Doctoral Students Report Satisfaction, But Inadequate Preparation

Katherine Friedrich

Adam Fagen of the National Academy of Sciences presented results from his research for the National Doctoral Program Survey at the CIRTL Forum 2008, which took place in Madison, Wisconsin on June 16-17. Most of the respondents were satisfied with their programs, but did not feel prepared for their future careers.

Fagen and his former colleagues at the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students developed the survey. Over 32,000 students from nearly 400 North American graduate institutions participated. The researchers compared the results across programs and across fields. Although the data are eight years old, they still provide insight to graduate students, administrators and faculty.

Fagen showed three contrasting slides – one slide stating that 90 percent of students said they felt prepared for an academic career, and two other slides stating that 60 percent or less of students said they felt prepared to teach, apply for grants, or do public speaking.

“It’s important for students to ask whether they are getting the kind of experiences that prepare them for future careers,” Fagen says. “Students are not really sure where they are going to go, and are not sure that most of the jobs where they are going to be will involve substantial teaching.”

Students in the life sciences said they would appreciate greater preparation for teaching. Teaching assistants in many fields reported they were not sufficiently prepared for their classroom responsibilities and sometimes lacked supervision.

The respondents felt more prepared for academic careers than for nonacademic ones. Some said their departments disapproved of graduates who pursued non-research careers – which included both college teaching and nonacademic jobs. Students who were interested in nonacademic jobs fared best in engineering and worst in the humanities.

Over 80 percent of students were satisfied with their programs, their advisors and mentors, and the graduate student communities in their departments. Even though many programs recruited students from underrepresented groups, female and minority students were somewhat less satisfied with their social environments than their peers were.

In response to potential concerns that the respondents may have been a particularly critical group, Fagen and his colleagues wrote that their results appear positively biased in comparison to a similar study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A detailed comparison of the two studies is available on the Web.

The survey results are available online at http://survey.nagps.org.

July 28, 2008

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