Administrators are putting the finishing touches on a report they hope will help combat attrition among graduate students and encourage directors of graduate studies to reevaluate the experience of graduate students at various phases of the doctoral program.
Leigh Deneef, associate dean of the Graduate School, said the report is meant to initiate conversations across departmental lines by highlighting good practices in graduate education and encouraging departments to adopt such practices if applicable to their own areas of study.
"The report gives examples of practices that are successful, and we're going to try to take those across departmental, or even divisional, lines," Deneef said. "We want to get conversations going between scientists, humanists, everyone."
Round-table discussions - which involved the Executive Committee of Graduate Faculty, DGSs and some department chairs within the Graduate School-broke graduate students' experiences down into distinct phases of the doctoral program.
"The reasons people drop out after their first year differ from when they drop out after four or five years," Deneef said.
More specifically, the discussions centered on department practices concerning student orientation, integration and examinations, and on methods of monitoring students' progress toward a degree.
"We had round-table conversations, not just about attrition, but about everything we did at different stages in a students' experience," Deneef said.
Dean of the Graduate School Lewis Siegel said the discussions helped bring to the surface a wide variety of approaches to graduate education. "We had these talks with the fundamental theme of seeing if there are simple things we can share with each other that might help reduce the significant attrition rate," Siegel said.
Deneef hopes to complete the report by the end of August so that he can distribute it to DGSs and the ECGF. After the report is released, he said, DGSs will be able to apply it to their own departments as they see fit because administrators do not wish to hamper flexibility with rigid, overarching policies.
"Because the Ph.D. is a research degree focused in a disciplinary area, much of the intellectual center has to be in the department or discipline itself," Deneef said. "The Graduate School will provide where it can for other kinds of needs... and keep practices we think are successful very visible. But some practices won't make sense for every division."
Still, he said, the Graduate School will keep pressure on DGSs for certain kinds of changes. For example, Siegel and Deneef saw the forging of a closer connection between students' preliminary examinations and their dissertations as something that could benefit all departments.
The Graduate School decided to examine its climate last year when the ECGF pinpointed attrition rates as a chronic problem. The committee examined the problem in terms of the admissions process, faculty mentoring and career advising.
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