The core of a lot of my thinking about academic hiring has been that graduate schools tend to (want to) produce candidates for a particular kind of job — one that to a large extent reproduces the faculty members of a doctoral university while the large majority of academic jobs are at institutions that only minimally resemble such places.
All four of the colleges and universities where I’ve worked as a faculty member and administrator have been relatively small, teaching-oriented institutions where research, while valued, was not at the top of the agenda. All four have been at least pretty good at their missions, and have provided excellent educational opportunities for undergraduates (and in a couple of cases, master’s students).
I’m struck, though, by the continuous disjunction experienced by new faculty members (most especially those fresh from doctoral programs) between the job expectations of graduate students, and the way things actually are at the institutions where they are beginning their careers. I personally suffered greatly through that transition at my first job, and that job was at the most prestigious and selective of the institutions where I have worked.
Graduate school is on one level a professional apprenticeship. It is where prospective faculty members learn not only the skills, but the values and worldview of academe. Doctoral education, rightly, occurs at universities whose priority is research and the creation of new knowledge, particularly through the ongoing revival of the profession through the generation of new Ph.D.’s.
However, a vast majority of people earning doctorates who are fortunate enough to get any kind of faculty job at all will land at institutions with high teaching loads, limited resources for research, and relatively minimal research expectations. They will be expected to be strong teachers and good campus citizens more than scholars and creators of new knowledge. I do not here intend to pose the false dichotomy of teaching vs. scholarship, but to point out that the weight placed on teaching is going to be much greater for most faculty members than the weight on scholarship.
Graduate education generally does not do an outstanding job of preparing job candidates for that reality. I am not exactly sure how it could be reformed to do better without distorting its value as a research apprenticeship. I also am not sure whether “tracking” graduate students to prepare them for different kinds of jobs is the right thing to do. But I do know that in my 20 years as a professor and administrator, the issue of how graduate school prepares faculty members, as opposed to scholars, has always been one of the biggest challenges we have faced.
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10 Responses to Job Expectations Vs. Reality
jesor - August 12, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Hmmm, it seems possible that something similar to the “practicioner” and “researcher” paths found in many D.Ed. and PhD programs for Education may be a model here. The education is just as rigorous in each, but in each one, the emphasis of the culmination of the program is placed on the actual work to be done by the student upon graduation (thesis for the PhD students, internship and/or portfolio for the D.Ed. students). Ultimately, it would clarify the expectations for both students and employers. If you want a researcher, hire a PhD, if you want an instructor, hire someone with the professional degree (D.Ed, D.Eng, etc).
swyckoff - August 12, 2009 at 4:21 pm
The Colleges of Worcester Consortium in Central Massachusetts offers a Certificate in College Teaching, a program of graduate courses in higher education pedagogy. The primary focus of the Certificate Program is to prepare graduate students, adjunct and full time faculty and career changers who aspire to, or are currently engaged in, a career in the college classroom. Recognizing that teaching effectiveness requires a solid base of knowledge in a subject discipline and knowledge of processes which facilitate learning, the program is grounded in research on best pedagogical practices. Institutions that hire new faculty look for candidates with teaching experience, but growing expectations for learner-centered teaching, inquiry-based learning, and student engagement are poorly met with traditional teaching methods. Thus, graduate students who shortly will be entering the academic job market find that their attractiveness is increased when their credentials include formal preparation in teaching. The Certificate in College Teaching Program offers the opportunity to strengthen classroom skills and makes those who obtain the Certificate more competitive candidates for potential teaching positions.
frankschmidt - August 12, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Nothing is as old as yesterday’s crisis. Many institutions including my own have had active Preparing Future Faculty programs for some time, in an attempt to deal with the disconnect you elucidate. Perhaps you might give some of our promising Ph.D.’s a job?
johnfarley - August 12, 2009 at 4:41 pm
I think a lot of what is going on here is related to declining support for higher education. I just retired after nearly 30 years at a regional state university. When I started, teaching loads were reasonable and both research and teaching were valued. And indeed, many valuable research findings and both academic manuscripts and major textbooks (a type of writing that certainly links the two endeavors) came out of that institution. Gradually, however, as budgets got tighter, teaching loads increased, and time for research fell. Now in some departments, people get tenure with little or no research, and because everyone is busier, the quality of teaching has not improved. But we crank more students through at lower cost (though most of the savings have gone over to increased expenditures in non-academic areas). Research is down, teaching is no better than it once was, tuition is up, and state support is down. I’m glad I retired when I did.
dickreddy - August 12, 2009 at 4:49 pm
I wonder whether there really is a good answer to this genuine problem.
Research universities produce those with doctorates and research universities embody a culture that emphasizes, values and rewards research and publication far above teaching and service. And, of course, the Ph.D. is in itself a research degree because it requires for its completion a research-based dissertation.
As David Evans suggests, doctoral programs overwhelmingly are given over to producing graduates prepared to work (I avoided using “teach”) at similar institutions, not, for the most part, where the jobs for their graduates actually are.
However desirable, it almost certainly would be very difficult to develop and sustain more balanced programs in such, basically unidimensional, environments.
It probably should also be pointed out that this problem frequently continues at those colleges and universities which claim to be much more teaching oriented. Despite their putative devotion to teaching and even their valuing of service, far too often their reward systems don’t reflect that. Even for them, salary increases and promotions and other forms of recognition go to those who publish, commonly without much attention to the quality of their work.
averhartjr - August 12, 2009 at 4:50 pm
As with FrankSchmidt, my institution also has an active “Preparing for the Future Professoriate” program for Ph.D.’s. However, inasmuch as we are a Tier 1 research institution, guess what is rolling around inside your head when you emerge from that course?
11274135 - August 12, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Well, yes, this disjunction has been noted in the past. Virtually all PhDs are educated in research uinversities, but probably 75%will wind up teaching at places where research is not the highest priority. And there have been attempts to do something about it. The usual attempt, however, has involved the creation of a “lesser” degree of some sort (cf “professional” degree above), such as the EdD, the nearly defunct Doctor of Arts, and so on– so that those students who knew they were more interested in teaching than research would not contaminate the sacred pool of PhDs. Not surprisingly, these were often called “women’s” degrees back in the day. (Some years back, the chair of my department had a DA. But she also had a scholarly bibliography that went on for pages and a huge national reputation. After she had gone on from our department and served as a provost at another institution for about 5 years, She was a candidate for a provost position at a major PAC Ten university. A friend of mine from there called to ask me if we “had any problem with her degree” when we hired her as chair. Wow! She now a very highly respected college president.)
But that was the problem with the “lesser” degree. Students got put on that track before they really knew what their professional interests would be, and then the degree limited their options. Not a good strategy.
About 20 years ago Pew and the Council of Graduate Schools started a program called “Preparing Future Faculty” which was deigned to ensure that doctoral students would be exposed to their career options while they were in grad school. The program involved a partnership among the research university, a comprehensive university, a small liberal arts college, and a community college. Grad students who were part of the PFF program could meet faculty and students from the different places, maybe have a opportunity to teach at one of them for a spemester, get a sense of what faculty life was like–while considering what they might like to do and what the odds were that they would get a position in a research university. The students did not then opt for a “lesser degree” but, instead, tailored their experiences in the graduate program to prepare them well for the kind of academic career they wanted. They had all of the competencies and skills that any doctoral student would have, but they acquired them and focused them in a different way. There is nothing that says that someone who wants to emphasize teaching does not need first rate research abilities and the level of curiosity that drives research agendas. He or she just might be curious about different things
PFF has been a successful program. Students who participated went on the job market with a really clear understanding of what their options were and a much better sense that most grad students have of the wonderful variety there is in academic careers. Some of the research university faculty were resistant: I don’t want my doctoral student teaching in a community college. THose who were able to think about their students rather then themselves eventually got over this. Some never did.
Research universities need to recognize that that is it possible–and necessary–to prepare their students well for a variety of career options within the scope of the PhD. I know one school– an up and comer–that has figured this out and regularly gets good placements for over 90% of its doctoral students.
ksledge - August 12, 2009 at 7:03 pm
At my school, the graduate students are asked to be on departmental committees. There are also opportunities to take on even more service if you want to. Students also teach 2-6 semesters, and the teaching appointments include real teaching (not just grading/office hours). The emphasis is still very heavily on research, but you can find the education you need to prepare yourself to be a faculty member. We also have a “preparing future faculty” seminar.
Frankly, I’m glad that the emphasis is still on research. The best faculty positions — even at teaching-oriented institutions — care about publications, plain and simple.
dqualters - August 13, 2009 at 8:46 am
This is a much larger problem than just preparing graduate students. Even those trained in programs which support teaching development often face a tenure/promotion system where teaching excellence is often judged in quantitative terms solely by student evaluations; peer review, if done at all, is haphazard and done by faculty with little training in observation, teaching/learning and feedback techniques; judgement on teaching is given by PTR committees who often don’t require documentation beyond basics of syllabus, assignments and teaching evals; and forums to discuss and grow as teachers are often limited or even non existent. Teaching Centers have been designed to assist with these activities yet these are often the first departments to be cut in times of financial crisis. It seems that “Education” with a Capital E is now “education” with a small e in Higher Ed.
avclark - August 13, 2009 at 11:52 am
The two-track system isn’t the answer, or at least not the only one: lots of teaching-intensive institutions also want faculty to do research, perhaps not to the extent required at Research I schools, but certainly to contribute to their fields. The days of giving up research entirely in favor of teaching are over from what I see, and the junior and mid-career folks I know here and at similar institutions would have it no other way: we enjoy and are committed to teaching, but we also want to stay as active as we can within our own disciplines.
Those who speak of a change of attitude make a lot of sense, and I think that may be happening as graduate programs find their students more and more at such institutions and liking it. When I first got my job at least some of my teachers clearly thought I would “upgrade”; some still may, but others see that the balance of teaching and research (and don’t forget service!) I have here works for me, and for some of my classmates. Graduate students I meet also see that there is more out there than creating the next generation of Ph. D.s. And many schools are doing far more to develop grad students as teachers than was available to me as a TA. More needs to be done, certainly, and those of us who work at teaching-intensive institutions need to be visible in our fields to help that to happen.
Actually, one of the things my graduate program gave me that was most valuable, and not particularly strong in many other programs, was the idea of being a specialist, yes, but one with a generalist’s breadth of attitude. Since most teaching-intensive schools require us to teach well outside our own specialties, this was a tremendous gift.
Alice Clark
Ph. D., Princeton, Music History
Associate Professor, Loyola University New Orleans