Many doctoral students get stuck at the A.B.D. (all-but-dissertation) stage; unfortunately, many give up at this point. The Council of Graduate Schools’ 2008 PhD Completion Project showed that almost 60 percent of students graduate within 10 years, while around 30 percent drop out, and those statistics have remained steady. Students clearly have an ongoing need for support in order to keep moving forward in their degrees, especially when the remaining work is mostly writing.

Given all the challenges of 2020, Ortega thinks admissions teams may modify their calculus when choosing their next class. Grades and test scores will still matter, but applicants' life experiences could be given more weight.

"Students approaching graduate school will be encountering ... a more humane and holistic process," said Ortega.

“We could have our own lost generation of students who get busy with other things and then don’t fulfill their dreams,” said Suzanne T. Ortega, the president of the Council of Graduate Schools.

First-time enrollment in graduate programs increased by 2.5 percent between fall 2018 and fall 2019 even while the number of applications to graduate programs dipped slightly, by 0.6 percent, according to a new survey conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Graduate Record Examinations Board.

African Americans made up 12.1 percent of all first-time graduate enrollees in 2019. Yet African Americans were just 6.1 percent of all incoming graduate students at doctoral universities with very high research activities. This was only a slight improvement from 2009 when Blacks were 5.3 percent of total first-time enrollments in graduate programs at these research universities.

But students from poorer backgrounds may not be able to wait for schools to restart admissions, so they’ll pursue other careers. Suzanne Ortega with the Council of Graduate Schools said that’s bad for diversity.

“We’re disrupting the flow from a more diverse undergraduate student pipeline to a less diverse student pipeline,” she said.

The rules could hit graduate students particularly hard, as doctoral programs tend to last more than four years. More than 88,000 international students enrolled in U.S. graduate programs for the first time last fall, according to the Council of Graduate Schools. One quarter of them were pursuing doctorates rather than shorter master’s degrees or certificates.

In a 2017 Council of Graduate Schools survey, 96% of graduate school deans said their school or institution offered mental health support or crisis counseling. Still, additional CGS research has shown that schools sometimes struggle to promote these services.

Project Will Deepen Knowledge of Career Transitions Across All Broad Fields of Study

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Contact: Katherine Hazelrigg (202) 461.3888/ khazelrigg@cgs.nche.edu

Washington, DC — The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) has announced a new phase in its efforts to understand and support diverse PhD career pathways. A significant grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF #2000750) will allow CGS to examine factors likely to impact retention and persistence in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) careers, particularly for underrepresented students.  Meanwhile, a previously-announced grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will seek to uncover both challenges and decision-making factors at points of career transition for Humanities PhDs.

“The new grants from NSF and Mellon will give us the opportunity to delve deeper into experiences of students and alumni in STEM and Humanities fields,” said CGS President Suzanne T. Ortega. “Our broader goal is to allow member universities to use data about PhD careers with greater nuance and awareness of challenges that students and alumni face at critical points of transition—in particular, from graduate school to career and in the years immediately following graduation. In 2021, we will launch a research hub for doctoral institutions as they seek to better understand and use PhD career data to improve programs.”

These projects build upon three earlier phases of CGS research: a feasibility study supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; a survey development phase supported by the Mellon, Sloan, and National Science Foundations (NSF #1534620); and a survey implementation phase supported by the Mellon Foundation and NSF (#1661272). In the most recent phase, CGS developed a network of 75 U.S. doctoral institutions through a competitive award process to collect data from STEM PhD students and alumni about their professional aspirations, career pathways, and career preparation.

Ortega believes the NSF-funded project will assist universities and scientific agencies in deploying investments and strategies that more effectively support STEM career trajectories. “Better understanding PhD career pathways has been a CGS research priority for nearly a decade, and this project takes the next step from understanding aspirations and experiences to bolstering career success. This work also has the potential to help funders and institutions refine their strategies for supporting graduate students and alumni pursuing careers in STEM fields.”

The Humanities Coalition, the new Mellon-funded effort, will further enhance the graduate education community’s understanding of humanities PhDs and their careers and to refine humanities-specific strategies for curricular change and program improvement. Additional research to better understand the nature of early career transitions for humanists is a primary component of the new initiative. CGS recently announced sub-awards for five institutions (Iowa State University, Purdue University, The University of Southern Mississippi, The University of Texas at El Paso, and University of Rochester) to join the data collection efforts. Additional sub-awardees will be identified in 2021 to support projects designed to develop and assess initiatives for better supporting humanities PhD students transitioning from graduate school.

Although the survey focused on the effects of the pandemic on universities, it is just one of several issues that will affect their financial health. Changes to the US visa programme will also be a factor. On 22 June, the US government announced that it will stop issuing certain categories of foreign-worker visa — notably the H-1B visa for foreigners hired as university faculty members or by technology firms — until the end of the year. “It’s hard to say which is the major influence,” says Suzanne Ortega, president of the Council of Graduate Schools in Washington DC, which represents 500 universities worldwide, mostly in the United States and Canada. “They’re both really important and still very much in flux.”