American colleges and universities simultaneously face large numbers of faculty retirements and expanding enrollments. Budget constraints have led colleges and universities to substitute part-time and full-time non-tenure-track faculty for tenure-track faculty, and the demand for faculty members will likely be high in the decade ahead. This heightened demand is coming at a time when the share of American college graduates who go on for PhD study is far below its historic high. The declining interest of American students in doctoral programs is due to many factors, including long completion times, low completion rates, the high cost of doctoral education, and the decline in the share of faculty positions that are tenured or on the tenure track. In short, doctoral education is in crisis because the impediments are many and the rewards are few; students often choose instead to enroll in professional programs that result in more marketable credentials. In Doctoral Education and the Faculty of the Future, scientists, social scientists, academic administrators, and policy makers describe their efforts to increase and improve the supply of future faculty. They cover topics ranging from increasing undergraduate interest in doctoral study to improving the doctoral experience and the participation of underrepresented groups in doctoral education.

This groundbreaking book explores the current state of doctoral education in the United States and offers a plan for increasing the effectiveness of doctoral education. Programs must grapple with questions of purpose. The authors examine practices and elements of doctoral programs and show how they can be made more powerful by relying on principles of progressive development, integration, and collaboration. They challenge the traditional apprenticeship model and offer an alternative in which students learn while apprenticing with several faculty members. The authors persuasively argue that creating intellectual community is essential for high-quality graduate education in every department. Knowledge-centered, multigenerational communities foster the development of new ideas and encourage intellectual risk taking.

Doctoral programs at U.S. universities play a critical role in the development of human resources both in the United States and abroad. This volume reports the results of an extensive study of U.S. research-doctorate programs in five broad fields: physical sciences and mathematics, engineering, social and behavioral sciences, biological sciences, and the humanities. Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States documents changes that have taken place in the size, structure, and quality of doctoral education since the widely used 1982 editions. This update provides selected information on nearly 4,000 doctoral programs in 41 subdisciplines at 274 doctorate-granting institutions. This volume also reports the results of the National Survey of Graduate Faculty, which polled a sample of faculty for their views on the scholarly quality of program faculty and the effectiveness of doctoral programs in preparing research scholars/scientists. This much-anticipated update of such an essential reference will be useful to education administrators, university faculty, and students seeking authoritative information on doctoral programs.

Universities and nations have long recognized the direct contribution of graduate education to the welfare of the economy by meeting a range of research and employment needs. With the burgeoning of a global economy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the economic outcome of doctoral education reaches far beyond national borders. Many doctoral programs in the United States and throughout the world are looking for opportunities to equip students to work in transnational settings, with scientists and researchers located across the globe. Nations competing within this global economy often have different and not always compatible motives for supporting graduate training. In this volume, graduate education experts explore some of the tensions and potential for cooperation between nations in the realm of doctoral education. The contributors assess graduate education in different systems around the world, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, the Nordic countries, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Many factors motivate the need for a global understanding of doctoral education, including the internationalization of the labor market and global competition, the expansion of opportunities for doctoral education in smaller and developing nations, and a declining interest among international students in pursuing their graduate education in the United States.

This book attempts to re-imagine the purpose of the doctorate, which has historically been used to prepare leaders who will work to improve the sciences (social and physical), humanities, and professions, while articulating curriculum as a living shape where students, faculty, and institution melded in a humanist and creative process. This idea, seriously eroded by the explosion in doctoral degrees between the early 1970s (20,000 doctorate per year) and last year (to over 46,000)—and an explosion in doctoral and research universities that has created a crossroads for the doctorate in America. We believe the value of a doctorate is Intellectual Capital, and are particularly interested in encouraging reflection as an important characteristic of a successful quality doctoral program. We posit that a “good doctoral” experience fosters active engagement in reflection on all elements of our work—the intellectual, advisory, and pedagogical work of faculty, curricular opportunities, as well as the intellectual of the doctoral candidates through an avocation that drives research and theory in our fields. Specific issues raised in this edited volume include comprehensive analysis of programs, rethinking evaluation and programmatic coherence, doctoral degrees beyond the discipline, subject, and field, and implications of individual identity. Along with authors’ chapters, we paid attention to encourage reflection as an important characteristic of a quality doctoral program; positing that “good doctoral” experiences foster active engagement in reflection on all elements of the doctoral experience, including program and curricular issues, personal relationships, work, and the creation of a community of scholars.

How should we assess and present information about the quality of research-doctorate programs? In recommending that the 1995 NRC rankings in Assessing the Quality of Research-Doctorate Programs: Continuity and Change be updated as soon as possible, this study presents an improved approach to doctoral program assessment which will be useful to administrators, faculty, and others with an interest in improving the education of Ph.D.s in the United States. It reviews the methodology of the 1995 NRC rankings and recommends changes, including the collection of new data about Ph.D. students, additional data about faculty, and new techniques to present data on the qualitative assessment of doctoral program reputation. It also recommends revision of the taxonomy of fields from that used in the 1995 rankings.

The development of students as “stewards of the discipline” should be the purpose of doctoral education. A steward is a scholar in the fullest sense of the term—someone who can imaginatively generate new knowledge, critically conserve valuable and useful ideas, and responsibly transform those understandings through writing, teaching, and application. Stewardship also has an ethical and moral dimension; it is a role that transcends a collection of accomplishments and skills. A steward is someone to whom the vigor, quality, and integrity of the field can be entrusted. The most important period of a steward’s formation occurs during formal doctoral education. Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education is a collection of essays commissioned for the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate. The question posed to the essayists in this volume was, “If you could start de novo, what would be the best way to structure doctoral education in your field to prepare stewards of the discipline?” The authors of the essays are respected thinkers, researchers, and scholars who are experienced with and thoughtful about doctoral education.