A few thoughts on reducing time-to-degree.

While I think that Dean Butler’s efforts to reduce the time it takes graduate students to complete their dissertations are laudable, I’d like to offer a little more background to the history of the Yale administration’s attempts to reduce time-to-degree.

One of the ways in which Yale handles time-to-degree is to place restrictions on the ability of students to register beyond their sixth year. Under the Graduate School’s current registration policy, graduate students must petition to the central administration for registration beyond their sixth year of study. These petitions ultimately must be approved by a dean from the central administration. Because these administrators lack the specific expertise necessary to accurately judge a student’s progress, the ways in which they decide who does or does not deserve “extended” registration are, at best, obscure and at worst, irrational and arbitrary.

The history of Yale’s attempts to deal with time-to-degree goes back to 1990. In that year, the Yale administration released the Kagan-Politt plan which cut TA positions by 30%, placed restrictions on teaching for students in the fifth year and beyond, imposed a six-year registration cutoff, and increased section sizes. In response, TAs in the humanities, languages, and social sciences voted to form the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO). After repeated attempts to engage the administration in meaningful dialogue about the Kagan-Politt plan, GESO (along with members of HERE Locals 34 and 35) participated in one-day walkout on December 4, 1991. After negotiations stalled, GESO went on strike for 3 days in February 1992. The activism of 1991-92 won both a pay raise for TAs as well as an end to the draconian restrictions on registration, but which resulted in the current regulations concerning registration.Even though the current policy has been on the books since 1993, it has been unevenly enforced. Recently, however, the university administration has begun to rigidly enforce this rule. For example, the administrators of the history department introduced changes to the language of the 2004-5 blue book that both placed restrictions on the ability for upper year students to register and normatively described the history PhD as a six year program, ignoring the fact that the typical history doctorate takes somewhat longer. The majority of graduate students in the department then filed a grievance with the Graduate School requesting the withdrawal of these new restrictions and the granting of registration beyond the 6th year based solely on our advisor’s analysis of our academic work in the dissertation progress report. Because the graduate school had not changed its registration policies, but rather had simply begun to enforce them more vigorously, Dean Butler dismissed our petition.

The consequences of the denial of registration can be quite severe. Minimally, this means losing full access to the resources available to registered students such as library access and health insurance. It also means the end of student loan deferments. International students who are denied registration lose their visa status. Finally, once a student has lost institutional affiliation, it becomes far more difficult to compete on the job market. This final point is significant, since the administration has advanced this policy as a means to reduce time-to-degree, which ostensibly will help us on the job market.

We must be very careful when devising ways to reduce time-to-degree. Some of the potential pitfalls of pursuing suuch a policy include:

1. Making the academy less accessible

The punitive denial of registration disproportionately affects those who, for want of funding, must take summer jobs unrelated to their dissertation rather than continue their own research in the summers. It also imposes a very rigid and inflexible career path that is unfriendly to those with children or other family responsibilities while in graduate school. The Yale Women’s Faculty Forum has called on universities to provide daycare, dependent health care and a more flexible career path in order to retain faculty with young children. This same consideration ought to be granted to graduate students as well as faculty.

2. Undermining departmental autonomy and faculty governance.

Yale’s policy places administrators rather than our advisors in the role of judging our academic progress. This seriously undermines the integrity of the student-faculty relationship and sends a clear message to departments that they can expect their decisions to be overruled by the central administration. Most recently, in the summer of 2005, Dean Barnaby denied registration to an upper-year history student despite the fact that both the DGS and one of his faculty advisors approved his petition. In response, GESO circulated a petition signed by 82 members of the history department demanding his reinstatement. With the backing of his advisor, the student in question was able to register. It is the faculty in our departments and not the central administration who possess both the time and the competence to accurately determine whether a particular graduate student is making adequate progress.

3. Hurting the quality of our work.

While it is possible to write excellent dissertations within 6 years, limiting access to registration imposes a one-size-fits-all timeline regardless of either the field or the project. More daring and extensive projects will get short shrift if, for the sake of efficiency, researchers stick to archives and materials that are available locally or regionally and do not venture outside either the developed world or established paradigms. In the American Studies and Sociology departments, the idea of changing academic requirements has been floated in order to reduce time-to-degree. If speed and efficiency become the sole criteria by which we measure such curricular reforms, this threatens to limit the process of intellectual exploration that is so vital to maintaining the quality of the dissertations that come out of the university.

4. Denying the realities we face on the job market.

When questioned in the spring of 2005 on his priorities as the new Dean of the Graduate School, the first thing Jon Butler mentioned was reducing time to degree. Butler stated it was “clear that students who move along in their programs efficiently tend to produce the best results and, generally speaking, do the best when they’re looking for a position.” To date, the Yale administration has offered no proof to support this claim.

Additionally, this denies the realities we face on the job market. It is not the “efficiency” with which we write our dissertations that will land us a good job, but rather the quality and completeness of the work we do. Given how tight the job market is, universities are seeking people who can quickly turn their dissertations into publishable manuscripts.

In the last decade or so, it has become increasingly unlikely to obtain tenure-track employment during our first foray on the job market. Frequently, students who apply for registration beyond their 6th years have gone on the job market but failed to obtain decent employment. According to a recent report by the Department of Education, new faculty jobs have gone disproportionately to adjuncts. Even though degree-granting colleges employed some 60,000 more faculty members in 2003 than in 2001, the increase in full-time employment was only 2 percent, while the rise for part-timers was 10 percent. As a result, nearly half of the jobs in academe are held by part-timers off the tenure track. It is likely that a more demanding job market is increasing the academy’s time-to-degree statistics rather than graduate students who “get off track.”

Finally, we can look at Princeton as an example of how not to reduce time-to-degree. Until recently, Princeton has granted 5 years of funding without teaching responsibilities, but with a firm 5 year cap on registration. According to this plan, you ought to be able to complete a dissertation in five years given this level of support. However, this never worked out in practice. There has been considerable dissent among Princeton’s graduate student body over these policies. A recent issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly characterized the registration policy as “cruel and inhumane.” It also failed to reflect the reality facing Princeton’s graduate student body.

Princeton recently admitted that approximately 80% of each cohort of graduate students entered “post-enrolled” status – the designation they give to students still at Princeton beyond their 5th year. In 2006, they will be initiating a new policy which will allow 7 years of registration.

Yes, it is important to find ways of helping graduate students finish the PhD more quickly. However, this must be done with the full input and cooperation of graduate students. To that end, universities should explicitly place the evaluation of a student’s progress towards completion of the PhD within the student-faculty relationship with no interference from the central administration. Finally, registration policies must be sensitive to the complexities of our lives. Where feasible, academic administrations should negotiate a workable family and medical leave policy with its graduate teaching workforce, and offer year-round support adequate enough to support us in our own writing and research especially in our upper years.

All this talk about reducing time-to-degree has regrettably invokes a vision of the university that emphasizes the values of efficiency, quantity and bureaucratic control over the values of contemplation, quality, and academic freedom. We must insist that teaching, writing and academic work is a craft, not an industrial process that can be sped up and rationalized.

Jay Driskell, PhD Candidate at Yale University, at 11:10 am EDT on April 17, 2006

Mayra, sad to say, is right on target. One important aspect not considered in this discussion is not only the saturation of PhDs on the open market (and I disagree with Hoosier who says that the mass retirement happened), but the saturation of lesser-brand PhDs on the market.

No doubt there are name-brand humanities profs searching for tt positions, but multiply that number by a factor to get the number of total PhDs on, in or hiding from the market. Adjuncting, the preferred business model from everyone from Land-grant State U. to the University of Phoenix will continue to grow because it makes economic sense. AND as long as the supply is full, there will be enough Stamford and lesser-brand PhDs to fill the slots, semester-by-semester, class-by-class.

Piss Poor Prof, at 12:55 pm EDT on April 17, 2006

Sacrilege

I don’t believe that even physicians go to greater lengths to manipulate supply and demand than college professors. When I applied to my first Ph.D. program, the committee made me promise I would not teach.

After 20 years in corporate life and polishing off a second program, I have come to realize how intellectually limited the Ph.D is and what a poor predictor of job success it can be. Give me someone with ten or twenty years of solid corporate experience with a variety of industries any day. Give me a chemist from a pharma company or a physicist from a DOE site. If they are PhD with real world experience, so much the better. PhD go through twenty plus years of experience and generally never learn the basics of anything associated with their jobs — the dissertation is the first piece of work that represents how they will earn their livelihood.

Colleges do not care whether they overproduce MBA’s or BA chemists or accountants. Why should they be concerned with PhD’s? Let the oversupply come to the real world and compete. Suck it up, you little nancy boys!

sillyone, at 4:00 pm EDT on April 17, 2006

Jay Driskell has a point — as long as armies of TA’s staff universities, you will have a pool of exploitable labor. Universities have no reason to reduce time to degree programs.

So why not do the following to reduce time to degree?

- Limit teaching support to four to six semesters.

- Create clear sign posts of progress. Penalize departments when large numbers of students fail to meet these requirements

- Reward professors whose students complete degrees in reasonable amounts of time.

- Reward students and professors for excellent job placement.

- After 8 years or so, start cutting people off. You should be punished for not making significant progress after a reasonable amount of time. It wouldn’t be draconian, but why should you be allowed to continue if you haven’t shown *some* progress?

- Do things to make financial life easier for grad students. Health insurance payments, for example, are pretty burdensome when you make $12,000 per year. What can we do to make life cheaper for grad students?

- Publish mentoring results for departments and individual professors. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If a department hasn’t placed a student in 3 years, you know there’s a problem.

Maybe some of these are good and others bad, but these seem like much more productive ideas than academy bashing. These kinds of proposals at least try to set up the right incentives. Otherwise, you assume individual departments all by themselves will solve the problem, which ain’t gonna happen.

Fabio Rojas, at 6:20 pm EDT on April 17, 2006

Sweeping up after the circus

Highly questionable job prospects. Uncertain funding. High teaching loads. Work supervisors who are also your academic supervisors — ENRON would be jealous.

Yeah, the circus can be fun. Just go in, with your eyes open. And if you get the shaft — remember, you were warned. No one to blame but yourself.

B.J., at 11:05 pm EDT on April 17, 2006

Academic Problems Yet to Be Solved

1. Some Professors intend to let student stay longer, particurly on the fourth or fifth year, so “cheap labor” guy has no way out. 2. Some Professors ask his current students to prepare a new research subjects for his next graduate students, and this may take time. 3. Of course, there are students who do not have much creativity on new ideas will enjoy “the cheap labor guy’s contribution.4. How to solve these problems?

Thomas Y. Lee, at 1:30 pm EDT on August 25, 2006