When it comes to university leadership, what interesting times we live in! Congratulations to Dee Morris, our faculty senator, for her motion at the epochal Faculty Senate meeting on Tuesday. After the resounding vote of no confidence in the leadership of the Board of Regents, Dee presented the motion that acknowledged with gratitude Provost Hogan’s work for the university during trying times (presumably with a subtext of please don’t feel you have to leave just because the Regents can’t run a half-decent presidential search process). And congratulations to Tom Simmons for his speech from the floor, even if his fifteen years’ experience at the UI was put in the shade somewhat by Professor Tomasini’s fifty years and still counting as a faculty member here! Good to see such extensive English faculty presence on the floors of the Senate Chamber. For more details about the senate action, see http://www.uiowa.edu/~facsen/.

I couldn’t make it, alas, to yesterday’s CLAS Faculty Assembly meeting, but I see in the press coverage that the message against the Regents’ leadership was as resounding there as at Staff Council and as at the Graduate Student Senate. After all of which statements, I’m sure you all saw Regent Gartner’s dismissal that this is just an Iowa City/Cedar Rapids phenomenon (I presume with a subtext of that’s where all Iowa’s radical minority hangs out) and that he has no plans of leaving before his term expires in 2011. Perhaps now the UI may get a bigger spread in the next Chronicle of Higher Education.

Meanwhile, papers need to be graded, grades need to be tallied and reported, reports on graduate students written, a semester’s classes need filing, research projects need dusting off or putting into high gear, a new semester needs contemplating, and vacation needs taking. Happy holidays to all!

Graduate Student Number Matters, continued

Here is my continuing presentation of data—mostly numbers—that I’ve been assembling and trying to digest in relation to the upcoming CLAS strategic assessment of graduate programs (which we need to complete by February). The last Reading Matters included information on the size of our graduate programs in relation to the size of the department and on admissions data. This issue contains data relating to progress through our program and outcomes.

TIME TO DEGREE

Based on the period 2001-06, according to data assembled by the Graduate College, the average registered time from entry into the Graduate College to receipt of Ph.D. for all programs at the UI is 6.7 years and the median is 6.0 years. CLAS Ph.D. programs take a little longer, with an average of 7.2 years and a median of 6.6 years. Humanities programs take longer still, with an average of 8.1 years and a median of 7.8 years (on a sample size of 248 completed Ph.D.s). The English Department is a little longer than the humanities norm, with an average time to completion of 8.5 years and a median of 8.1 years (based on a sample size of 50 completed Ph.D.s). For a context, here are our numbers in relation to other Ph.D. programs in the humanities that graduated more than 10 students in the five-year period:

Average TTD	Median TTD	Numbers graduated	Department
9.2	9.0	12	American Studies
6.4	5.7	47	Communication Studies
8.5	8.1	50	English
9.3	8.7	40	History
6.6	5.0	30	Mass Communication
8.9	9.1	12	Philosophy
9.6	9.7	17	Religious Studies
5.8	5.3	13	Spanish

This is something that both the Graduate College and CLAS have signaled they take seriously, i.e. they are concerned at the length of time it takes to get a Ph.D. and would like to see us take steps to shorten that time. One extreme plan bruited is the possibility of not funding students after, say, six years, although such a draconian measure seems unlikely to get formalized. There are strong hints that a department will be somewhat penalized in seeking graduate resources on account of a slow time to completion.

I’m ambivalent about this whole criterion. I accept that we don’t want to unnecessarily extend the time in the apprenticeship status that is a Ph.D. track, but if students are still learning and benefiting from our environment, well, why should we hurry them out the door? We have such a small Ph.D. population that we really do give each student an individual experience and they all have distinctive needs and distinctive lives that affect how long they will stay in our program. But, that said, I agree that we should look to see that we are not unduly impeding our graduate students’ progress.

In trying to spot structural impediments and encouragements to timely completion, it is possible to break our internal data down in many different nuanced ways. For example, one can look at time to completion in relation to a prior MA, or fellowship packages, or admissions criteria. The numbers are too small to release any of this publicly, since you end up tracking individuals, but my own inference is that there doesn’t seem to be any clear pattern at all. It is hard to predict who is going to get through quickly, and even the presence of a prior MA doesn’t seem to make a clear difference.

When we discussed Ph.D. time to completion in executive committee, the graduate student representative insisted that this is a question that the faculty ought to discuss collectively, since it is an issue of departmental culture that we as a group of faculty define. I find that very persuasive. If directors are thinking that an appropriate dissertation has 300+ page and should be ready to go to a publisher, it’s going to take longer to write than if we are looking for 200 page works that lack full polish. And do our collective expectations for the comprehensive exam, or even for the qualification process, slow our students unnecessarily? This is an issue that I hope we will be able to discuss as a department next semester.

COMPLETION RATE

The Graduate College has released a chart documenting the percentage of students who entered with a Ph.D. degree as an objective in 1996-99 (52 for English) and looked at that number in relation to those who had completed a Ph.D. by July 2005 (18 for English). That gives us a completion rate of 35%! With these criteria, the average for Arts/Humanities is 46%, while the average for all doctoral programs at the UI is 52%. Here’s the comparison with other larger departments in the Humanities:

33% American Studies
55% Communication Studies
35% English
40% History
82% Mass Communication
22% Philosophy
19% Religious Studies
67% Spanish

Mostly this statistic is meaningless for us, since our average time to degree means that many of the students in this sample are still in progress (15 of the 52 were still enrolled). This measurement mostly privileges programs with short time to degree, notably Mass Communication.

It is possible to get a more realistic sense of the completion rate within our Ph.D. program. We have been enrolling Ph.D. classes of 14-19 and graduating an average of 10 a year. If you assume our usual pattern, then, 30 of the 52 students who enrolled in 1996-99 will receive a Ph.D., for a completion rate of 58%. Of the 52 incoming students, 10 left with an MA and 9 left (by 2006) without any degree from UI. In broad terms, then about 60% of our entering class are likely to graduate with a Ph.D., about 20% will leave with an MA, and about 20% will leave at other stages without any degree.

I don’t see that statistic as cause for particular concern. I tell graduate students that the department is committed to helping all the students we admit to complete the program and get a Ph.D. if they can. For all kinds of reasons, it suits a few individuals to leave before the extended time involved in getting a Ph.D.—and I think it is good that we can make the MA available for some of those students. It is unfortunate that some leave without any degree, but that is surely bound to happen. Indeed, it is possible to pursue that particular datum from this Graduate College chart. Within the Arts and the Humanities 1996-98 entering cohort of Ph.D. students (318 people), 61 left without any degree from the UI, i.e. 19%. For the same period, English saw 9 out 52 leave without any degree, i.e. 17%, so we are in step with university norms on that.

QUALITY WITHIN THE PROGRAM

This is information less amenable to statistical charting. One marker of the quality of our graduate students is their success at winning prizes and awards in internal and external competitions. Numbers are small, and comparison between different departments would be difficult, and so there are no charts to share on this issue. Instead, the success of English graduate students in winning the D.C. Spriestersbach Best Dissertation Award, Ballard/Seashore fellowships, Marcus Bach fellowships, summer fellowships, and external awards are all evidence of the high quality of our students and should find its way into our Strategic Assessment. This is information that gets shared as it happens in Reading Matters, is commemorated in the annual graduate student reception, and will soon be available as part of the graduate pages on our website (with thanks to Barbara for spearheading the updating of those pages). Another marker of quality that will also be appearing on the website are the publications of our graduate students.

PROGRAM OUTCOMES: PLACEMENT

This is another item that isn’t very conducive to statistical charting. I’ve heard it said that the national unemployment rate among English Ph.D.s is effectively zero: those with Ph.D.s are eminently employable and use their skills in some job or other, although some are frustrated in pursuing their first career choice. In practice, the vast majority of students who leave us with a Ph.D. take a position as an assistant professor somewhere, while a small number choose not to seek employment. The specific positions of our graduates are announced as they happen in Reading Matters and the updated information will be available on the graduate pages of the English Department website (with thanks to Barbara and Kathy). It is clear that such positions are in a range of different institutions, including Research I universities, liberal arts colleges, four-year colleges, community colleges, and others. It is also clear that some people move after initial placement, while some positions evolve, e.g. from visitor to tenure track status. It should be possible to establish the percentage of Ph.D. graduates who are in a tenure-track or tenured position within, say, three years of graduating (which I think is about 70%, but I don’t have the appropriate data to hand). Even that statistic would not be entirely helpful, since presumably some of the others will have chosen alternative career paths, while some may have found those alternative career paths thrust upon them. Given the high quality of our placements in the last few years, it does not look to me like we are over-producing Ph.D.s, but this may always be a somewhat subjective judgment.

CONCLUSION

When the Provost’s Office initiated the recent strategic planning exercise comparing departments within colleges, our graduate program was highly ranked (indeed, it was the top of the comparison group of humanities departments). This seems to me entirely appropriate: by any measure, we have a strong graduate program and I am sure that we can reflect that in the upcoming Strategic Assessment. All the same, it behooves us to be mindful of what we are doing and aim to do it yet better where there is room for improvement. While most of the changes that we could desire revolve around graduate financing—we could sure cut time to degree and improve the quality of the experience if we could support graduate students with a smaller teaching load, while forcing us to fund our first-year class through teaching rather than RA support is a step in the wrong direction—these are issues involving multiple stakeholders that we as a department can try to influence but can’t straightforwardly change. Our own procedures look pretty healthy, but if you have any suggestions after looking over all these numbers, do let me know. I look forward to further discussion of our graduate programs within the department in the first half of next semester.