The Graduate School Mess

What Caused It and How We Can Fix It

Leonard Cassuto

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780674728981
• eBook ISBN: 9780674495616
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

It is no secret that American graduate education is in disarray. Graduate students take too long to complete their studies and face a dismal academic job market if they succeed. The Graduate School Mess gets to the root of these problems and offers concrete solutions for revitalizing graduate education in the humanities. Leonard Cassuto, professor and graduate education columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Education, argues that universities' heavy emphasis on research comes at the expense of teaching. But teaching is where reforming graduate school must begin.

Cassuto says that graduate education must recover its mission of public service. Professors should revamp the graduate curriculum and broaden its narrow definition of success to allow students to create more fulfilling lives for themselves both inside and outside the academy. Cassuto frames the current situation foremost as a teaching problem: professors rarely prepare graduate students for the demands of the working worlds they will actually join. He gives practical advice about how faculty can teach and advise graduate students by committing to a student-centered approach.

In chapters that follow the career of the graduate student from admissions to the dissertation and placement, Cassuto considers how each stage of graduate education is shaped by unexamined assumptions and ancient prejudices that need to be critically confronted. Written with verve and infused with history, The Graduate School Mess returns our national conversation about graduate study in the humanities to first principles.

CHAPTER ONE

Admissions

FOR PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS, getting into graduate school can feel like a full-time job. They dedicate months to studying for the GRE (that is, the Graduate Record Exam); they agonize over every word of their personal statements; and they pray that their letters of recommendation will distinguish them from the pack. During this rite of passage, students try to fashion themselves into acceptable proto-graduate students. The admissions process essentially teaches applicants to present themselves as potential scholars—and so, as the first major “qualifying exam” in a young student’s graduate career, this ordeal has a certain pedagogical function. At the same time, the admissions gauntlet, because it deals in the currency of exclusivity, plays a substantial role in maintaining an academic culture that loves prestige rather too well. It fills students with anxiety, not to say fear and loathing, and prepares them to take a subordinate position at the bottom of the academic food chain. Graduate admissions practices thus begin by persuading accepted students to feel lucky that they’re now at the bottom of the academic hierarchy.¹ The admissions system teaches through the exertion of the power of that hierarchy. When brought to bear on individuals, it shapes their institutional identities.

It also shapes the identities of the institutions the students are trying to get into. The process ennobles universities as selective and therefore exceptional—which it does by dignifying them with prestige. The mechanisms that determine who gets into graduate school, and why they get in, are central to the enterprise itself and by extension to the academy’s prestige culture. Gatekeeping centers in equal parts on who’s allowed inside and who’s being kept out. The decisions about who gets into graduate school and why are therefore integral to the mission and function of the enterprise itself. Admissions provide the first glimpse of who we are and how we train others to be like us.

Remarkably, no one has yet written a history of graduate admissions. Much valuable—and sometimes prurient—attention has been paid to the subject of undergraduate admissions, but the story of graduate admissions has never been unearthed, let alone told. No one has even gathered the data.² Having never been explored, the relation of graduate admissions to today’s graduate school is right now a cipher. It absolutely should not be. Many scholars have written about the history of graduate schools generally, and much ink has been spilled by researchers, professional societies, and think tanks about the many so-called crises that have long plagued doctoral education.³ In order to put those crises into historical perspective, admissions, as a key component of American graduate school, needs attention, if only because the selection of graduate students is controlled by the economic issues and the cultural values that are at issue in the wider discussions about the utility and purpose of American higher education.

In fact, when we look closely at the history of graduate admissions, we can limn the whole history of graduate school—how graduate schools evolved and how they operate. We can see the history of the research university in broad outline there, because the development of the admissions process is so crucially involved in negotiating the university’s identity. This story has been too long untold, and this first pass at it makes this the most historical chapter in this book. What follows is a pointed history of admissions—pointed, that is, toward using the past as a way to account for and explain today’s practices. To explain those practices is not, as will become clear, to defend them. The largest emphasis in this chapter falls on the early years of the research university, because we see all of the familiar patterns developing then. Such is the conservatism of graduate school that the values that evolved more than a century ago remain the basis for today’s practice.

The archives of Harvard and Michigan and, to a lesser extent, Yale, Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins inform this story at ground level. They’re a representative selection, a small group of institutions that span public and private, but they are not a random group: I’m seeking to spotlight schools that have been highly influential in the development of American graduate education. Applications are, of course, unavailable to examine. For a long time in the history of graduate school, applications did not exist, so figures like admittance rates don’t exist either. Instead, we have to view the process from a remove, through the annual and biennial reports authored by the presidents of universities and by the deans of their graduate institutions. I’ve divided the story into three parts, beginning with the early days of the American graduate school (from the late nineteenth century to 1900), when the admissions process largely crystallized, and then moving to important developments in two subsequent periods, the middle years (from 1900 to 1945) and the postwar expansion (after 1945).

These partitions roughly reflect major changes in the history of the graduate admissions process. But American graduate schools did not march in lockstep; their admissions policies grew at different rates and in different ways. These differences in development mean that there is no single history of American graduate admissions that can be neatly organized into pat stages, a fact illustrated by an anecdote shared by historian Stanley N. Katz:

When I applied to graduate school in 1955 there was already a graduate admissions office, but I am sure that individual profs had much more influence. But when I moved to Wisconsin in 1965 they did not use a graduate admissions office—instead, students could apply to up to three seminars offered by individual professors, and each professor admitted his own grad students.⁴

Katz’s story reveals, first of all, that today’s bureaucratic graduate application process has not always been the norm. Rather, admissions was once a much more informal affair, and it was often largely under the purview of individual professors. Second, Katz’s experience demonstrates how the formalization and standardization of graduate admissions evolved differently at different locations. There was an admissions office when Katz applied to Harvard in 1955, but as late as 1965, the University of Wisconsin had none. Today, Wisconsin has a graduate admissions office with a director and staff of four, and it has instituted admissions technologies pioneered at the universities at the center of this story.⁵

In general, the most prestigious universities have set the trends in admissions processes, which are then adopted by other institutions. Like Wisconsin, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) has not always kept pace with other universities in its graduate admissions practices, but in 2013, CUNY announced a plan to restructure its policies. CUNY reduced its graduate admissions and raised fellowships for those who are admitted. This move toward a leaner, full-time model was designed to bring the public university into line with more elite institutions. The initiative, lauded by some observers, also prompted criticism that its aim was inconsistent with CUNY’s mission to serve New York’s citizens more broadly.⁶

CUNY’s move to emulate the elites has considerable precedent in the history of graduate admissions. The archives show a tendency toward conformity of practice, typically motivated by the quest for prestige. The prestige race dominates much graduate school practice, and it creates a landscape I examine from different angles throughout this book. Admissions opens a clear window onto some of the ways that universities have protected and nourished their research cultures and defended their cherished research mission over the years—often in the face of different imperatives urged onto them by their critics, both intramural and extramural.

Even though academic institutions develop at different rates, they compete with one another in the same drive for institutional credibility. This contest for academic honor, as the higher-education scholar J. Douglas Toma points out, often takes generic approaches. The attempt to attain a higher place on the academic prestige ladder inevitably leads, Toma shows, to a stagnating conformity in which “everything that rises must converge.” Unlike those firms in more dynamic markets that seek to distinguish themselves through differentiation (so that one footwear company may make shoes, another sneakers), American universities often end up mimicking one another.⁷ The history of graduate school admissions is a particular case that proves Toma’s general point: graduate schools, playing the prestige game, have installed similar admissions policies until, over time, there has been an almost complete standardization of the process. The standard is set at the top of the food chain, where the fewest graduate students live and where their experience is least typical. Public universities, formed under different mandates, consistently seek to emulate their smaller, usually wealthier, counterparts even when their mission statements suggest that they should pursue more accessible goals.

Rankings provide the main arena for the prestige competition among universities, and the fight for position on that ladder permeates much graduate school practice. (In Chapter 7, for example, I discuss how it shapes our conception of the job market.) While the fight for rankings causes a convergence of practice, it also produces a kind of monoculture in the graduate student body. With so many graduate programs subscribing to the same values and aspiring to the same status, they institute similar policies that are all designed to promote the recruitment of more prestigious students. Graduate admissions thus elevates those students who endow universities with the most respect: the specialist scholar-researchers in training.

Admissions processes have developed over time precisely in order to woo these particular student-assets. Research has its benefits, of course, and it cannot be conducted without researchers. But the single-minded pursuit of a certain kind of graduate student has meant that universities often neglect their other responsibilities, namely to train teachers and liberally educated, public intellectuals. Many graduate programs have explicitly designed their admissions processes to marginalize and to exclude those students who do not fit the specialist scholar-researcher mold, despite the fact that administrators have recognized that they are responsible for the promotion of democratic values and for the education of a diverse range of types of student. As I suggest at the end of this chapter, this strong bias toward potential “knowledge producers” extends to the present, when we find it at every stratum of the rankings hierarchy.

This brief discussion shows how admissions renders the conflicts within graduate school, and the research university generally, in embryonic form. We’ll see how admissions reflects the marginalization of the master’s degree to the point where it lacks a clear identity or purpose, and how fear of the dilution of Ph.D. research led graduate programs to draw sharp divisions between their student populations and in some cases even to segregate them on other campuses. Driving the history of graduate admissions is an overarching quest for selectivity. Like undergraduate institutions, which are today engaged in an absurd arms race to see who can reject the most applicants, graduate schools have long sought to demonstrate their prestige through spectacularly parsimonious admissions practices. It is a goal that graduate schools achieved only relatively recently—and only as a result of the bad economic times that have squeezed universities and resulted in books like this one.

To see how it all started, let’s go back to the early days of the research university, in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century.

ADMISSIONS IN THE EARLY DAYS OF RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES

Today graduate schools are adrift, unsure how to reconcile the need to encourage research with the need to cultivate teachers. These tensions were on display from the beginning—and we see them in admissions practices. Graduate programs developed rapidly at the new research universities, both public and private, and at existing colleges, many of which became universities when they added graduate schools. These new graduate schools were tiny by today’s standards, with graduate study mainly concentrated in humanities fields (the days of big science having not yet arrived), and they lacked familiar bureaucratic elements of today, such as admissions offices.⁸ In the growth of these programs, we see the early contours of today’s landscape.

Admissions practices were, even at first, largely governed by economic necessities. The first attempts in the 1890s to create a selective admissions process were motivated more by a lack of resources than by any sense of what we today call “competitiveness.” In those early days of the research university, graduate schools in the United States were highly provincial affairs. Universities were not involved in any national network but were localized, serving their immediate communities, and so they did not necessarily see one another as direct competitors for students. Being small and provincial, graduate schools had no need for today’s bureaucratic application process. Applicants often were known personally and could easily be assessed by graduate faculty. A student of the 1890s might be admitted for graduate study simply by showing up and having an informal chat with a professor in his field of interest. (I use the male pronoun advisedly here.) Often, the student was simply staying on at the same institution where he had done undergraduate work. Sometimes his prolonged stay wasn’t even directed toward an advanced degree, and occasionally he hadn’t even finished a bachelor’s degree, which might be awarded later, in course. It wasn’t until the first decade of the twentieth century when administrators even put into writing their most basic requirements for applicants for graduate study, a formalization of procedure that evolved as universities associated themselves within a national graduate education system. At that point, degree systems became standardized, fellowships came under the purview of specialists, and graduate schools used admissions to more fully articulate themselves as research institutions.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves when we talk about graduate school admissions as growing out of an informal process, because, strictly speaking, the graduate school as we know it did not yet exist until around the time that its admissions systems became formalized: the codification of the admissions process helped to crystallize the graduate school as an institution (not just vice versa). Early American graduate study often took place in “graduate departments” and “graduate ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: In Search of a Usable Future
• 1. Admissions
• 2. Classwork: The Graduate Seminar and Beyond
• 3. The Comprehensive Exam: Capstone or Cornerstone?
• 4. Advising
• 5. Degrees
• 6. Professionalization
• 7. The Job Market Reconceived
• Conclusion: In Search of an Ethic
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index