Future Faculty In Nursing for Doctoral Programs
This topic discusses the themes and outcomes of a national conversation in the USA focused on the state and future of doctoral education. It outlines the interrelationship of recent national calls for improvements in US doctoral education, describes the role of ‘Re -envisioning the PhD Project’1 in synthesizing those calls and in providing those who prepare and hire PhDs a set of tools for action, and offers an example of a way in which the discipline of nursing can heed the recommendations of the project to help address the current faculty shortage.
Characteristics of Topic
While the topic of graduate education reform is not necessarily a new one, it is being addressed today in ways that differ importantly from other times in the past. First, the demands of an ever-changing and increasingly complex knowledge economy, as well as labor market uncertainty, present challenges and opportunities to contemporary education unlike those experienced by earlier educators and policymakers.
Secondly, the undergraduate and graduate student populations—a percentage of whom will be in the pipeline for PhD degrees, and some of whom will become our own and other nations’ future professors—are becoming more diverse culturally, socioeconomically and in career orientation than ever before.
A third difference is the range of voices participating in the conversation. Increasingly, leaders from business and industry, government, K-12 education (kindergarten through to 12th grade, or elementary and secondary schooling, in the USA and Canada), disciplinary associations, foundations and funding agencies, and two- and four-year colleges and universities are voicing their concerns about how well the doctoral degree helps them to meet society’s educational, social, business, political and other needs.
The sheer range of stakeholders is recognition that responsibility for the PhD degree is not the sole province of research universities, but more appropriately is regarded as the product of loosely structured but interdependent interactions among several different socioeconomic sectors.
In the following topic, we introduce readers to the driving forces, goals, strategies and outcomes of the Re-envisioning the PhD Project. We explain how it has served to engender and coordinate much of this national conversation, and we outline its hopes for the future of doctoral education. While focusing on the themes and recommendations for action that have emerged for doctoral education generally, we attempt to draw some important implications for nursing education specifically, particularly in the light of the nursing faculty shortage.
To do so, we explore how one school of nursing, at the University of Washington, is embracing the call of re-envisioning the PhD to improve the preparation of graduate students aspiring to the nursing professoriate. Our objective is to provide doctoral educators in nursing, both in the USA and abroad, a framework for understanding their efforts to improve the doctorate in the context of this larger dialogue, to encourage them not only to learn from it but also to contribute their unique insights to it.
History And Purpose of The Project
There is widespread recognition that a new, national agenda for doctoral education in the USA is emerging, motivated in part by shifts in the demand for PhDs in academic and non-academic markets and by a growing acceptance that long-held traditions in research universities must be re-examined periodically and evolve with the times.
Over the course of the 1990s, many disciplines, especially those in the arts/humanities and some social sciences, faced the threat of long-term surpluses of PhDs, while others, such as computer science, engineering and nursing, for example, faced shortfalls —particularly in relation to the numbers of PhDs choosing to remain in academe.
An increasingly complex knowledge economy, coupled with labor market uncertainties, have raised questions about how well doctorate holders are prepared to apply their intellectual expertise in a range of settings where they are most likely to secure career employment. For many disciplines, the bulk of professional positions available for PhDs is not necessarily in the research universities, where only a limited number of faculty opportunities exist relative to the numbers of PhDs produced annually.
Such pragmatic concerns about the deployment of human intellectual resources catalyzed several commissions and individual researchers to examine the current state of doctoral education in the USA. Recommendations for improvements have been issued by groups as diverse as the National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy (1995), the American Association of Universities (1998), the National Research Council (1998), ‘The PhDs. Org Graduate School Survey’ (Davis and Fiske, 1999), ‘The PhDs—Ten Years Later Study’ (Nerad and Cerny, 2000) and the cross-purposes report (Golde and Dore, 2000), and by several disciplinary associations.
Although often very different in methodological approach, many overlapping criticisms of doctoral curricula began to emerge from these inquiries, such as potential overspecialization in research, insufficient attention to pedagogical preparation and experience, and growing disconnects in many arenas between the development of scholarly expertise and its application to pressing social and economic challenges.
What was missing from the national scene, however, was a common forum to help synthesize the multitude of recommendations for change and articulate opportunities for collective action. Thus, in the light of the many views of change being put forth, the goal of the Re-envisioning the PhD Project has been to stimulate a wide-reaching, active and ongoing discussion on the following question: How can we re-envision the PhD to meet the needs of society in the twenty-first century?
Developing A Framework For Dialogue And Action
Re-envisioning the PhD draws together diverse policymakers and educators at all levels to reflect on ways of ensuring that graduate education at the modern research university will enable the PhD to thrive in the context of increasingly complex demands.
The project has been driven by a philosophy of inclusion and action— Zinclusion of perspectives from all of the sectors of society with a stake in the processes and outcomes of PhD education, and an orientation to identifying strategies to facilitate collaborative action on ideas set forth in the national discussion.
One of our project’s participants, a former dean of a comprehensive, land grant university, succinctly captured our vision of inclusion in his opinion that a new vision of the PhD it is a community problem. It is going to require input from federal agencies, input from industry, input from academia and from others who hire PhDs. What we have not done is sit at the same table and declare what the ground rules are going to be, because no one party can change effectively what we are trying to do.
In other words, no single level of education, type of institution, or social or academic constituency ‘owns’ the PhD. Instead, the doctorate should more appropriately be thought of as the product of a loose but interdependent set of relationships among those who educate PhDs, those who hire them, and those who influence the educational process.
Research universities, which have a significant interest in replenishing their faculty ranks with new scholars, are not the only destination for doctorate holders. A wide range of employers, both inside and outside academe, seeks the analytical skills and problem-solving habits of mind developed in doctoral training.
Academic institutions with missions primarily devoted to excellence in undergraduate learning need the PhDs they hire to have attained sufficient and high-quality instructional preparation, a solid understanding of their disciplines and the ability to navigate intellectual cross-roads with other fields of knowledge.
For their part, government, non-profit and business and industry sectors seek candidates who understand the importance of scholarly relevance and how to apply advanced skills to national, regional and local challenges, as well as to commercial opportunities. And those who fund doctoral research and educational opportunities desire to see their investments leverage measurable benefits for groups of people beyond the individual grant recipients.
To engage as many parties as possible in the articulation of a new vision, the Re-envisioning the PhD Project conducted an environmental scan of the landscape of doctoral education, eliciting widely held concerns about the PhD and mapping the numerous innovative practices known to be emerging on campuses and in organizations.
After more than 350 interviews with leaders inside and outside academe, supplemented by focus groups and e-mail surveys, nine groups of stakeholders in doctoral education emerged: doctoral students, research-intensive universities, teaching-intensive colleges and universities, K-12 education , business and industry, government funding agencies, foundations and other non-profits, disciplinary societies, and educational associations (including governance boards and accrediting bodies).
Selection of Students Criteria and Preferences
Although across these groups we noted some differences of opinion regarding the essential purposes of doctoral education, who and how many students should be admitted to doctoral study, and the model of training students should receive, we also found widespread agreement that action should be taken to address six major concerns about PhD education:
1 The time to degree needs to be shortened.
2 More ethnic and gender diversity needs to be cultivated among doctoral recipients.
3 Doctoral students need more exposure to technology, including instructional technology.
4 Doctoral students need broader professional preparation for the career opportunities available to them.
5 More global perspectives on economy, environment and culture need to be incorporated into doctoral study.
6 More opportunities for interdisciplinary work need to be fostered.
Although regarding the purposes of this topic we focus, in the second half, more substantively on number four—concerns professional preparation for a wide array of doctoral careers we explore the entire array of community concerns in great detail in a project booklet entitled Re- envisioning the PhD: What Concerns Do We Have? (www.grad.washington.edu/envision/project_ resources/concerns.html). (Nyquist and Woodford, 2000).
In April 2000, we invited some 200 leaders of these groups—those who prepare PhDs, those who fund them, those who hire them, and those who influence the doctoral enterprise in important ways, including doctoral students themselves—to participate in a national conference on re-envisioning the PhD.
This forum was the first of its kind in the nation to invite several interest groups to ‘sit at the same table,’ as it were, to address each others’ concerns and to identify multiple strategies for collaboration. A synthesis of conference themes can be found on the project’s website (www.grad.washington.edu/envision/project_ resources/metathemes.html) alongside the conference’s proceedings, panels and sector-specific action items.
Resources to Aid Change
In addition to distilling community concerns and making them available to interested policymakers and educators, the project also developed several important resources to aid change agents in formulating a collective action agenda. These include:
- the national/international website itself, a living clearinghouse of transformative ideas, which is periodically updated and averages over 200,000 hits per month
- an extensive bibliography of 700+ entries addressing issues and strategies for improving doctoral education
- a collection of over 300 promising practices illustrating innovations in doctoral education from nearly 150 different institutions
- a collection of practical resources on obtaining a doctorate and on obtaining employment in diverse institutions and sectors
- an ongoing virtual discussion that extends to over 2500 stakeholders.
Issues of preparing aspiring faculty to enter a higher education system undergoing significant transformations have figured prominently in the re-envisioning project’s national discussion. As Hirsch and Weber (1999) emphasize, among the many challenges universities face are those of ‘providing new structures, flexible career paths and selective support for new patterns of creative inquiry, effective learning, and responsible public service’ (p. 180).
This range of professional endeavor requires institutions to develop multiple models of excellence (Atwell, 1996), and thus to develop faculty who are both willing and sufficiently skilled to extend themselves beyond the traditional boundaries of the laboratory or the lecture hall, to reach into the complex arenas of institutional governance and public scholarship, and to guide diverse learners in both the fundamental and novel applications of their disciplines.
To deal effectively with these challenges in the coming decades, doctoral students will need a kind of preparation that differs considerably from that which many of their senior faculty advisors may have acquired. Recognition of this reality is evidenced by the many promising practices being developed in universities to sharpen doctoral students’ skills as innovative educators and intellectual leaders in a wide range of learning and teaching contexts .
In the remainder of this topic, we focus on one aspect of re-envisioning the PhD that relates specifically to enhancing the preparation of aspiring faculty, and discuss a type of collaborative strategy that may aid the nursing discipline in attracting and retaining new faculty.
The Nursing Faculty Shortage Quantity Versus Quality
The current shortage of nurses and nursing faculty in the USA is a crucial issue for the recruitment and preparation of human and intellectual resources. It seems that more attention, however, is being paid to recruiting the desired quantity of individuals to the profession than to the quality of preparation these recruits will require to function effectively in the profession and serve as role models for attracting others.
The strong focus on recruitment is understandable given the predicament of trying to increase baccalaureate enrollments in the context of a growing deficit of full-time master’s and doctorally prepared faculty. Without being able to ensure a sufficient number of instructors, the population of bachelor’s students cannot effectively be increased. In various reports, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (see, for example, AACN 2002, 2003a, 2003b) has been rigorously monitoring the quandary:
- Recent years have witnessed successive drops in bachelor’s and master’s degree enrollment nationally, along with relatively little growth in PhD program enrollments overall.
- In response to a 2002 AACN survey of nursing schools on enrollment and graduation rates 62% pointed to faculty shortages as a reason for denying admission to numerous qualified applicants into their baccalaureate programs.
- Replacements for a large number of anticipated faculty retirements (the mean age of current nursing faculty is 50 years) are difficult to find. Noncompetitive academic salaries, the high cost and length of doctoral education, and the increasingly complex expectations of faculty performance, cause many current faculty and new PhDs to consider turning away from the academic profession.
- As much as 43% of nursing master’s degree holders, and as much as 27% of doctorate holders, leave, or choose not to enter, faculty positions in the academy in order to pursue more lucrative opportunities in nursing services, the private sector or private practice.
- It is estimated that only about 50% of all faculty teaching in baccalaureate and higher degree programs are PhD-prepared.
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