Ph.D. program enrollments

Naomi Chana worries about how to advise students on to Ph.D. or not to Ph.D. (that's the question, yes indeed), while the Invisible Adjunct ponders attrition and reform. Some thoughts:

• I suspect it will be easier to push reforms through at public universities as opposed to private universities, but not necessarily for a reason anyone is going to like. One word: legislators.
• It should be possible to key enrollments to placement rates (if, that is, you can get reliable placement rates in the first place, and if, that is, you can agree on what counts as placement). I'm not sure that this is the sort of thing that can be phased in all at once, since you'd need to do some counting over time. Let's say you've got a Ph.D. program that every year admits about 60 students and graduates 20. In the next three years, 1/4 of those graduated Ph.D.s get tenure-track jobs; the other 3/4 are adjuncting, in law school, or have found employment elsewhere. In year four, the department's intake is reduced X percentage and is readjusted every year (or every other year) thereafter until it reaches an agreed-upon placement rate. Something like that. In some cases, it should be possible to restructure a program that successfully places students in one field.
• I'm not sure that you can predict who will be able to finish a dissertation and who won't. Most people would agree on the Idea of the dissertation director. Directors must return chapters in a timely manner (a month is reasonable), guide the student to a focused topic (it's not necessary to write the equivalent of War and Peace...), refrain from imposing their own vision on the dissertation to the detriment of the student's ability to finish (avoid meddlers at all costs), and encourage the student to regard the dissertation as a preliminary draft instead of a ready-to-publish book (dissertations are there to be finished). They must give honest advice about what ought to be in the dissertation. ("Um, there really need to be canonical authors here.") They must also be honest about employment opportunities in a given field. They must not use the student as a pawn in department politics or cause the student to miss deadlines. Nor should they be allowed to take on more students than they can reasonably handle. But even the Director From Heaven can't write the dissertation.
• Perhaps it's time to change how students choose their examination fields. According to my parents, who were graduate students in the 60s, UCLA used to require all history Ph.D.s to do a minor field in US history. That's not a bad idea, really; ask Americanists to do a subfield in British, British specialists to do a subfield in American, or offer both the option of doing rhet & comp. While that won't necessarily help students get hired at Research I schools, having additional teaching fields may look very interesting indeed at a small school like mine. Incidentally, I suspect that the rise of rhet & comp as its own Ph.D. field will eventually alter adjunct hiring in English as well: instead of taking on unemployed Victorianists, departments will look for unemployed rhet & comp specialists.

UPDATE: Omitted sentence replaced.

Comments

[gthistle]

Nor should they be allowed to take on more students than they can reasonably handle.

This sentence and the general tenor of the bullet point it ends imply tailoring grad student intake to a number that extant faculty can support. Is that done proactively, to your knowledge, or is your comment for optimality? As a medievalist grad, I know that faculty sometimes apply gentle pressure to ensure enough students are admitted in their field--because there aren't enough--but I'm not familiar with capping at the other end. Just curious.

My advisor has far too many students, due to interdepartmental issues rather than a superfluity of English grad medievalists :) so the sentence caught my eye.

(Am here after seeing your comment at Baraita the other day.)

[Miriam]

I was speaking of the Optimal Director as opposed to the Real Director. But yes, I do think Ph.D. departments should admit only as many students as they can support--not just in terms of $, but also in terms of faculty guidance. In some cases I can think of, however, the program provides adequate support but the students all flock to the same professor (who then promises more time than s/he can give). At that point, TPTB need to intervene, gently but firmly.

[gthistle]

I'd agree for the optimal case, certainly. Pity it isn't the Real Director or a Real Chair so that one could see how such a department balanced things in practice. Hiring additional faculty (in a dept that has room for growth and can get FTEs reliably) to balance extant grads is occasionally done, but it doesn't seem the best plan.

In my advisor's case, two recent deaths and grad-fac personal issues have forced her into taking more students than anyone would like; both the deaths and most of the issues occur(red) in other departments. It's handy that the university approved her tenure review two years ago, but as you say, time becomes the pressure point.