Washington

US graduate students appreciate the education that their universities provide, but feel they get too little career guidance, according to a new survey. The results, published on the Internet by the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (NAGPS), confirm the suspicions of many university deans.

Some 32,000 graduate students responded to the survey, which was designed to measure the extent to which universities have adopted reforms proposed recently by bodies such as the National Research Council and the Association of American Universities. Such organizations argue that students should be more broadly prepared for diverse scientific careers.

The survey's data indicate that many graduate students feel that supervisors focus on training students for academic careers, sometimes to the exclusion of other options, says Kimberly Wells, past president of the NAGPS — even though academic opportunities are limited in some disciplines. Some students commented that just mentioning non-academic careers could get them labelled “black sheep”, says Wells. Others noted that they were frowned upon for considering a teaching career.

Robert Thach, dean of the graduate school of arts and sciences at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, says he knew that his graduate school could do a better job in career guidance: “But this poll underscores my impressions dramatically.” Lewis Siegel, vice-provost and dean of the graduate school at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, agrees. “In most scientifically oriented disciplines, they've hit the nail on the head,” he says.

But both Thach and Siegel criticize the survey's methodology. The total number of participating students is too low for results to be “statistically compelling”, Thach says.

Most controversially, the report attempted to rank individual institutions for graduate student satisfaction — requiring only a minimum of 10 replies from a department. Deans argue that these sample sizes are much too low to give reliable results.

The NAGPS will repeat the survey next year, publishing the results in spring 2003.

→ http://survey.nagps.org