Part 2 (2/2)

A Mandate for Reform.

aWith regard to the quality of research, we tend to evaluate faculty the way the Michelin guide evaluates restaurants,a Lee Shulman, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recently noted. aWe ask, aHow high is the quality of this cuisine relative to the genre of food? How excellent is it?a With regard to teaching, the evaluation is done more in the style of the Board of Health. The question is, aIs it safe to eat here?aa1 Our research suggests that for many students currently enrolled in higher education, the answer is: not particularly. Growing numbers of students are sent to college at increasingly higher costs, but for a large proportion of them the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication are either exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent. At least 45 percent of students in our sample did not demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in CLA performance during the first two years of college. While these students may have developed subject-specific skills that were not tested for by the CLA, in terms of general a.n.a.lytical competencies a.s.sessed, large numbers of U.S. college students can be accurately described as academically adrift. They might graduate, but they are failing to develop the higher-order cognitive skills that it is widely a.s.sumed college students should master. These findings are sobering and should be a cause for concern.

While higher education is expected to accomplish many tasksa”and contemporary colleges and universities have indeed contributed to society in ways as diverse as producing pharmaceutical patents as well as primetime athletic bowlsa”existing organizational cultures and practices too often do not prioritize undergraduate learning. Faculty and administrators, working to meet multiple and at times competing demands, too rarely focus on either improving instruction or demonstrating gains in student learning. More troubling still, the limited learning we have observed in terms of the absence of growth in CLA performance is largely consistent with the accounts of many students, who report that they spend increasing numbers of hours on nonacademic activities, including working, rather than on studying. They enroll in courses that do not require substantial reading or writing a.s.signments; they interact with their professors outside of cla.s.srooms rarely, if ever; and they define and understand their college experiences as being focused more on social than on academic development. Moreover, we find that learning in higher education is characterized by persistent and / or growing inequality. There are significant differences in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills when comparing groups of students from different family backgrounds and racial / ethnic groups. More important, not only do students enter college with unequal demonstrated abilities, but their inequalities tend to persista”or, in the case of African-American students relative to white students, increasea”while they are enrolled in higher education.

Despite the low average levels of learning and persistent inequality, we have also observed notable variation in student experiences and outcomes both across and within inst.i.tutions. While the average level of performance indicates that students in general are often embedded in higher-education inst.i.tutions where only very modest academic demands are placed on them, exceptional students, who have demonstrated impressive growth over time on CLA performance, exist in all the settings we examined. In addition, students attending certain high-performing inst.i.tutions had more beneficial college experiences in terms of experiencing rigorous reading / writing requirements and spending greater numbers of hours studying. Students attending these inst.i.tutions demonstrated significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills over time than students enrolled elsewhere.

The Implications of Limited Learning.

Notwithstanding the variation and positive experiences in certain contexts, the prevalence of limited learning on todayas college campuses is troubling indeed. While historian Helen Horowitzas work reminds us that the phenomenon of limited learning in higher education has a long and venerable tradition in this countrya”in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, for example, acollege discipline conflicted with the genteel upbringing of the elite sons of Southern gentry and Northern merchantsaa”this outcome today occurs in a fundamentally different context.2 Contemporary college graduates generally do not leave school with the a.s.sumption that they will ultimately inherit the plantations or businesses of their fathers. Occupational destinations in modern economies are increasingly dependent on an individualas academic achievements. The attainment of long-term occupational success in the economy requires not only academic credentials, but likely also academic skills. As report after national blue-ribbon report has reminded us, todayas jobs require aknowledge, learning, information, and skilled-intelligence.a3 These are cognitive abilities that, unlike Herrnstein and Murrayas immutable IQ construct, can be learned and developed at school.4 Something else has also changed. After World War II, the United States dramatically expanded its higher-education system and led the world for decades in the percentage of young people it graduated from college, often by a wide margin. Over the past two decades, while the U.S. higher education system has grown only marginally, the rest of the world has not been standing still. As Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Higher Education and Public Policy, has observed: aIn the 1990s, however, as the importance of a college-educated workforce in a global economy became clear, other nations began making the kinds of dramatic gains that had characterized American higher education earlier. In contrast, by the early 1990s, the progress the United States had made in increasing college partic.i.p.ation had come to a virtual halt. For most of the 1990s, the United States ranked last among 14 nations in raising college partic.i.p.ation rates, with almost no increase during the decade.a5 For the first time in recent history, many countries today graduate higher percentages of their youth from college than does the United States. While the United States still ranks second of Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in terms of adult workersa bachelor-level degree attainment, it has dropped to sixth when higher-education attainment of only the most recent cohort of young adults is considered.6 aWe may still have more than our share of the worldas best universities. But a lot of other countries have followed our lead, and they are now educating more of their citizens to more advanced levels than we are,a the recent federal report A Test of Leaders.h.i.+p observed. aWorse, they are pa.s.sing us by at a time when education is more important to our collective prosperity than ever.a7 The U.S. higher-education system has in recent years arguably been living off its reputation as being the best in the world. The findings in our study, however, should remind us that the systemas international reputationa”largely derived from graduate programs at a handful of elite public and private universitiesa”serves as no guarantee that undergraduate students are being appropriately challenged or exposed to educational experiences that will lead to academic growth throughout the wide range of diverse U.S. colleges and universities. While the U.S. higher-education system still enjoys the compet.i.tive advantage of a sterling international reputation, in recent decades it has been increasingly surpa.s.sed in terms of quant.i.ty (i.e., the percentage of young adults it graduates), and its quality is coming under increasing scrutiny. The U.S. governmentas recent decision to partic.i.p.ate in current international efforts led by the OECD to measure higher-education academic performance on a comparative basis cross-nationally, following the less-than-stellar comparative results observed in international comparisons of adult literacy, provides little rea.s.surance that the systemas reputation will not become increasingly challenged and debated.8 In an increasingly globalized and compet.i.tive world system, the quality and quant.i.ty of outcomes of a countryas education system are arguably related to a nationas future trajectory and international economic position.9 The changing economic and global context facing contemporary college graduates convinces us that the limited learning that exists on U.S. campusesa”even if it has been a part of the higher-education landscape since the systemas inceptiona”qualifies today as a significant social problem and should be a subject of concern of policymakers, pract.i.tioners, parents, and citizens alike. While the phenomenon can accurately be described as a social problem, the situation that exists on todayas college campuses in no way qualifies as a crisis, and we have consciously avoided the use of rhetoric here that would point to aa crisis in higher education.a Limited learning in the U.S. higher education system cannot be defined as a crisis because inst.i.tutional and system-level organizational survival is not being threatened in any significant way. Parentsa”although somewhat disgruntled about increasing costsa”want colleges to provide a safe environment where their children can mature, gain independence, and attain credentials that will help them be successful as adults. Students in general seek to enjoy the benefits of a full collegiate experience that is focused as much on social life as on academic pursuits, while earning high marks in their courses with relatively little investment of effort. Professors are eager to find time to concentrate on their scholars.h.i.+p and professional interests. Administrators have been asked to focus largely on external inst.i.tutional rankings and the financial bottom line. Government funding agencies are primarily interested in the development of new scientific knowledge. In short, the system works. No actors in the system are primarily interested in undergraduate student academic growth, although many are interested in student retention and persistence. Limited learning on college campuses is not a crisis because the inst.i.tutional actors implicated in the system are receiving the organizational outcomes that they seek, and therefore neither the inst.i.tutions themselves nor the system as a whole is in any way challenged or threatened.

While in the long term this countryas global compet.i.tiveness is likely weakened by a white-collar workforce that is not uniformly trained at a rigorous level, colleges where limited academic learning occurs in the short term can still fulfill their primary social functions: students are allocated to occupational positions based on their credentials, not their skills; students are provided settings where they can experiment with new forms of social behavior and develop independent ident.i.ties; and, as we have shown elsewhere, studentsa subsequent marital choices can in part be structured by their college pedigrees.10 This evaluation can be contrasted with the situation that exists in U.S. elementary and secondary schools, where a acrisis in moral authoritya has prevented many public schools from socializing youth effectively and has aundermined public school legitimacy, eroded popular support necessary for maintenance and expansion of these inst.i.tutions, stimulated political challenges and the growth of compet.i.tive organizations, and thus [has] come to threaten public school organizational survival in many state and local settings.a11 Socialization of elementary and secondary school students is a core inst.i.tutional function, but academic learning at colleges unfortunately has not been recognized as such.

Transforming Higher Education.

Given that the problem of limited learning in higher education has such a diverse set of causes, potential efforts towards educational reform must be multifaceted, and must be directed at various levels for significant change to occur. Specifically, we propose here recommendations for improved educational practices at the inst.i.tutional level as well as policy changes that are focused at the system level. Before discussing these potential reforms, we briefly discuss the need for improved elementary- and secondary-school student preparation. While the latter issue is largely beyond the scope of this book, we would be remiss not to identify and bring attention to the topic here.

Student preparation.

Our study provides evidence supporting the proposition that students who come into college with higher levels of academic preparation (in terms of either prior advanced placement coursework or SAT / ACT performance) are better positioned to learn more while in college. These findings resonate with prior research that has emphasized the importance of rigorous academic work in high school. Clifford Adelman, for example, has demonstrated that athe intensity and quality of oneas secondary school curriculum was the strongest influence not merely on college entrance, but more importantly, on bacheloras degree completion for students who attended a four-year college.a12 Many students come into college with such inadequate levels of preparation that they must spend much of their early coursework in remedial education cla.s.ses where gains in higher-order critical thinking and complex reasoning are unlikely to occur. One-third of recent four-year college students took at least one remedial course in college.13 In terms of needed reforms in elementary and secondary schools, however, we believe that improving academic preparation is only half the story. Many students emerging from these schools have also not developed norms, values, and behaviors conducive to a.s.suming productive lives as responsible adults, let alone the ability and interest to focus on academic learning at college.14 While students today express very high educational expectations and professional ambitions, as Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson have well doc.u.mented, they have failed to develop realistic understandings of the steps necessary to achieve their goals.15 These students have not formulated what the social psychologist William Damon calls apaths to purposeaa”that is, moral grounding that anchors their ambitions in the tasks, behaviors, and practices required to achieve the ends they view as meaningful. Youth today have been unable to develop a sense of purpose in their lives not only because of general changes in parenting and the larger culture, Damon argues, but because schools have turned away from accepting responsibility for youth socialization and moral education. Elementary and secondary educational reform has focused almost exclusively on improving studentsa standardized test scores. aOften squeezed entirely out of the school day are questions of meaning and purpose that should underlie every academic exercise,a Damon notes. aOur obsessive reliance on standardized test scores deters both teachers and students from concentrating on the real mission of schooling: developing a love of learning for learningas sakea”a love that will then lead to self-maintained learning throughout the lifespan.a16 Higher education leaders.h.i.+p.

aUltimately, itas about the culture aa was a conclusion drawn by researchers studying twenty high-performing four-year inst.i.tutions.17 Inst.i.tutions need to develop a culture of learning if undergraduate education is to be improved. This is not an easy or an overnight process, but one that requires strong leaders.h.i.+pa”including presidents, deans, provosts, and others demonstrating a commitment to these goals. aStudent success becomes an inst.i.tutional priority when leaders make it so.a18 Setting student success, and learning in particular, as a priority provides guidance and focus for future action; staying the course over the long haul is crucial, as many aspects of an inst.i.tution may need changing, implementing the change takes time, and seeing the results of specific policies and practices takes even longer. Leaders at successful inst.i.tutions have a strong sense of purpose; they engage other members of the community in achieving the vision, and they make decisions about hiring and programs that support the achievement of these goals. Effective administrators provide the vision; motivate broad engagement and openness to change, continuous evaluation, and growth; and aget and keep the right peopleaa”those committed to undergraduate learning.19 We believe that one way for higher-education leaders to communicate a greater sense of inst.i.tutional purpose is for them to articulate to their respective communities that colleges and universities need to take greater responsibility for shaping the developmental trajectories of students, and to prioritize these organizational goals in decision-making. It is not enough for higher-education inst.i.tutions simply to confer educational degrees on students, if the credentials do not reflect substantive academic accomplishments and if the students have not developed an appreciation of the meaning and responsibilities a.s.sociated with their acquisition. Many higher-education administrators and faculty today have largely turned away from earlier conceptions of their roles that recognized that providing support for student academic and social development was a moral imperative worth sacrificing for personally, professionally, and inst.i.tutionally.

Consider, for example, the issue of college dormitories. College dormitories were originally developed in the first quarter of the twentieth century, according to historian Julie Reuben, because auniversity administrators recognized that it was almost impossible to mold the social lives of students when they lived outside the college.a20 Lyman Wilbur, Stanford Universityas president at the time, wrote that awhen students are housed together there is developed a strong cooperative sense of loyalty and enthusiasm called acollege spirita which has a profound effect upon the development of the character of the students and upon the welfare of the inst.i.tution.a At Harvard University a similar sentiment was expressed. aThe problem of the college,a Harvardas president A. Lawrence Lowell a.s.serted, ais a moral one, deepening the desire to develop oneas mind, body, and character; and this is much promoted by living in surroundings and an atmosphere congenial to the object.a For Lowell and other university leaders at the time, the dormitory was a asocial device for a moral purpose.a21 Today, rather than instruments designed for shaping studentsa individual social and academic development at college, residence halls are often viewed as arevenue and cost centersa that need to be managed primarily for financial ends. Many colleges and universities today are building private-suite residence halls to cater to student demands for increased privacy and comfort. At the Midwestern public university where sociologist Mary Grigsby studied, four new dorms that together can house five thousand students have been built featuring atwo-bedroom suites with a shared bathroom and single rooms with private baths.a Grigsby notes that acompet.i.tion for students by universities and perceptions on the part of decision makers that parent and student consumers want upscale facilities, along with beautiful grounds, up-to date recreation centers, and glamorous sports stadiums, have led Midwest to invest heavily in such construction.a Grigsbyas study of undergraduate culture, however, reveals that while these new forms of private residences are popular among student and parent consumers, they have significantly altered the collegiate atmosphere. In traditional shared-room dormitories with communal bathrooms, Grigsby found open doors and very high levels of interpersonal interaction; in the new private-suite residences doors were closed, little interpersonal interaction occurred, and the atmosphere was similar to that of modern apartment buildings. In terms of the role of adult authority in these two settings, Grigsby notes the comments of a resident a.s.sistant who had served in both traditional shared-room and new private-suite halls: aWhere students in the other dorms (with shared rooms and communal baths) resented my enforcing rules because they said I was ajust one of them,a in this [private-suite] dorm they complain because Iam just athe hired helpa and have no right to tell them what to do, since they are paying for their privacy and have a right to do what they want in their rooms.a22 In their efforts to cater to student consumers, colleges and universities have arguably moved even further away from their responsibility to structure social behavior and provide a setting conducive to rigorous academic instruction and moral development. While these new dormitories potentially provide increased opportunities for students to study alone, the ability to develop a shared sense of mission and collegiate ident.i.ty is losta”as, too, is the possibility to tie these larger communal sentiments to the development of individual purpose and meaning in the lives of undergraduate students.

Improving curriculum and instruction.

While it would be nave to base policy reform on appeals for higher education actors to embrace a call for inst.i.tutional renewal on moral terms, all higher-education inst.i.tutions could focus increased attention on the academic component of undergraduate learning without fundamental challenges to the existing system. Our findings provide clear empirical evidence that academically rigorous instruction is a.s.sociated with improved performance on tasks requiring critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication. Spending time studying, having faculty who hold high expectations, and offering courses that require reasonable amounts of reading and writing are a.s.sociated with studentsa learning during the first two years of college. These practices focus attention on the fact that students benefit when they are in instructional settings where faculty demand and students engage in rigorous academic endeavors. Prior sociological literature has at times applied the term aacademic pressa to elementary and secondary schools whose organizational climates encourage student academic engagement and effort.23 Given the large number of students who were not exposed to courses that required more than forty pages of reading per week and more than twenty pages of writing over the course of the semester, we believe that it is inc.u.mbent on higher-education inst.i.tutions to take seriously their responsibility to monitor and enhance the academic requirements of courses. While at most colleges and universities course syllabi are collected from instructors and administratively filed (typically at the department level), there is often little evidence that faculty have come together to ensure that coursework is appropriately demanding and requires significant reading, writing, and critical thinking. Faculty share a collective responsibility to address this issue.

In addition to reading and writing requirements a.s.sociated with coursework, we have found that students who report that faculty have high expectations of their performance demonstrate improved rates of undergraduate learning. Just as they need to ensure rigorous a.s.signments a.s.sociated with coursework, colleges also need to encourage faculty to communicate high expectations to all their students. At least since the publication of Pygmalion in the Cla.s.sroom in 1968, elementary and secondary school teachers have understood the importance of high expectations for all students, and have been inst.i.tutionally encouraged to demonstrate them.24 Unlike elementary and secondary school teachers, however, college professors have typically not received formal training in instruction that has emphasized the pedagogical functions of educational expectations. Our findings suggest that high expectations for students and increased academic requirements in syllabi, if coupled with rigorous grading standards that encourage students to spend more time studying, might potentially yield significant payoffs in terms of undergraduate learning outcomes.

Academic press is one element of effective instructional practices that has been advocated by higher education reformers in recent decades. The importance of active learning and related academic experiences has been repeatedly emphasized in scholars.h.i.+p on effective practices in higher education. In their seminal work t.i.tled Principles of Good Practice for Undergraduate Education, for example, Chickering and Gamson outlined seven categories of effective educational practices, including those that encourage the following activities: student-faculty contact, co-operation among students, active learning, prompt feedback, time on task, high expectations, and respect for diverse talents and ways of learning. These principles are reflected in the five benchmarks of academic engagement of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE).25 Based on Chickering and Gamsonas work as well as other research on effective practices in higher education, Kuh and his colleagues have identified five cl.u.s.ters of desirable educational practices: academic challenge, active / collaborative learning, studenta”faculty interaction, enriching educational experiences, and supportive campus environments.26 Of the five categories of effective practice, the academic challenge benchmark is most clearly a.s.sociated with the sociological concept of aacademic pressa and corresponds with key factors identified as facilitating student learning in our study. In the NSSE framework, academic challenge includes questions regarding time spent preparing for cla.s.s, course demands (including reading, writing, using higher-order thinking skills, and working harder than students thought they could to meet the standards), and inst.i.tutional emphasis on studying and academic work. The results from NSSE indicate that academic challenge has a strong relations.h.i.+p with student persistence and grades.27 Results from the ongoing Wabash National Study, which uses slightly different measures of engagement, indicate that academic challenge and effective teachinga”including factors such as prompt feedback and faculty interest in teaching and student developmenta”are related to most of the twenty-nine indicators of student development in college, from moral reasoning and psychological wellbeing to academic motivation and critical thinking.28 While what faculty members do matters, how much time and effort students invest in their cla.s.ses is paramount: Studying is crucial for strong academic performance as anothing subst.i.tutes for time on task.a29 It is worth emphasizing that faculty demands and studentsa time on task are related: when the students in our study reported that they had taken a cla.s.s where they had to read more than forty pages a week and a cla.s.s where they had to write more than twenty pages during the semester, they also reported spending more time studying.

At the core, changing higher education to focus on learning will require transforming studentsa curricular experiencesa”not only the time they spend sitting in their chairs during a given cla.s.s period, but everything a.s.sociated with coursework, from faculty expectations and approaches to teaching to course requirements and feedback. Scholars.h.i.+p on teaching and learning has burgeoned over the past several decades and has emphasized the importance of s.h.i.+fting attention from faculty teaching to student learning.30 Once student learning is the focus of the enterprise, faculty can attend to the strategies that improve it. Research by members of Harvard Project Zero, for example, provides ample clues about strategies that facilitate student learning, including clearly stating course objectives, clearly presenting material, linking course content to course objectives, providing students with examples of what is expected, creating ample opportunities for students to apply what they have learned and perform their knowledge publicly, and a.s.sessing learning frequently and adjusting teaching accordingly. Education is not a process of simply acc.u.mulating afacts, concepts and skills,a but one that facilitates studentsa aever-increasing grasp of the world.a31 Scholars.h.i.+p on effective college teaching and learning in recent decades has emphasized student engagement and has focused on active and collaborative curricular activities. Although there are different definitions and emphases, at the core of active / collaborative learning is the idea that students should not pa.s.sively absorb the information but instead should engage in the learning process, often through applying what they have learned and working with others. The NSSE benchmark for active / collaborative learning, for example, includes factors such as asking questions in cla.s.s, making cla.s.s presentations, working with cla.s.smates during and / or outside of cla.s.s, tutoring or teaching students, partic.i.p.ating in community-based projects, and discussing ideas from cla.s.s / readings with others. Based on these measures, college students appear to be quite engaged in their learning: virtually all contribute to cla.s.s discussion, and the vast majority have made cla.s.s presentations and worked with peers inside and outside of the cla.s.sroom.32 Although preference for active engagement in the learning process over pa.s.sive acquisition of information can hardly be disputed, there is a question of what aactive / collaborative learninga really entails in the day-to-day activities of a cla.s.sroom. Has adopting active / collaborative learning meant mostly that we have made cla.s.srooms more lively and interesting, but not more demanding and challenging? Sociologist Steven Brint has recently raised concerns about the overarching emphasis on student engagement in higher education, which he describes as anew progressivism.a According to Brint, the new progressivism aadvocated active learning experiences, commitment to diversity and civic engagement, and challenging academic standards. However, [this] advocacy of challenging academic standards proved to be no match for the consumerism and utilitarianism of college student life. The trajectory of the new progressivism consequently mirrored the pattern of Ka”12 progressive education in the early 20th century, when followers of John Dewey, such as William Heard Kilpatrick, de-emphasized Deweyas insistence on rigor and frequent a.s.sessment and highlighted student-centered, active learning, and community engagement themes.a33 Indeed, while approximately 90 percent of college seniors say they have worked on projects and a.s.signments with cla.s.smates inside and outside of the cla.s.sroom, 50 percent have not written a twenty-page paper, only one-third have taken coursework that avery mucha emphasized synthesizing and organizing ideas, only approximately 40 percent have taken coursework that avery mucha focused on applying or a.n.a.lyzing theories or concepts, and the vast majority spent less than fifteen hours a week studying.34 Given these trends, perhaps it is not surprising that NSSE measures of engagement do not track strongly or consistently with objective measures of learning.35 Our own findings also caution specifically against an overemphasis on studying with peers.

Engaging activities and peer collaboration do not have to be ant.i.thetical to learning, but they are likely conducive only in specifically structured contexts that focus studentsa attention appropriately on learning. In a recent national survey, only approximately 50 percent of students reported that they were avery successfula at developing effective study skills in college.36 This raises the question of whether students know how to study, particularly in groups or collaboratively. Active / collaborative learning approaches are expected to increase student engagement and time on task. As Kuh and his colleagues claimed: aActive and collaborative learning is an effective educational practice because students learn more when they are intensely involved in their education and are asked to think about and apply what they are learning in different settings.a37 What we need to delve into more deeply is whether students are indeed using active and collaborative learning activities in these expected ways, and in particular whether these activities lead to notable gains on objective measures of learning. Studies rarely gauge the content, depth, or actual learning that takes place in collaborative experiences, thus leaving open the question of whether in practice those experiences are as beneficial for mastering complex skills such as critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing as they should be, based on theories of learning and cognitive development or on studentsa self-reports.

It is not only students who may not put active and collaborative learning activities to best use. Faculty are not very skilled at doing so either. During graduate training, future faculty members receive little if any formal instruction on teaching. Doctoral training focuses primarily, and at times exclusively, on research. Although recent decades have seen a proliferation of interest in improving the preparation of graduate students, a recent survey of doctoral students indicated that only 50 percent either had an opportunity to take a teaching a.s.sistantas training course lasting at least one term, or reported that they had an opportunity to learn about teaching in their respective disciplines through workshops and seminars.38 Not surprisingly, one of the main concerns of students in doctoral programs is a lack of systematic opportunities to help them learn how to teach.39 Graduate students are not only entering cla.s.srooms without much preparation, but more problematically, they are learning in their graduate programs to deprioritize and perhaps even devalue teaching. Frederick, a graduate student in history interviewed in a recent study of graduate school experience by Jody Nyquist and her colleagues, made the following remark about the comments and choices of faculty members in his department: aI have learned that the people who call the shots do not value teaching. And Iave learned that I canat spend as much time on my teaching as I have.a Alice, a graduate student in math, conveyed even stronger sentiments: aWhat kind of messages have I received about being a teacher? That itas really settling for a lesser thing. That if you are going to be a real person, youare going to do research a .a40 This aspect of graduate training, which neither prepares students to teach nor always instills in them a respect for the importance of teaching, is problematic not only on principled grounds but also from a functional standpoint: aMany, if not most [PhDs], will not be tenure-track faculty members,a and only a few will have jobs at research universities.41 A number of organizations and major foundations have spent recent decades conducting studies, sponsoring initiatives, and organizing conferences and roundtables to address the current state of affairs and the future of the doctorate. Some of the programs, such as the Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program, appear effective at increasing the interest and preparation of graduate students for teaching.42 Those important endeavors are chipping away at the ivory tower. However, transformational chang

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