Having just completed a rather lengthy graduate school program, I am mystified that the Educational Testing Services — the company that administers the GRE and other standardized tests, including the SAT and TOEFL – is offering a new test to determine whether students have the “personality” for graduate school (reported in the Chicago Tribune by Larry Gordon).

Because nearly half of all students who start doctorate programs don’t finish, educators have long wondered how best to judge applicants to graduate schools and reduce that attrition rate.

Now, the Educational Testing Service says it has just the thing. The ETS, which runs the Graduate Record Examinations, will soon offer a supplemental assessment of graduate-school applicants on those personal characteristics that could help students tackle advanced studies.

Now, going to graduate school does require some personal characteristics.  So does medical school, but no one is suggesting adding a section to the MCAT where potential future doctors watch gory surgeries to see whether they can stomach the sight of blood.  And it’s unclear what this Personal Potential Index will add something that graduate schools cannot find in applicants’ CVs and letters of recommendation.

But the idea underlying this test is what’s really disturbing — that not finishing graduate school is a personal failing rather than a systemic problem.  In other words, if there were just better ways of choosing the students admitted to graduate school, there would be a higher graduation rate.

What’s missing here is an understanding of how graduate school works, and what graduate students do for universities, and what the academic job market looks like.

Graduate students are in a strange situation.  On entering a graduate program, they take classes and feel like students.  As time goes on, they transition into an apprentice-like situation where they learn, teach undergraduate students, conduct original research, present papers at conferences, publish, etc.  While they are still referred to as “graduate students” there is an acknowledgment that their role has changed (which is often indicated by calling them “advanced graduate students,” “ABDs [All But Dissertation],” etc.).  They perform work for the university, both by teaching undergraduates (as teaching assistants or instructors) and adding to its prestige as a research institution.

Marc Bousquet’s book How the University Works shows that many people working on PhDs cannot expect to have high-paying jobs on graduation.  (I am limiting my comments here to those in graduate school who intend to work in academia, not those doing degrees in law, business, or medicine.)  The reality is that there are far fewer jobs in academia than full-time positions.  Students who realize that a 8-12 year program may not pay off financially (in terms of tuition costs or opportunity costs) are not leaving graduate school because of their “personality,” but due to their economic situation.

Unlike undergrads — who enter and largely leave school unmarried and without children — graduate students start families, care for aging parents, hold other jobs, move for a spouse’s career, buy homes, etc.  In short, they are adults.  Is it surprising that sometimes they make adult decisions, such as concluding that “Graduate school no longer seems to be the best use of my time and resources” or “The cost of attending graduate school will never pay off in this field” or “This job, that I took just to pay the bills, is turning out to be more stable and profitable than staying in school” ?

Now, to some extent this situation this may be a case of “When one has a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”  The ETS creates standardized tests; they are not in a position to reform academia. A background paper on the new test notes that “expressed concern about the continued problem of graduate school attrition and time-to-degree, which they suggested may at least partly be accounted for by noncognitive factors” (emphasis added).  The use of the term “partly”  is an implicit acknowledgment that personality is not the only factor in graduate school success.

Everyone prefers to have collegial, helpful colleagues, and these characteristics go far in academia and everywhere else.  But academic success in graduate school is not just a matter of merit or personality, but luck and, yes, money. But I guess the ETS can’t test for that — I hope.

Here’s a little intellectual exercise I recently undertook, with help from — who else? — my Dad.  I found this gem at the Chicago Book Fair Lit Fest a couple of weekends ago:

For $7.50, I purchased a piece of history.  This was a original ad run in the Saturday Evening Post.  Pan-Am was the first airline to market discount airfares to the U.S. middle class, discussed beautifully in Christopher Endy’s book Cold War Holidays, which explores how the U.S. promoted post-WWII tourism to France as part of the Marshall Plan.  (I highly recommend it either as undergraduate course material or casual non-fiction reading.)

As an anthropologist of tourism specializing in Latin America, this seemed to be the perfect thing for my office.  It was clearly post-WWII, but when exactly?  The vendor told me it might have a date on the back, but since it was packaged in plastic I decided to do some guesswork first.  My first guess (close but incorrect, it turns out) was 1952.

The ad includes flights to Havana, a popular tourist destination in the 1950s, clearly placing this before the U.S. embargo on travel to Cuba in 1960.  But the other information here was less clear: Pan-Am had been flying out of Brownsville airport since 1929.  Pan-Am’s clippers flew starting in the late 1930s.

The date turned out to be on the reverse side, written in a language that my Dad speaks fluently:

This is where being part of a family with a serious hereditary car obsession comes in handy.  With Dad visiting for a week, I knew he could solve this mystery for me.  He was polite about the Pan-Am ad, but when I showed him the other side he got very excited.  He immediately dated this car to the late 1940s, and a bit of searching on google images pinpointed the model to 1947 (you can see an example here).  You can see similar Chrysler ads to this one here.

When I told him I planned to frame this for my office, he asked (in his typical deadpan fashion), “Which side?”

Other data pointing to 1947 include this 1948 Pan-Am route map, which is very similar to the one on the Pan-Am ad.  And a bit more searching revealed that the everythingpanam.com site actually has a copy of the same ad, which they date to May 1947.  It may have been run in later magazines, but that would suggest that the special mentioned ran from May-Sept of 1947.

In short, Dad was right!  Happy Father’s Day!

[Crossposted at the Gringo Tambo.]

Two things have come to light in the past couple of weeks regarding academic honesty in the U.S.  One is the Chicago Tribune’s expose on the University of Illinois at Campaign-Urbana (the state’s main campus) admitting students because they have political supporters, rather than on the basis of merit.

The other is that William Meehan, the President of Jacksonville State University, plagiarized much of his dissertation.

What is disturbing about Meehan’s plagiarism of Carl Boening’s dissertation — and something that I’m not the first to notice — is that both men wrote their dissertations for a Doctorate in Education at the University of Alabama, within three years of each other (1996 and 1999).  Not only that, they SHARED COMMITTEE MEMBERS, specifically Michael T. Miller, now of the University of Arkansas (who was chair of BOTH their dissertation committees) and the late Harold Bishop.  In other words, these two men supposedly read, critiqued and commented on drafts of both these dissertations, but didn’t notice that they were largely the same document.

I would be embarrassed to have signed off on a dissertation without noticing something so glaring.  This not only brings Meehan’s reputation into question, but unfortunately also those of Drs. Miller and Bishop.  While dissertation committees should not be expected to turn graduate work into turnitin.com, and it is well known that committee members often don’t have the time to read every word of their students’ dissertations (that is a structural problem involving what is expected from academics and what they can reasonably do), it seems that members of this committee should have noticed something so obvious and done something about it.

In fact, this should have been caught at the stage of formulating a dissertation project.  If a doctorate is supposed to add to a discipline’s body of knowledge, students should be encouraged to avoid projects that are too similar to others completed so recently, unless they truly have a different take on the material.

The larger point I want to make, however, is that these kinds of scandals do more than anger those of us who wrote our own dissertations and who have the unpleasant task of punishing undergraduates who plagiarize.  They affect the reputations of others associated with these institutions.  It’s one thing to write a mediocre dissertation; it’s another for others to have to wonder whether U. of Alabama doctorates wrote their own work (and I assume that most of them do).  It’s one thing to not be the best student to ever grace UIUC; it’s another for people to have to wonder whether anyone with a connection to someone in state politics is only there because they pulled strings (as this letter points out).

This is not just about who is accepted to these institutions, but what it means to have graduated from them.  In academia, much of the legitimacy of our work rides on the integrity of our scholarly communities — our students, our department, our university, our alums.  Those who throw that honesty into question should expect consequences, and those who value the reputation of their institutions should take action.  In the end, our reputation as scholars is the most valuable thing we have.