider the viability of the definitions across degree types and across fields.
From the perspective of many people in graduate education, some items on the framework will appear to be too general and a restatement of principles that have long been used by the graduate community to assess its own programs, while other requirements are too specific and describe trajectories within graduate education but are hardly norms for curricula in every field. The proposed criteria are a blend of generic principles that few graduate faculty would disagree with and distinct innovations that have been adopted in particular fields based on the real career needs of graduates. To name just one example of the latter type, the requirement that all master's students "employ and apply" "mathematical, formal logic and/or statistical tools" in their graduate work implies a requirement that every master's humanities student become, in essence, a "digital humanist."
The conflation of generic principles with professional program trends raises broader questions: What is the purpose of the degree qualifications, and how would they be used? Are they to serve as reminders to graduate institutions because institutions are assumed to be unable to define their own educational objectives or need assistance in measuring whether the standards have been met? Or are they intended to have a more formative purpose, of pushing the envelope in the curricula and structure of graduate education? In this last case, the "degree qualification" format assumes that master's education is a unitary phenomenon varying only by subject matter and that a general-education model, which posits one set of criteria for undergraduate education, would fit master's education equally well.
But the shape of master's education in the United States suggests otherwise. It has matured into a fine-tuned aggregate of research and professional programs that each year prepares more than half a million students for academic and nonacademic career paths. The power of the master's degree lies in the unparalleled ability of master's programs to be flexible and responsive to the diverse needs of students and employers.
This is not to say that outcomes-oriented graduate reforms are unnecessary. The fact is that these reforms are already under way through, among others, the Preparing Future Faculty effort and the council's Ph.D. and Master's Completion projects. And the burgeoning growth of professional master's degrees in the past decade can be explained by innovative degree structures that meet work-force needs by combining research expertise with professional skills development. In just these few examples, the clear thread is evidence-based reform informed by program and career outcomes.
What we have learned from the successful graduate reforms of the past two decades is that institutional change requires ownership by the academic community. Some of the proposed models for reform call for accountability first, ownership second. What we are calling for is ownership first, accountability second. Graduate deans have a crucial role here because they must foster supportive academic environments for faculty and students that result in improved learning at the graduate level, just as faculty have the primary responsibility for fostering students' success in academic programs.
Both advocates and skeptics of efforts to define learning goals for graduate education want to sustain the excellence of the country's graduate efforts, and both have valid points. Common ground can be achieved by ensuring that the outcomes we define have input from the graduate community, reflect the diversity of master's education, and are informed by the real career needs of master's-degree recipients.
Two steps are necessary for a successful national strategy to define those outcomes. First, we must develop a national framework for the collection and use of data on postgraduate careers. Second, we must build a process for community engagement in the definition of learning expectations within and across institutions. Serious energy must then be marshaled to define outcomes that are appropriate to degree type, field, and institutional mission as well as to students' career objectives and opportunities. This effort would ensure the continued excellence of graduate education and maintain the trust of students and the public. Fortunately, the record suggests that America's graduate schools are up to the challenge.
