Community on Graduate education
a. Jordan Johansen - Co-Chair on committee of graduate education
i. Committee has met about 50 times in the past few months to draft this report
ii. We have two town hall events coming up
- Nov 13th 2-3pm
- Nov 14th 4-6pm
- Both in UChicago Grad office
b. David Nirenberg: This committee is actually 17 strong, and we were charged in the spring by the provost to do a thorough assessment of graduate education in every aspect: a huge charge, so we broke it into four arches of inquiry (academics, student life and campus climate, administrative/financial aspects of graduate education, and the constantly evolving role of graduate education in not only this university, but all universities). To address those areas, we’ve gathered mounds of data (from Registrar, non-private information on health, rent changing in Hyde Park, etc. etc. On every single area, we’ve gathered as much data as the university can possibly produce). We’ve looked at pay, and compared stipends across departments/faculties. Surveys were just a small part about this year-long data hunt, but the Grad Student Survey is the only thing we’ll be talking about today. 40% of doctoral population, and ~25% of non-doctoral program, responded. We’ve published results online, but we’re going to break down results by faculty now
i. Student experience:
- More than a quarter of students are not satisfied with student life experience
- Greatest issue is student life experience
ii. University resources
- Everyone loves the library, with only a few exceptions
- Workspace is a major issue (compared with the library)
iii. Professionalization
- Generally students have greater receptivity in the way that they are developed as scholars than how they are prepared for their careers
iv. Faculty members’ disengagement
- Students feel that timely written/verbal feedback on work and career advice from faculty is lacking
v. Housing/safety
- Students are satisfied with housing
- Not satisfied with safety
vi. University Support
- Students are not happy with the lack of dental and vision insurance and that is must be paid for separately
- Underrepresented students are being underserved by resources
- Among dissatisfied students, international students are feeling worse-treated than the general pool
vii. Chicago Center for Teaching has been excellent, but there’s room for improvement in terms of training how to teach within the departments
viii. Personal health/financial issues are a big obstacle, more so in different degree programs than others (PhD candidates struggle less than non-PhDs)
ix. AND, a more detailed breakdown and analysis is underway
c. Thoughts/questions?
i. Next steps after data is assembled/analyzed?
- End product of the committee will be a comprehensive report that pulls together info from all different data sets, and we won’t be giving prescriptive advice, but we will have a rigorous evaluation of issues at hand
- Lots of these issues are on a divisional/departmental level, so even if it’s not under our purview necessarily, we can point out individual problems and maybe offer some suggestions
ii. When you analyze the differences between Masters and PhD programs, you’ll see more differences?
- Yes, and we have seen some of this, and lots of these things have been good case studies
- We have a “dashboard” (data set) for every program, and we can say “in this program, students are taking __ long to finish, only % are finishing, they’re leaving with $_ in debt,” etc.
- We’re comparing ourselves to ourselves: Other universities don’t publish this important information
iii. Timeline?
- We’ve been drafting for about three weeks, and have made a lot of progress, but our deadline is ~Jan 11, but we may need an extension
- Faculty survey closes today, and that data will take a while to analyze\\
iv. Is there a main focus of the faculty survey?
- So faculty survey is mostly focused on faculty perceptions of graduate education, for example we want to know how faculty think about all the facets of student life that they have control over.
v. Kartik: I went through the survey and there were lots of questions with text-based answers, are we going to see any analysis for them…?
- We have a plan to analyze them in aggregate. For anonymity reasons, we don’t get the raw data ourselves, we get it from the survey lab, and we’re working with them to generate aggregate data
- Some departments are so small, that if you were to divide by gender, year, and department, it’s no longer anonymous
- Text responses, though, are really important and helpful, and often give us specific and important intelligence
vi. gradexperience@uchicago.edu. Email us with any information you want to share, or questions you have~