I am quite worried about the state of this country’s graduate education system.  While I am sure we are cranking out record numbers of students with advanced degrees, I think the quality of education has been severely eroded.  This stems primarily from the desire of many universities to build large, well funded research programs.

Unfortunately it seems that over the years a ‘large, well funded program’ has essentially become synonymous with running a consulting company.  To understand why this is you have to understand the different types of funding engineering faculty can get.  One can split it into government funding and industry funding with the vast majority of the money coming from the government.

Let us consider the smaller industry funding first.  This money comes as either a grant or a gift.  Gift money is essentially unrestricted and companies give it for a couple of reasons.  First is to build relationships with academic research groups which helps in preparing and recruiting students.  The second reason is that gift money goes farther because universities typically do not charge overhead on it.  Grant money on the other hand is charged overhead (typically around 50%) but there is a contract in place and deliverables expected.  Thus, the company has much more say in what research should be conducted and what results should be delivered.  Gift money is probably the best type of money someone can get because it is essentially unrestricted.  However, unless a faculty member has had a very long relationship with a business, gifts are usually very small (tens of thousands of dollars) and are hard to rely on because of natural business cycles.  Grant money from industry is probably the worst type of money you can get because there are usually many deliverables.  I.e. companies are looking for tangible results from their investment.

Government money makes up the vast majority of funding.  As an engineer there are two primary sources of government funding, the Department of Defense (DoD) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).  Depending on the specific type of work, engineers also get funding from the Department of Energy (DoE), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and NASA.  Funding from NSF is arguably the best because it is largely unrestricted, allowing the faculty member and the supported students freedom to explore interesting ideas that may not have been explicitly proposed.  DoE and NIH funding can also be fairly unrestricted.  NASA funding was always relatively small and it is almost completely gone now.  The vast majority of engineering research funds come from the various DoD agencies.  This is probably the worst type of funding there is from an academic freedom perspective because DoD wants specific results and will not continue funding a program unless they get them.

While I am not suggesting that having deliverables and expecting results from a funded research project is bad, I do think it diminishes the academic experience and the education of the students supported by the funds.  If a faculty member is being pressured by a funding agency to deliver results (or lose the funds) that faculty member will pressure the students working on the project.  The faculty member then becomes a manager, the students employees, and the research group a small consulting company.

Putting pressure on graduate students to get research done is not necessarily a bad thing.  However, it seems to always results in the student spending less time on their courses/education and more time on their research.  If the work is truly graduate level research the students should need to spend at least a year doing mostly coursework to build a deeper understanding to perform the research.  The pressure to get immediate results distracts students from learning anything besides what is directly needed to get the results.

This pressure also affects how faculty members advise their students.  Students are frequently directed to take the minimum number of classes required and steered towards easier classes requiring less work.  A light course load will mean there is more time for research.  I was shocked to hear that students in one lab are actually told not to do schoolwork from 9:00 to 5:00 because that is when they are ‘working’.  This environment is really the same as they would have working in industry and taking courses towards an advanced degree in the evenings.

In fact, it seems like in many situations the students would be better off doing just that.  Even if you consider the tuition the students do not have to pay, the money they make is much less than the money they would be making in industry.  The only reason I can tell for students not opting for this is the necessary classes are not offered in the evenings.  Maybe as more and more classes are offered online we will start seeing students take this route.

Thus, one has to wonder why companies are still willing to hire graduate students.  This is likely because these students are usually the smartest and hardest workers.  Going to graduate school does not change that, and the classes they do take and the research they perform do likely better prepare them.  Unless they are doing the exact same type of research as they did for their thesis (which is highly unlikely) the lack of focusing on courses, learning, and broadening and deepening their knowledge will make them less prepared than they could have been.