On Doctoral Education

During my career I have taught at four schools with doctoral programs, three state and one private. Two of them considered doctoral program a profit center where the "financial aid"they provided were more in the nature of plantation wages. The third considered it a cost center, and the fourth  considered it practically a non-center since most students were part-time who paid hefty tuition to be a "doctor".

When a doctoral program is considered a cost center, the university is forced to invest in the program, and that can not happen unless there is the willingness to inflict pain on itself so that there is gain in the future. When it is considered a profit center, there is an incentive to invest not because of a pain-gain calculus, but because of the possibility of cross-subsidisation, usually to reduce costs elsewhere, especially of the undergraduate programs. These schools run old-fashioned plantations with the doctoral students.

A few years ago we went through a doctoral program reviews at Albany, and the process was an eye opener. The time-to-graduate is relatively short in STEM fields because most students are engaged in research well, because they are sup[ported more often with FUNDED research with DELIVERABLES. In STEM fields there is a culture of profit center of a different sort: the university invests in capital, but the faculty must bring its own investment through external research funding for non-capital expenditures.  By the time they graduate, most STEM doctorates are fully prepared for opportunities in teaching/research as well as in the industry or government. There is a culture of accountability.

In the non-STEM fields, on the other hand, the culture is one of cost center where we expect the university to bring in most of the funds, but since that often does not happen, we emulate the profit center of the worst kind: Instead of soliciting research funding to support doctoral students we finagle funds from the universities to support doctoral education and use them to cut costs elsewhere (usually in undergraduate education). This robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul strategy leads to lengthy time-to-graduate and higher drop out rates.  In these non-STEM fields, especially in business,  by the time the students graduate, they think and are expected to be able to walk on water, but the very fact that their opportunities are more often than not confined to the academia suggests an anomaly. In non-STEM fields what I think is required is to stop thinking of doctoral programs the same way Division I football schools think of their programs as a sort of minor league NFL; a 4-5 year time served for teaching at colleges.  In non-STEM fields there is a culture of entitlement.

I have of course, as usual, drawn a caricature above, but suspect there is more than a grain of truth there. And of course there are many exceptions to the above, and I salute those schools.