Graduate Admissions Are Downstream of Faculty Hiring
Everything comes back to original sin
One of the latest mini-tempests to sweep through academic social media concerns the increasing difficulty of graduate admissions, which is a regular seasonal event at this point. I think the current round started here:
At least, this is the first thing I saw. This has led to a lot of follow-ups, some of which get my back up in a way that I’ll explain a bit later. One of the more interesting took a look at astronomy specifically, in terms of the population of undergrad students who might apply for graduate school, which has tripled since the 1990s:
I generally approve of the approach here, which is a little more data-driven than many of the lamentations I’ve seen elsewhere, though I don’t quite agree with the conclusions. As I noted somewhat cryptically, I think there’s a big piece of this that is really a consequence of the faculty job market, which in turn makes it really hard to solve.
To be fair, at some level every problem with American academia comes back to the Original Sin of the field, which is the massive overproduction of Ph.D.’s relative to the number of faculty jobs over the last several decades. That’s led to a vast oversupply of people looking for academic employment, which has distorted the job market in any number of ways that are terrible for the profession. It also has important consequences on an educational and institutional level, which on the surface might look like a Good Thing, but end up contributing to the problem of hyper-qualified students applying to graduate school.
What I mean by that is that the terrible job market for faculty has, over the years, pushed a lot of prospective faculty down the prestige hierarchy. New Ph.D.’s who might in decades past have been good candidates for elite research universities are boxed out of those jobs, and end up at schools that decades past might’ve been happier to higher faculty who were less driven to do research. The market being what it is, though, they’re ending up with people who have greater scholarly ambitions, who are more active. And having been presented with the opportunity to hire these people, institutions quite sensibly have chosen to make use of them and their ambitions. This leads to the common complaint that standards for tenure have increased to an absurd degree, causing no end of stress for junior faculty even at lower-prestige institutions. Places that in the past would’ve cared primarily about teaching and treated research as a nice bonus factor now have significant research expectations for new hires (even when they have limited resources to support those).
Faculty being industrious and ingenious, these people mostly find ways to make scholarly progress at a level you wouldn’t’ve seen 30 years ago, which leads to the oft-lamented vast increase in the quantity of scholarly literature. That, in turn, is the direct cause of the problem that kicked this off: more students are applying to grad school with publications as undergrads because more faculty are doing research at a level that can produce co-author credits for their students. And there’s the usual non-linear feedback loop here, in that those students are more driven to go to grad school, and then on to academia, where they run into the teeth of the lousy job market that pushes smart and ambitious people even further out from the elite-research-university core of yesteryear.
And that gets to the thing that gets my back up, here, which is that many of the people lamenting this situation end up, essentially, calling for me to not do my job. That is, I’m a professor at an undergrad-only institution, where one of the things my colleagues and I do is to provide research experiences for undergraduates. In fact, for four years, I was the Director of Undergraduate Research, controlling a fairly significant budget with the goal of maximizing the number of students who get to do research. Which will inevitably lead to an increase in the number of students applying to grad school who have research experience, up to and including co-authorship of research articles.
So, in a very real sense, making this particular problem worse is my job. And if I’m being honest, it’s one of the best parts of my job— I am where I am because I had opportunities to do research as an undergraduate, and enjoyed the experience enough that I decided to pursue a job providing those opportunities to future generations of students.
As a result, I get reflexively annoyed with people whose response to the problem of “too many” undergraduates having research experience is that we should stop providing exceptional students with the opportunity to showcase their talents. Particularly when this comes from people at the sort of elite R1 schools that look down at us lowly PUI’s. I don’t want to pick specific fights, so I’m not going to link to examples, but they’re not that hard to find.
But this is also why I find a lot of the proposed solutions to the problem to be impractical to the point of being misguided. Specifically, I think proposals to significantly increase the number of graduate students are completely unhelpful, because they’ll just end up making the core problem worse, by feeding even more people into the potential-faculty pool and making all the Bad Trends that cascade down from that worse.
To my mind, the only really workable solution to the problem is to go in the opposite direction: to significantly reduce the number of students going on to graduate school. Not by artificially restricting their numbers, but by providing more attractive options for people with only undergraduate degrees who might otherwise consider the academic track. This would eventually reduce the glut of Ph.D.’s, which will reduce the pressure on faculty and prospective faculty, and allow everybody to ease up a little.
But, of course, that just shifts the “Oh, so you’re telling me not to do my job? Fuck you!” to a different point in the system. People whose careers depend on the assistance of graduate students aren’t going to regard this as an attractive option, and it’s hard to blame them. Which is a big part of why it’s such a messy and intractable problem.
But as with basically everything else that’s annoying in academia, the root cause is the terrible job market for faculty, which has been screwing everything up for decades.
So, that’s cheerful. Yeesh. Now I’m going to go to a lunch event and try to convince some high school students that they ought to come here, where they’ll get the opportunity to do research with faculty…
Anyway, if you’d like more of this kind of thing to turn up in your inbox, here’s a button:
And if you want to argue with me about this, the comments will be open:
How much of the glut of overqualified candidates at all levels of academia is, to some significant extent, explained by the failure of enrollment at the "top" 50 colleges and universities to keep pace with population growth? Shouldn't the astronomy, physics, chemistry, etc. departments among all R1 institutions be ~50% larger than they were 35 years ago?
Astronomy undergrad degrees might be rising because undergrad STEM degrees are more marketable to employers than liberal arts degrees. I highly doubt all of these undergraduates intend to be astronomers.
One of the ways to reduce the grad student population is to severely restrict student loans. Right now grad students are allowed to borrow 100 percent of need- which is tuition plus room and board and living expenses. And then through income based repayment options, paying only 10 percent of even a miserly salary results in eventual loan forgiveness. Many of these PhD’s, MA’s, JD’s from second and third tier schools borrow six figures and then can’t even pay the interest. The taxpayer is being had, all while perpetuating bloat in academia.
Of course, this would just eliminate teaching jobs and programs at many second and third tier schools- so be it. Offer value for money rather than relying upon stealing from the taxpayer .