|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
* Revised from an address given at the Symposium on the Future of Graduate Education at Purdue University, 14 March 1972. Until 1972 Dr. Cartter was chancellor of New York University.
JUST TEN years ago, when I was finishing my stint as dean of a graduate school and giving my last annual report (I'm a little embarrassed to remember it now), I was urgently telling my colleagues that we had to expand graduate education throughout the country in all disciplines to avoid a chaotic decline in the quality of college faculties. Two years later, with responsibility for a commission of the American Council on Education studying trends and trying to evaluate developments in American higher education, I published several articles that predicted a rather dramatic shift to an academic “buyers' market” starting about 1969 or 1970. I lost some of my friends among my former decanal colleagues for that reversal. I remember one wrote me a letter and said, “You have become a grey eminence in higher education—spoiling the market, subverting graduate education and the national interest.”
To the economist, the academic labor market is interesting to study. It is a fascinating institution, and it has a lot of peculiar characteristics. On the supply side of the market, it is confusing because there's a five to ten year time lag between the time people make decisions to go on for the Ph.D. and their actual attainment of it. There's a very high degree of specialization and very limited substitutability. A geologist cannot step in and teach the Romantic poets. In addition, scholars are less responsive to market inducements than are people in many other occupations. I would remind you that all during the depression of the 1930's, despite the deteriorating job market, Ph.D. output increased 6% every year. It is also a peculiar market in that the market signals themselves are both blurred by time by this gap between entry and exit, and also by a kind of institutional filter—the fact that universities very often act as a kind of market buffer rather than as a kind of transmitter.
On the demand side there are other peculiar characteristics. Sixty percent of graduate school output—that is, young men and women with Ph.D.'s—finally end up in the academic marketplace. And two-thirds of the others, principally supported in research and development, are dependent upon government funds. For a decade up until 1968 all systems were go; both academic employment and government spending on research and development encouraged a very rapid expansion in graduate education. For the last several years this has suddenly been reversed. There is now only slow growth in the hiring of new teachers and a decline in real terms in the amount of research and development support from the federal government since 1967.
But the most distinguishing characteristic of this market is that our graduate school energies are largely reproductive; we are reproducing ourselves. The graduate schools are chiefly concerned with their own institutional well-being. We develop new Ph.D. programs to achieve a balance of offerings within the institution, very seldom asking about what the nation needs or the region needs. We think primarily of the health of the institution. And it has become almost a natural law that you can't build a first rate university or a strong department except through growth.
Frequently, when I've talked on academic labor market projections, people have said, “Well, since you knew this was coming, your university must have been much better prepared for it than others.” I've had to confess that it's hard to convince your own faculty or your own department chairmen. About two years ago I got all of my department heads together and said, “Now, here's the emerging crisis. What are we going to do about it?” And they sat there for a while and then replied, “But it's not our fault. It's all those new schools out there. You know, it's Bowling Green and Stony Brook and the City University of New York that are spoiling the market. Somebody ought to do something about it.”
But the most peculiar characteristic of the academic labor market is that the production and marketing functions are rather separate, to use a business analogy. If you're RCA and you're producing a bad product and can't market it, or you're producing much more than people want, then you have to go in and make tough decisions (such as RCA did with its computer division) and say, “Off with its head.” There is a kind of feedback that makes a business firm react quickly, almost instantly, to its own mistakes. In the academic marketplace that isn't true. We, as institutions, don't take the responsibility for finding jobs for the people who go through the graduate schools. We may be very sympathetic; we may help them; we may write letters of recommendation; we may have a placement office. But it has not been considered our responsibility to place them. And if we turn out too many Ph.D.'s in our English department, we tell them “Go and cry on the shoulders of the Modern Language Association; that's the group that ought to worry about it.” The result is that the academic institutions tend to act very independently of market forces, much more so than almost any other institution one can think of in this country.
So I am glad the theme tonight is graduate education to the year 2000, not at 2000, because the hardest task, I believe, is going to be getting there. In those three decades, the next dozen years are going to be the most difficult. This is likely to be the time of agonizing adjustment and reappraisal in all of graduate education. We have had fifteen years of phenomenal growth. Ph.D. output has expanded at a compound rate of about 12% annually. Starting from a fairly stable base in the 1950's of about 8,500 doctorates granted each year, we have gotten up to 32,000 for the current year. We have a present capacity estimated at something like 45,000 Ph.D.'s annually. We have a planned capacity, according to several studies for the late 1970's, of somewhere between 55,000 and 70,000 annually. Until 1969 the academic marketplace, principally college teaching, had always absorbed at least 50% of new Ph.D.'s—lower in the science and engineering fields, higher in the humanities. About 60% finally ended up in colleges and universities, although some by a more circuitous route through post-doctoral employment and other types of non-teaching jobs. This year, only about 40% of the Ph.D.'s are finding jobs in academic employment, and many of them are taking positions at somewhat lower levels than they had been trained for or had aspired to.
Looking ahead, if every new college teacher hired in the senior institutions in this country had the Ph.D., and at least 50% of all the new junior college teachers hired had the doctorate—and that's a much higher goal than we've ever aspired to in the past—then the need for new college professors is predicted at about 15,000 annually for the first half of the 1970's, about 10,000 annually in the second half of the 1970's, and something less than 5,000 annually out to 1985. After 1990 employment may pick up again largely because of demographic factors. By then we will have been through a sharp contraction of the 18 to 21 year old group that is almost the symmetrical counterbalance of the rapid expansion we had in the 1960's. So in the late '80's and '90's there may be some expansion again, but the continued decline in fertility rates is not a cause for optimism. It is obvious, as we look ahead over the next twenty years, that higher education is not going to be a major growth industry as it has been in the past.
We are already at the point where something like 60% of high school graduates now enter formal degree programs in higher education, and another 12% or 13% go on into post-secondary non-degree education. Thus we're already absorbing nearly three-fourths of the high school graduates in this country. Rising college entrance rates will not contribute signficantly to enrollment expansion in the future. In terms of the next fifteen years, therefore, I think it's going to be fairly clear that we will have excess capacity in most of our graduate schools somewhere in the range of 25% to 50%. The big problem I would like to emphasize is not really today; most of today's problems are the result of the immediate impact of recession and some adjustments because of difficulties in federal and state budgets. The big problem is at least five years ahead, and the critical time is going to be the early 1980's.
This situation poses several problems for us both nationally and institutionally. On a nationwide basis we have to ask how we can shrink the graduate establishment in some orderly fashion without just following a Malthusian solution—starving off the children and undernourishing the mothers, if this is the parallel to graduate students and institutions. Somehow we must manage to stabilize the support in higher education for strong educational programs rather than having legislatures or congresses that impose across-the-board cuts on every institution. I think we have to ask ourselves whether there is any way we can cut back to having only 75 to 100 major national graduate schools, perhaps federally supported, rather than the 250 to 300 Ph.D .-granting institutions that we now have.
We will also have the problem in some fields of how to prevent an overreaction. Right now many people are worried about the case of physics, which was perhaps hardest hit by the drop in external support and demand for new positions. Current enrollment patterns suggest that Ph.D.'s in physics will drop from about 1,600 today to only 800 five years from now. This raises the question of whether one needs as many physics departments as we now have or whether we're going to have substantial excess capacity in each one. There are those, particularly Richard Freeman at Chicago, who argue that this is the way the market works and that we have to expect it to work that way. If we're going to get appropriate market adjustments, we have to be willing to avoid interfering with it by undue incentives and subsidies. Freeman has offered a fairly convincing thesis that many educators and legislators have accepted: given about five-year time-lags, the market really works very well in making these adjustments. Market adjustments are terribly painful, however, for the individuals who unexpectedly find they're in a surplus situation. And, as we're now finding out, it's terribly painful on the academic institutions themselves.
Within public systems as well as within private institutions the hardest economic adjustments right now are resulting from fluctuations in external support. The most critical problems for the future however, are likely to be in the humanities and social sciences which rely so heavily upon college teaching as their major employment source.
Institutionally, I think we will have to do a lot of things. We will have to reassess retirement and tenure policies. If we don't do that, we're going to find that we have institutions that are losing their vigor. Between now and 1990 the average age of college professors may rise by almost ten years. There is going to be very little new net hiring in college teaching unless there is a surprising amount of rotation through the ranks—much more so than we've had in the past. If we're going to reduce retirement ages and change tenure policies, this in turn is going to add a lot of pressure for faculty unionization which may end up in even less flexible personnel policies within academic institutions. This is going to create difficult internal stresses and strains, already evident in some universities.
I think we're also going to have to reassess the extent of our commitment to graduate programs and ask ourselves much more seriously whether we can be all things to all people with such limited resources, or whether many of us should discontinue programs or not initiate new programs in areas where we have planned to expand. I think we're going to come under increasing pressure, especially in the state systems, for much greater rationalization of our programs, much greater cooperation among institutions, and much greater pressure for broader training with less emphasis upon the narrow specialties within disciplines. At a very interesting conference at MIT about a year ago attended by many of the graduate students there, the common cry was, “For God's sake, don't make us so overspecialized. We come out prepared for one little phase of nuclear engineering and if there's not a job there, we are in a very difficult position.” So there is increasing pressure from students, much of it constructive, to broaden the kind of training they get.
I would guess that twenty-five years from now, after we've gone through this trauma, we're going to have fewer universities granting the Ph.D. degree than today, although many more perhaps granting the master's. I think we're going to be somewhat more successful in breaking down the boundaries between disciplines. I think there's going to be a tendency for graduate education to take a leaf out of medical education and to develop a kind of two-stage training period—a compressed formal degree program and a somewhat expanded post-classroom period much like the internship and residency period in medicine. This could represent a kind of liberalizing of graduate education. It seems rather ironic that we train teachers in the liberal arts in the most fractured, illiberal educational environment we ever could have devised.
The financing of graduate education, I'm sure, is going to be much more heavily dependent upon federal funding, with all of the risks and yet all of the opportunities that may raise. Student support is likely to be based more upon need than just talent and merit. And I think it's fairly evident that we have to break down many of the barriers of the past, many of them unconscious, some of them conscious, that have kept the numbers in minority groups, whether by sex or by race, very underrepresented in many of our professions.
If we're going to survive as vigorous institutions, we will have to find a way of rewarding excellence and promise and be somewhat more ruthless than we have been in the past in our willingness to weed out mediocrity within our institutions. Neither the taxpayer nor the student is going to put up with some of the built-in inflexibilities that we have developed in higher education.
Carnegie Commission on Higher Education
© 1973 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
|
|---|
|
|
|
