Price Check : You

A former PhD student of one of my colleagues recently added up the cost to their advisor/institution of their graduate education: salary, tuition, benefits for n years. It was a large number. Add to that the cost of the research (this can be considerable). Then evaluate the result, however you want to attempt to measure that in tangible or intangible ways (knowledge advanced, papers published, career opportunities for the former student).

[Note: I am talking about the typical case of a STEM graduate student who receives full support during their graduate studies -- salary, tuition, benefits. In this post I am ignoring the issue of low pay for grad students, not because I don't care about the issue but because I want to discuss other financial aspects of the grad school experience.]

In this particular case, the former student (who is not an academic and who has a successful career that involves thinking about money) was just musing about 'worth'. Was it 'worth' it to the advisor, department, institution to spend all that money on this PhD? In this particular case, the advisor's answer is yes (I happen to know), and I will take the liberty to speak on behalf of the institution and say yes as well. This is a good result.

I was impressed that the former student was interested in putting a price tag on their graduate education for the items that have specific costs. If you are in a STEM field or another field in which you are paid to be a graduate student (including as a teaching assistant), do you know how much your graduate education cost(s)? For example, if you are a graduate research assistant paid from a grant, do you know what the actual amount to the grant is (not just your salary)? You may not know, as advisors don't routinely share this information; I don't, but not because it is a secret, it just doesn't occur to me to mention it. If you are teaching assistant, your department may be paying your tuition and benefits in addition to your salary, which may or may not be the same amount as for a research assistant depending on institution-specific policies.

And how much does your research cost? You probably know (or knew) some of the costs, for example if you turned in receipts for conference travel. But do you also know the costs (rate) for any analytical, computational, or other methods that have user fees? This is not a judgmental question with a right and wrong answer; I'm just curious.

Whether those costs turn out to be 'worth' it to anyone (including you) is another question -- one that is too big a question for my post-grading brain to handle right now, though it is interesting to contemplate how each of us measures long-term worth in this particular context.

Prospective Grad Student Fail

Earlier this summer I met an undergraduate from another institution. The meeting was arranged by one of the student's mentors, who wrote to me saying that this student would benefit from meeting people whose research topics are similar to what the student has been doing for an undergraduate research project. This student is at a small school and, as a Prospective Graduate Student (PGS), they would also benefit from talking to a professor at a research university. So we set up a meeting.

From the very beginning, the conversation was confusing for me. PGS informed me early in the conversation that "no one else" (but PGS) is working on the particular research topic that we apparently had in common. I said, "Are you being sarcastic?". Oops, PGS was serious. So I said, "You mean other than me and a few dozen other people?" I explained that this was a very active topic of research, worldwide. I gave some examples.

Then PGS told me that some equipment at PGS's undergrad institution was very important for the research, but very few other places have these. I said, "We have two." Most research universities do.

PGS explained that the TopTwo schools according to the US News rankings were of most interest for graduate school, but this led to a question for me: Should PGS apply to "lesser" schools like mine? (meaning: not TopTwo). Um, no. Actually, I said I couldn't answer that for PGS in particular, not knowing anything about PGS's record, but I gave some examples of various subfields in which both, one, or neither of the TopTwo was a good place for graduate research.

My overwhelming impression was that PGS was immature, had spent too much time talking only to the undergrad advisor and not enough time immersed in the literature relavent to their research project, and was not at all prepared to have a professional conversation. The meeting was set up by a professor, not the student. I am not sure I will agree to that particular arrangement again. If a student wants to meet me, they can contact me.

Whether PGS will succeed or fail in graduate school, if accepted, is anyone's guess. Chances are that PGS will figure things out eventually.

Stage 2: Acceptance

Yes, I know that Acceptance is Stage 5 in the evolution of grief, but in the academic context of graduate admissions, it is Stage 2(ish), in the sense of Stage 1 = Application; Stage 2 = Acceptance (or not).

At this time of year in the US academic calendar at many institutions, students have been accepted, rejected, or put on hold by the graduate programs to which they applied. Some departments or programs bring in prospective students for an interview or recruiting visit; in the first case to make final decisions about admissions, and in the other case to try to convince students to accept their offers of admission.

Some departments bring in some of each, and some bring them all in at the same time. That is, a group of prospective grad students are brought to visit as a group: some have been offered admission, some have not (yet). The idea for this post is based on a conversation I had with an undergrad who recently participated in one of these 'hybrid' events.

According to this student, the not-yet-accepted students worked very hard to impress their potential advisors and other faculty and researchers. In the opinion of this student, those who had been accepted did not work so hard (or, at least, some didn't. I have no direct knowledge of the situation, but it was the opinion of this student that those accepted were significantly less concerned with making a good impression than those who had not yet been accepted.)

I suppose if I think back over my years of encounters with prospective students at conferences (before admissions decisions are made) and my subsequent meetings with them after they receive an offer of admission but before they make a decision, I could come up with some examples of students who were energetic pre-admission and lethargic post-admission. Without being any more specific than that, I can say that my experiences seem to back up this undergrad's impressions.

I asked this student: But don't those who have been accepted know that they still need to impress their potential advisors? If they accept the offer at that place, why would they want to start off working with someone who may now have a somewhat negative impression of them? Or perhaps they behaved that way during the visit because they are not serious about accepting the offer from that place, and they are just wasting everyone's time and money? Either way, this does not speak highly of the maturity of those students.

Yes, I know that someone can have an off day, be recovering from the flu, experiencing stress, be exhausted from midterms and travel etc. etc. etc., but exceptions aside, I hope that it is not the case that, once accepted, many students think that it is only their opinion that matters now. It is a two-way street: the students need to check out the departments and potential advisors to make good decisions about what is best for them, and the departments and potential advisors are still checking out the students, even those admitted.

Questions for those who advise grad students and for whom this mode of grad recruiting is relevant:

• Have you ever met a potential student (particularly a potential advisee) before and after their acceptance to your grad program and seen a difference in their energy level or degree of interest in having an interesting conversation about research topics?

• Have you ever met a student who was accepted to your grad program (based on their excellent application) but then, after meeting them, you wished that they had not been accepted? 

• If you answered yes to the previous question, did you later find that your negative first impression was accurate, or did you develop a more positive opinion after more interaction with that student?

Question for current and former graduate students who have been on recruiting visits to programs to which they had been accepted:

• What was your attitude during your visit? Did you try to impress, or was your attitude that it was entirely the responsibility of the program to impress you?

What You Don't Know

It came to my attention yet again recently that many grad students don't know that professors at many universities in the US are not paid by the university in the summer; we have 9-month base salaries. I have written about this before (I know, I say that a lot in this blog, but the blog is ~6 years old). I don't think it matters a lot if students know or don't know the details of how professors are paid except that it might help them understand the behavior of some professors in the summer.

Most of us don't take the summer "off", and most of us don't like being asked to do department service in the summer. Of course advising is a 12-month/year responsibility, but I know some professors who think nothing of spending lots of time working with their own grad students in the summer but balk at having to participate in a large number of prelim exams or defenses for our colleagues' students in the summer (a few here and there might be OK as long as the student is diligent about scheduling well in advance). etc. etc.

What I want to know is: if you are or have been a grad student in the US, do/did you know whether the professors have a 9-month or 12-month base salary? Does/Did it affect how you view/ed the types and amount of work that professors (including your advisor) do/did in the summer? Did you, or are you likely to, take a prelim or final exam in the summer and therefore need your committee to assemble?

No Jerks Allowed*

* with some exceptions

At, in, on, under, and through Scientopia today, I meander from pseudo-answering a question about whether to explain grad-recruiting decisions to current students to a question (for discussion) of how we advisors get a sense for group dynamics among our advisees.

I Used to Be Nicer

In Scientopia today, an angsty-message from the grad-advising trenches.

An Office of One's Own

In a comment last week, someone stated that grad students are "4 to an office", as if this is a general fact. Is it? Maybe it is common, even if you count cubicle farms with low partitions, but many departments seem to have at least some (or many) private(ish) office for grad students, with doors and maybe even a window (!).

I know I have written about offices before.. apparently, I have devoted at least 15 posts to the topic of "faculty office", and I recall a few mentions of grad offices before as well (such as the fascinating topic of whether professors ever venture into the grad office zone). And yet, I don't think I have ever probed the question of grad office-sharing. The topic came up indirectly in a recent post on background noise and distractions when a student is on the phone trying to have a professional conversation, such as in a phone interview; hence the comment about "4 to an office".

When I was in grad school, I had a different grad office every year, each one better than the one before. I graduated from a make-shift cubicle (some bookcases arranged around a desk) to shared offices to a private office (no window, occasional dead rodents behind the walls, but I loved my little office-cave). Even when I shared an office, I never had more than one office-mate in my immediate vicinity (i.e., two desks in a small room with a door), although in the overall "office space" there were maybe 15 of us (and we all shared one phone). I was quite content with these offices, and always felt that I had a good place to work, even if none of these offices could be described as aesthetically pleasing spaces. 

Despite years of private offices as a postdoc and professor, I occasionally get to relive the shared-office experience during sabbaticals and other extended visits to other universities. For my first sabbatical, for example, I shared an office with a very polite and mostly quiet person who, I eventually realized, was being slowly driven mad by the fact that I had different ideas about office lighting, door position, and various situations involving the windows. In my view, when I was alone in the office, I could have the lights, door, windows arranged in whatever way I wanted, and then when my office-mate appeared, we could find a compromise, but this person wanted everything to be a certain way even when they were not there, and certainly everything had to be back the way it should be when they showed up at the office in the morning or after some time away during the day. This became kind of stressful.

These had not been issues when I had a shared office as a grad student, and only partly because we had no windows; I was lucky to share an office with compatible people, all of whom are still good friends of mine. An incompatible office-mate can really affect your ability to work in 'your' office, including how you feel about going to the office and spending time there. If you have more than one office-mate, the chances increase (exponentially?) that one (or more) will be annoying, or worse.

And yet, I think it is a good thing to have an office plan that facilitates interaction, so that grad students aren't just toiling away in isolation in private offices, at least not for the first few years of grad school. The informal discussions that I had with my office-mates in my general office area were some of the most interesting and significant intellectual experiences I had in grad school, leading in one case to a paper that I wrote with another grad student.

So, '4 to an office' certainly doesn't sound pleasant, but it might not be entirely dire. Many research labs have grad students desks scattered around in and near them, so no one has their own office with walls and window, but everyone has their own space to work. It might be difficult to work at times, but there are also lots of good interactions as well. Another possible arrangement to foster interactions is to have private or semi-private offices arranged around a central area where people can gather (quietly).

Questions of the day: How many grads to an office (range or typical) at your department? Is this scheme (whatever it is) seen as good/bad/indifferent?

Independence

Today in Scientopia, I discuss issues related to the independence, or lack thereof, of graduate students, and whether the preferred amount of independence in research is a good match with the advisor's preferences.

Left With A Masters

Recently, I was rummaging through some databases involving doctoral completion rates in different fields of Science and Engineering. Specifically, I was looking at doctoral completion rates for male and female students. Of course I know that graduate school is part of the "leaky pipeline" for women scientists in academia, but I'd always assumed that women choosing to do an MS and not continuing on for a PhD was a much more significant "leak" than female PhD students leaving a doctoral program with an MS.

It is likely more significant, but I was surprised at some of the data showing the % of women doctoral students who "leave with an MS". In fact, for some programs, most of the women who start a doctoral program leave with an MS. The fact that they started a doctoral program indicates that these women were at some point interested in doing PhD-level research.

The usual explanations for leaks at this stage invoke the fact that graduate studies fall at a critical time for many young women because of the stresses and choices involving work and family. This may well be a good explanation for much of the "leaving with an MS" phenomenon, but it's too general to allow advisors, departments, and institutions to understand the data and determine what, if any, changes should be made.

From these data, we don't know how many of these women:

1. left and did a PhD elsewhere;
2. switched to the MS voluntarily because it was a better fit for their career goals;
3. switched to the MS involuntarily owing to (a) life or work pressures, or (b) an academic problem (exams, classes, advisors).

Explanation #1 does not involve a pipeline leak; it's just appears to be one for any particular institution.

Explanation #2 is technically a leak, but if these MS graduates continue on with a career relevant to their graduate studies (because that's what they want to do), it's not a tragic leak. Overall, it's not good that there are so few women faculty in physical sciences, engineering, and math at research universities, but each individual woman needs to make the best decision for herself in the context of life and career issues.

Explanation #3 is more problematic, but the databases provide no insight into how many women are given an MS "consolation prize" after failing a PhD preliminary exam (and whether more women than men fail these exams) and how many women leave doctoral program with an MS because they can't (or don't think they can) get a PhD and start a family at the same time. A sub-category of the latter is of the "there could only be one PhD in the family, so we decided it should be Robert" sort.

To the extent that the "left with an MS" situation is a problem that needs solving, it's likely that it can only be solved at a very large scale (i.e., by changes in society and academia as a whole). Even so, what I want to know is: What, if anything, can individual faculty and departments and universities do?

At this point, with the tools at hand, we can at least do exit surveys in each department to find out why doctoral students leave with an MS (voluntarily or involuntarily), and, based on results:

- address any issues that relate to a discrepancy in how female graduate students are evaluated and advised, or

- use these data as a basis for instituting family-friendly policies that alleviate some of the problems that disproportionately affect female graduate students (keeping in mind that these policies need to minimize harm to advisors and research groups as well, or the policies are unlikely to be as effective as they could be for all concerned).

I am sure some (many?) departments do this type of evaluation already, and I'd be curious to know if the results have led to any structural changes in graduate programs, and if these changes had any effect on doctoral completion rates.

Location Location Location

In conversations with colleagues during some recent travels by me and visits to my department by others, the seasonal topic of Grad Recruitment was much discussed.

One issue that some colleagues clearly spend a lot of time thinking about is the relative effects of:

the excellence of the university, department, research group/advisor

vs.

the location of the university.

(more on university vs. department vs. research group reputation later; for now, I am lumping them.)

Everyone has different ideas about what makes a place desirable, so the geographic factor is not a constant, agreed-upon thing, although there are some general trends. Some people are happy to live in a big city, some are not; and some have very particular preferences about climate, topography, proximity to coastlines, and other features that are unrelated to the excellence of a particular graduate program. There might be some connection in particular instances (e.g., oceanography departments and coastal locations), but, in many cases, the geographic factor relates primarily to an individual's preferences.

For some grad applicants, these preference are guided by what each person is used to, although there is a subset that longs for something different from what they are used to.

The question that many of my colleagues talk about is the extent to which location matters in the decisions of students to apply to particular graduate programs, and then how it factors into decisions to accept an offer at one grad program versus another.

Of course there are some students who won't even apply to certain schools, however excellent, in particular locations, but I don't have a good sense for how that population of applicants compares in size to applicants who apply anyway and then use geography as a factor in deciding among offers.

Over the years, I have met quite a few grad students who do take location into account. However brief graduate school is in the scheme of things (although it may not seem that way when you are in it), some people are not willing to live in certain places that are too far from (or close to) their family, a coast, a mountain range, or a warm (or cold) place. These preferences may also limit job opportunities later, but I suppose there's no point in living in a place where you know (or think) you will be unhappy.

The issue of location is more severe for those in geographically-challenged places, but it cuts both ways: programs in places that might not be as scenic or climatically pleasant as some others worry that talented students won't accept their offers (or even apply in the first place); and programs in places that many people find to be geographically excellent get applicants who are significantly more interested in, say, skiing or rock climbing, than in their graduate studies (although this may not be mentioned in the applications).

I didn't take geography into account when making my own decision about which graduate school to attend, and, since I was single at the time, I didn't have to consider anyone else's geographic or other preferences. I chose the program that most closely matched my interests, and I was focused on working with a particular advisor whose papers I had read (and admired) as part of an undergraduate research project.

Am I unusual (in that particular respect) or is that common? FSP wants to know..

Did you take location into account when choosing a graduate school?
	Yes - a major factor
	Yes - one of many factors
	No
pollcode.com free polls

Please elaborate in the comments.

Left Behind

Today in Scientopia, I discuss some angsty, anxious, anguished e-mails I get from readers who are thinking of "leaving" Science and/or Academia and are worried about what others may think of them as a result.

Attrition Rate

In addition to publicizing the post-graduation employment data of a department's or research group's graduate students, should the attrition data -- the % who start but do not finish a degree -- also be made available to those interested in seeing such data? (Instead of calling it attrition rate, perhaps we should call it graduation rate, to put a more positive spin on it.)

I mentioned last week that graduates of my research group have been successful obtaining PhD-relevant employment, but of course there is something missing from those data: the students who left without getting a degree. I can see how someone might want to know what the ratio of completed to never-completed degrees is for a particular advisor, research group, or department.

But what would such data indicate? Would these data indicate anything useful for those seeking to make an informed choice about graduate programs or a particular advisor?

These data might indicate something about the level and duration of financial support available. A high attrition rate could be a signal of low level of financial support for students, but such data could probably be obtained more directly by looking at student funding levels and duration.

So let's assume that a department/advisor is fortunate to have sufficient resources to support students for the duration of a typical graduate research program. Would comparison of graduation rates (among advisors, departments, or universities) give a sense for some other essential aspect of the graduate programs, such as quality of advising?

Maybe, but the data would really only be useful if we had a good baseline estimate of the "background" attrition rate for graduate students. Students may leave a particular graduate school for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the program. For example, some students realize they are interested in something else and move to another department/institution, some move when their significant other has to move elsewhere, and some decide to take a job outside academia before finishing their degree (for a wide variety of reasons).

Presumably, if graduation data were known for a large number of advisors, programs, or departments, a pattern would emerge so that outliers (very high or very low rates) could be detected. Such data are unlikely to be available anytime soon, however, and not necessarily because an institution or individual advisor is ashamed of such data; in fact, some might be proud of having high attrition rates.

I have no idea what this rate is for my department as a whole, and even if I knew how many students left without a degree, I wouldn't know the reasons for most of the departures. And even if I had such information, I wouldn't have any other data for comparison.

Perhaps we can make a small dent in that last issue. Some questions:

• Does anyone know what the average graduation rate is in their department, research group, or other relevant unit? (let's keep it positive and use graduation rate instead of attrition rate)
• Is anyone willing to share their personal graduation rate of advisees? (my research group's is ~90%*)
  
• Are there graduation rate trends for particular advisors: e.g. a high rate in the early-career years and a lower rate later on?

My own answer to the last question is yes. Early in my career (particularly at University 1), I had a lower graduation rate* than I have had at University 2, but the reasons why students have left without a degree have been extremely varied*, so it's difficult to interpret this trend.

* Note that 'attrition' includes students who left for personal reasons (e.g., a significant other's career move) and then got a PhD elsewhere and then obtained a tenure-track faculty position, so not all 'drop-outs' actually drop out of Science or academia. Also, it is important to note that those who leave Science/academia are not failures**. Many go on to have interesting careers in industry, business, government, or K-12 education.

** OK, a few of them are, but only a few.

The Graduate School Experience

As an introductory image to show my research group as part of a general discussion about grad school, careers etc., I decided to see if I could graphically depict the essence of The Graduate School Experience using only the standard menu of clip art and shapes available with PowerPoint presentation software. I found that I could get pretty far with the available images, although, for the final product, I added one non-ppt image, and in the version I showed my group (but not shown here), I added some images specific to my field/research group. Nevertheless, here is a PowerPoint Clip Art vision of The Graduate School Experience: