Graduate Education in the Chemical Sciences Issues for the 21st Century: Report of a Workshop (2000) / Chapter Skim
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1 The Challenges to American Graduate Education
1 The Challenges to American Graduate Education
Pages 7-17
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From page 7... ...
DRIVING FORCES Before reviewing the findings of the 1995 MPS workshop, I would like to review the driving forces that were in place at that time and prompted holding the workshop and how these forces have evolved to the present (Box 1.1~. These forces affect the research and development enterprise and therefore the educational enterprise that is critical to it.
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The first finding relates to funding. In 1995 we were concerned about facing a large budget deficit and about the little discretionary money available because of the combined expenses of national security and social programs.
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Science moves forward, and individual fields are becoming more specialized. One result is that students will have to develop skills beyond their scientific expertise.
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Many workshop participants supported a fixed time limit, such as that for financial support at Princeton. The NSF workshop participants decided, instead, to recommend what I will call knowledge feedback by distributing best practices and making people aware of the average time in each discipline to get a Ph.D.
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From page 11... ...
program, which by now has had three national competitions. I don't know whether its generation is related directly to the MPS workshop, but it is so much on target in addressing all the issues identified in that workshop that I assume it was.
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The reason is that science has left the sanctity and security of working on basic science and having military impact. In a complicated way, we are becoming increasingly involved in societal questions that are not necessarily amenable to the simple reductionist answers of yes and no.
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These changes make the 1995 MPS workshop recommendations even more important. I think that the NSF workshop identified many of the core issues.
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We have heard over a number of years that what we need in graduate education is something similar to the Saturn assembly line and that the education process should work faster and do more in a shorter period of time. I think that has been inflicted on us, to a large extent, by success in manufacturing, but educating people is different.
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From page 15... ...
Lynda Jordan, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University: I would like to address the issue of increasing the number of women and minorities in the chemical sciences. In fact, a major issue is the attrition of minorities and women graduate students from the graduate education process in this country.
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From page 16... ...
Since the first three years, the skills that have come into play have been those associated with coordination of technology management and support for a variety of oil companies Exxon, Sunoco, Amoco, and currently Marathon Ashland Petroleum. So, we can presume that the oil industry is looking for a wide variety of skill sets from Ph.D.
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From page 17... ...
I think the intent in the workshop was to show that the distortion seems to be the greatest if learning is not educationally bundled but is essentially research bundled. That affects the time.
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