Do it over–Fix Graduate Educationion

I like many of the suggestions in this article (tho can only clip 1000 characters, so it’s worth reading the whole thing) and am proud that my program, Community, Agriculture, Recreation, and Resource Studies (CARRS) at Michigan State University, is already doing interdisciplinary, problem/theme-focused research and teaching.

clipped from www.nytimes.com End the University as We Know It By MARK C. TAYLOR GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans). The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors