Report of the Task Group on
Graduate Student Success
DRAFT of 3/1/04
INTRODUCTION
The University of Maryland,
College Park (UM), is one of the nation’s
major research universities. Designated
as the “flagship” institution of the University System of Maryland in 1988, UM
is legislatively mandated to assume a leadership role in graduate instruction
for the State of Maryland. Its unique
location in the Baltimore-Washington corridor affords students and faculty access
to one of the greatest concentrations of research and cultural facilities and
intellectual talent in the nation.
According to Office of
Institutional Research and Planning (OIRP) data as of Fall 2003, UMCP enrolls 35,329 students of which 25,666 are
undergraduates and 9,883 are
graduates. The majority of graduate
students are enrolled full-time, and there are a total of 4,663 masters and
4,366 doctoral degree candidates with 854 first professional and advanced
special students.
Excellence in graduate
education depends upon outstanding performance at both the individual and
program level. It is not enough simply
to have superb teaching and research faculty and well-qualified students. It is no longer enough for a student to
simply master research and technical skills in graduate school. A successful graduate program, especially as
it pertains to doctoral students, must also include training in the art of
teaching and of publishing one’s work, the ethics of practice, the
responsibilities of service, and the navigation of professional organizations
or relationships. But the key ingredient is an institutional responsibility to
provide research opportunities at the forefront of scholarship and science.
Only then will graduate programs turn out prepared professionals, with
successful job placements, ready to make long-term contributions to their
fields of study.
Contribution to the field may include writing of the
dissertation as well as other publications, presentations at professional
meetings, and peer recognition as evidenced by awards received or citations of
the student’s research. The rate of
success in placement for new doctoral students and the perceived quality of the
placement is significant to the reputation of a graduate program. The definition
of successful placement will vary across disciplines and evaluation of
placement of master’s students is perhaps even more complex. Although placement quality is harder to
measure than placement rate, it represents an important component of the mission
of a nationally ranked research university which is likely to increase its
ability to attract the best students. Placement quality is also critically
dependent on graduate students being trained at the cutting edge of progress in
their field.
CHARGE TO THE TASK
GROUP
The Task Force will make
recommendations for specific policies and practices regarding graduate student
success and offer commentary upon support and costs/revenues that will bring
the University of Maryland in line with best practices. Through comparison with peer institutions,
the task group will examine key issues including: 1) time to degree; 2) the
campus subsidy for students (tuition remission, Graduate School
fellowships, department/faculty support
through assistantships, fellowships, etc.) that should be expected for resident
and nonresident students; 3) the tuition revenue generated by graduate student
tuition that is paid by students, grants and contracts, and other sources
(excluding tuition rates), for both full and part time students; and 4) the
expectations of teaching and research assistants including duration of
employment.
SUMMARY AND
RECOMMENDATION
The University of Maryland
has many strong departments in the key disciplines and is now poised to meet
the next level of opportunities. It is becoming increasingly clear that the
most rapid advancements in scholarship and research are occurring at the
intersections of traditional departmental and disciplinary lines. The single
most important resource of a successful graduate program is its intellectual
rigor and substance and the major recommendation of this report emanates
directly from this fact. We must find ways to enhance existing
multidisciplinary efforts and identify new multidisciplinary initiatives to
remain competitive with our peers and to remain at the forefront in the
generation of new knowledge.
Key Recommendation: Identify and nurture key emergent areas of study in
which UM has a base of excellent faculty across departments and colleges and
establish funded research teams and degree-granting doctoral programs that
transcend departmental administrative units.
Action
Item: The
Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School will convene
monthly meetings of dean’s representatives to initiate, enhance, and respond to
multidisciplinary research opportunities that require broad participation
across the Campus.
Action
Item: The
Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School will continue to
develop Memoranda of Understanding with federal laboratories, other federal
agencies, cultural institutions, and regional consortia (e.g. SURA).
ELEMENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL GRADUATE EXPERIENCE
The key recommendation in
this report is intimately tied to a number of supporting recommendations which
are aimed at ensuring that the departments and disciplines that form the basis
of the proposed multidisciplinary efforts will remain strong and continue to
excel. These supporting recommendations
are necessary for attracting the best possible students who will perform
research at the cutting edge of the field, allowing these students to complete
their degrees in a reasonable time frame, and enabling these students to be
successfully placed into positions from which they can contribute new knowledge
to their fields.
The elements identified by the committee that are
critical to meeting the goals of attracting excellent students who will perform
cutting edge research, complete their degrees in a timely
manner, and find successful
placement from which they can contribute new knowledge to their
fields are described below:
Availability
of Intellectual Resources and Multidisciplinary Research
The single most important
resource of a successful graduate program is its intellectual rigor and
substance. Highly talented faculty and
challenging curricula are major keys to the recruitment of excellent students.
Additionally, a successful graduate program must provide its students with
cutting edge technology for computing and research, excellent library services,
and appropriate and sufficient office or laboratory space to enable progress
toward the degree. Access to research
facilities, on- and off-campus, and a vibrant intellectual life (seminar
series, brown bag lunches, reading groups, etc.) greatly enhance the educational
experience and engage students in
research and professional exploration.
Last but not least, timely access to faculty mentors is essential to
developing and maintaining a vigorous intellectual environment.
It is becoming increasingly
clear that the most rapid advancements in scholarship and research are
occurring at the intersections of traditional departmental and disciplinary
lines. Universities are organized administratively into departments and the
disciplines represented by these departments form the backbone of great
universities. The University of Maryland has many strong departments in the key
disciplines and is now poised to meet the next level of opportunities. To remain competitive with our peers, be
secure at the forefront of the generation of new knowledge, and to excel in
training of the next generation of scholars and scientists, we must find ways
to enhance existing multidisciplinary efforts and identify new
multidisciplinary initiatives.
Successful multidisciplinary
programs typically arise through one of three mechanisms, and all three are
represented on this Campus. One
mechanism is the gradual participation of an increasing number of faculty with
common intellectual interest in an area of investigation that is inherently broad
and diverse. The evolution of the Neuroscience and Cognitive Sciences (NACS)
program on this Campus, now numbering 80+ faculty, is one example. Neuroscience
is inherently interdisciplinary and this program offers a wide range of
research and training opportunities for students who are interested in pursuing
doctoral-level research in a variety of areas within neuroscience,
computational neuroscience, and cognitive science. Faculty research interests
extend from molecular neurobiology, neural and behavioral systems, all the way
to studies of language, and cognition. Research and training activities of NACS
take place within the participating departments, which include (but are not
limited to) Animal and Avian Sciences, Biology, Computer Science, Center for
Automation Research, Electrical
Engineering, English, Hearing and Speech Sciences, Human Development, Human
Nutrition and Food Science, Kinesiology, Linguistics, Mathematics, Philosophy,
and Psychology. While the NACS Program
offers degrees, the student must also be enrolled in a “Home” department. The vibrant intellectual exchange among NACS
faculty with diverse interests is now spawning the development of smaller
interdisciplinary research teams that are highly competitive and successful in
securing external support from NIH and NSF and other federal agencies.
A different mechanism can be
found in the establishment of the Center for the Study of Advanced Language
(CASL). In response to an opportunity for external funding, and based on
strengths of exiting faculty on Campus, we developed a multidisciplinary
research center. In this case, we
competed for funding for a University Affiliated Research Center to meet a
national need that is also intended to establish a long-term commitment to
research in language and linguistics.
CASL brings together the disciplines of psychology, computer science,
linguistics, and language acquisition to study a broad range of research areas
including foreign languages and dialects, theoretical and descriptive
linguistics, second language acquisition, information retrieval and use,
machine translation, language and analysis, and deception.
Yet a third mechanism entails
the Campus proactively identifying emergent areas of study and related faculty
strengths and requesting funding to support the particular research area. The University of Maryland Institute for
Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) is an example of this proactive
mechanism. UMIACS’ mission is to
foster interdisciplinary research and education in computing. Its research programs are led by distinguished
faculty with joint appointments in units across the Campus including Computer
Science, Engineering, Education, Philosophy, Business, Life Sciences, and
Information Sciences. The Campus
brought together the resources necessary to develop and support the Institute
with the aim of encouraging a rapid maturation so that UMIACS became a
self-sustaining interdisciplinary intellectual hub within a short time. In this model, faculty and graduate student
multidisciplinary research occurs and is supported within the Institute, but
the degrees are offered by the disciplinary departments.
These three models have all led to vibrant, successful, and competitive
multidisciplinary research programs on this Campus. To be sure, there exist a
variety of other multidisciplinary research efforts on Campus, both in the
sciences and non sciences as, for example, the Committee for Philosophy,
Politics, and Public Policy. The great opportunities to develop and enhance
these multidisciplinary research teams, and to encourage departments or groups of departments to make adjustments to
their existing programs in such a way as to facilitate and encourage
interdisciplinary research lead to the major recommendation of this
report.
The Vice President for
Research will convene a monthly meeting of dean’s representatives to identify,
enhance, and initiate multidisciplinary research efforts through the following
actions.
Recruitment of Excellent
Students
Whether a traditional,
disciplinary program or an emergent, interdisciplinary program, it is important
that doctoral programs are able to attract the best and brightest students as
measured over time by such things as GREs, undergraduate GPAs, and the
perceived quality of undergraduate institutions attended, as well as by
non-quantitative measure of a student’s potential to excel such as strong
letters of recommendation, writing samples, and previous research success. One way to determine if UM is getting the
best students is to compare the academic characteristics of the enrolled
graduate students to those at our peer institutions. At the request of the task force, a query is in progress to the
AAU Data Exchange (AAUDE) in order to place UM graduate student characteristics
within a national context. While the
data are not yet sufficient to make any definitive statements about the quality
of UM graduate students compared to those of other AAU institutions,
preliminary data on GRE scores and undergraduate GPAs suggest the following is
true. UM graduate students have GRE scores and undergraduate GPAs that are
slightly lower than one of its peers, UCLA, while they are generally higher
than other AAU public four year institutions that responded to the survey. A higher response rate will be required in
order to make confident statements about the characteristics of our new
doctoral student quality and this effort is underway. However, we note that UM’s newly enrolled doctoral student
combined average GREs have continued to climb over the last three years,
increasing from 1919 in Fall 2001 to 1965 in Fall 2003. Undergraduate GPAs have remained stable at
approximately 3.48.
The Graduate School will
continue to expand its assistance to departments in recruiting and retaining a
graduate student cohort that is diverse in race, gender, social class and
nationality. All departments should
actively market their graduate programs in a manner that best supports a “good
fit” between the student and the program, or else retention will become an
issue. To ensure the best fit,
departments must provide prospective students clear information with respect to
program requirements, faculty research foci, progress assessment, typical
time-to-degree, financial support, completion and attrition rates, job
placement, and the amount of time that students can expect with their advisor.
Recommendation:
1. The Division of Research and Graduate Studies will
raise a $2M endowment fund to enable programs to invite prospective students to
campus to meet faculty as well as enrolled graduate students.
Stable and Sufficient Financial Aid
Financial support is an
important factor in recruiting and retaining students, time-to-degree, and the
completion of a degree in graduate programs. Lovitts (2001) investigated the
relationship of attrition rates to types of support. She found the lowest attrition rates among those with research
assistantships (17%) and teaching assistantships (24%), followed by
university-sponsored fellowships (31%), privately sponsored fellowships (39%)
and those with no outside support (80%).
Clearly teaching and research assistantships enhance completion because
they involve departmental investment in the student’s success and enable high levels
of routine student interaction with departmental faculty and with other
graduate students. Just as clearly,
research assistantships allow students to focus on research and generally do
not detract from the student’s dissertation.
While fellowships allow students to focus on research, a concerted
effort must be made to integrate fellowship students into all facets of
department life rather than allowing fellows to participate selectively or not
at all. Therefore, it is critical that
financial aid not only be sufficient to support a student through degree
completion, but that it also be the right type of aid and be competitive with
the amount and types of aid offered by other institutions so that we may
attract and retain the best students.
Data on peer institutions’ support levels should be made readily
available to college deans and graduate programs directors to allow them to
assess their positions relative to other institutions.
In examining the campus
subsidy that should be expected for resident and non-resident students, we
reviewed a summary of the AAUDE Stipend Survey data for UM and four of its peer
institutions (UNC did not submit data) for AY 2002-2003. The data indicated that the cost to the
institution for resident and non-resident graduate teaching assistants at UM is
at the lower end of that of its peer institutions and for non-resident graduate
research assistants is considerably lower than three of the four peers. This is to be expected since all teaching
and research assistants at UM, whether resident or non-resident, automatically
have tuition remitted at the resident rate.
UM is the only institution among its peers to consider non-resident
graduate students as resident for tuition purposes. This policy results in an understatement of the net cost to the
institution (stipend plus tuition).
With respect to health insurance, however, UM’s subsidy is much higher
than its peers because UM allows teaching and research assistants access to
employee health insurance plans. A
summary of this data is included in Appendix A.
Recommendations:
Competitive Completion Rates and Reasonable
Time-to-Degree
Doctoral student attrition is
an issue in varying degrees throughout the United States. Although many
involved in graduate education acknowledge that doctoral programs cannot be
expected to have the completion rates found in the shorter and more clearly
defined professional programs of medicine, business or law, an attrition rate
nationwide between 40% and 50% is quite problematic. Time and monetary investments toward the doctoral degree are significant
both for the institution, the faculty, and the student. If, as research shows, there is very little
difference in GRE score and undergraduate GPA of those who complete their
degrees and those who drop out, high attrition is a waste of talent and resources. The nature of academic work is such that it
is not uncommon for students to “try out” graduate studies and then find that
it is not right for them, particularly if they are self-supporting. However, if a student is committed to
completing a degree, and the program has provided financial, intellectual, and
moral support, completion rates are an important indicator of graduate program
success.
According to a recent article
in the Chronicle for Higher Education,
trends in attrition show that women drop out at a higher rate than men,
minorities at a higher rate than white students and American students at a
higher rate than international students. In a UMCP Graduate Student Survey conducted
in 2000, graduate students were asked to indicate which factors they thought
contributed to their failure to complete the degree. These factors included full-time job responsibilities or
financial difficulties, family obligations, difficulties with
thesis/dissertation topics, program structure or requirements, and difficulties
with course scheduling. In other
studies, factors leading to successful completion of the degree included an
early match between advisor and student, stable and sufficient financial
support, early involvement in research, and consistent advising and
mentoring. One example of an attempt to
influence these issues may be seen in Washington University-Saint Louis’s
decision ten years ago to establish a policy that cut the size of graduate
programs to match the number of assistantships available to the number of
students, thereby ensuring every student is supported on an assistantship or
fellowship for six years. While this
policy change may have affected a number of other factors which in turn influence
completion rate, the data show that the completion rate in the humanities went
from 34% to 68% over the last ten years and the overall completion rate at the
University is now 70%.
Exceedingly long times to
degree completion are costly both to students and to the University. In addition, it reduces the productive
work-life of holders of advanced degrees to their disciplines, and discourages
some undergraduates from considering graduate school. Shorter time to degree is not necessarily synonymous with high
quality graduate education but timely progress is indicative of intellectual
vigor, competence, and commitment.
Each program should develop its own normative time-to-degree and model
of timely progress. The model should
include identifying the stages and requirements of the degree program,
reasonable times for achieving each stage or milestone, and a means to identify
students at risk and plans for appropriate intervention with those
students. Each student’s progress
should be reviewed annually with respect to this model.
Recommendation:
Strong and Consistent Advising and Mentoring
Regular advising is a key
factor in bolstering retention of graduate students, maintaining excellent
academic performance, creating top-notch, competitive graduates, and placing
students in good jobs. It is hard to overstate the importance of
regular, scheduled meetings between student and advisor in which clear
expectations and timetables for completion of courses, exams and other
milestones in a graduate program are established. It is useful to distinguish between advising and mentoring.
Individual mentoring is at the heart of imparting graduate knowledge. By
mentoring we mean a closer, more complex relationship between a faculty member
and a student. A mentor fills multiple
roles—functioning not just as a teacher and advisor, but also as a role model,
collaborator, colleague, and friend. It
is through experiencing this type of multifaceted relationship that the student
assimilates the culture and values of the discipline and learns how to be a
professional. If students are afforded
regular contact with faculty in the proper environment, then general
discussions about issues and challenges in the discipline, professional
expectations and responsibilities, and likely career paths can occur naturally.
When this happens, it is more likely
that students will be retained, that progress through degree requirements will
be satisfactory, that degrees will be obtained on time, and that students will
obtain good job placements.
Faculty
mentors should do more than simply advise.
Mentors should select coursework that matches student needs and
interests and yet does not extend time to degree; encourage early participation
in seminars, laboratory work, reading groups and other activities that engage
students in research and assist them in developing their dissertation topic;
provide regular and substantive feedback on their dissertation progress; define
the scope of the dissertation topic so that it can be completed in a reasonable
timeframe; and engage students in the current academic and professional issues
in the discipline on a regular basis.
Recommendations:
Sufficient and Supportive Placement Services
Providing students with good
sources for job searches, assisting them in crafting CVs, and teaching
interview techniques (especially for academic positions) will increase the
likelihood of appropriate job placement, which is the ultimate goal of a strong
graduate program.
Recommendation:
Responsibilities of
Teaching and Research Assistants
In the 2000 UMCP Graduate
Survey, two out of five students with half-time and full-time assistantships
reported being expected to work “more” or “much more” than their official
workloads of 10 or 20 hours per week.
These respondents were disproportionately teaching rather than research
assistants. With a higher ratio of
teaching assistants to research assistants than our peers, it is especially
important to ensure that graduate students are not overextended with duties
associated with their teaching assistantships thus prolonging time to degree
and reducing degree completion rates.
In January 2004, a survey on
teaching and research assistant responsibilities was sent to graduate directors
at UM. Twenty-three graduate programs
responded and they showed a wide range of TA responsibilities that varied
considerably across disciplines. For
example, a humanities program reported that 15 to 20 TAs a year act as
“instructors of record,” teaching at least three courses per year. Similarly, in the behavioral and social
sciences, one program reported that 10 to 12 TAs are assigned to be instructors
of record and teach at least 2 courses per year, each with 25 to 35 students
per course. One science program
responded that approximately 12 teaching assistants run approximately 54
sections which have on average 20 students per section. [In other words, the
average TA teaches 4.5 sections totaling about a 100 students] Although the data, at this point, are
limited, it is clear that teaching assistants undertake a heavy teaching load
that requires many more hours than the 20 for which they are obligated. It is hard to imagine that this level of
teaching duties does not slow a graduate student’s progress towards a degree.
In some disciplines, only a
few TAs were assigned as instructor of record to 2 courses per year, and in
others, all TAs were assigned sections to lead, some with responsibility for
only one section per year with 25 students on average per section. Most TAs who lead discussion sections or
labs also assist the instructor with grading.
The responsibilities for
research assistants were less variable across programs according to survey
responses. RAs usually work under the
direction of the principal investigator and assist the faculty member either in
conducting assigned tasks related to the research or parts of the research
itself, as outlined in the research grant.
Often, the student uses some portion of the research for his or her
doctoral dissertation.
To understand the
relationship between graduate assistant workload, financial support,
time-to-degree or degree completion, it is important to obtain more detailed
information. The other side of this
complicated issue is the program’s need for instructors. It would be difficult to maintain the
undergraduate courses if graduate student teaching loads were cut. Finding the right balance is a challenge.
Recommendations:
1. The Graduate Council will review policies for graduate
student teaching that take into account the teaching obligations specific to
field of study, the necessity of teaching experience for future job placement,
and the relationship between time spent as a teaching assistant and timely
degree completion.
2. The Research Council will develop incentives for
faculty to include more research assistantship support in grant
applications.
3. Departments should provide teaching assistant training
programs for all new teaching assistants.
Student Services and Quality of Life
The quality of life of
graduate students is also important for both recruitment and retention. The
campus needs to provide adequate affordable graduate housing, office or
laboratory space, parking, childcare
if needed, and a range of activities for interaction with other students in
their own programs and in other programs throughout campus.
Recommendations:
COMMITTEE
J. Dennis O’Connor, Chair
Nehama Babin
Peter Carruthers
Robert Dooling
Michele Eastman
Irwin Forseth
Elizabeth Hays
Irwin Morris
Judith Paterson
Meg Pearson
Jonathan Rosenberg
Abby Vogel