1. One challenge for graduate schools, said Pitt State’s Pawan Kahol, is getting faculty and business interests aligned. | 2. Denis Medeiros from UMKC said the tenure-promotion process was often an impediment to making such alignments possible. | 3. Development of creative and critical-thinking skills are important elements of graduate education, said Maria Di Stefano of Truman State University.


Growing Graduate Students

One phenomenon that Janice Putnam has been seeing at UCM is an awareness by incoming freshman of the value of graduate education and the determination at an early stage to pursue that education.

“Are we preparing our undergrad students for this?” George Justice asked. If so, he questioned what campuses are doing to develop freshmen into future workforce professionals and graduate degree holders.

Pawan Kahol, dean of Graduate and Continuing Studies at Pittsburg State University, had a less sanguine take on the issue. “Many of our graduates go for a degree,” he cautioned, “but they have no idea why.” Just as problematically, “They have no idea what they are going to be doing after they get this degree.” To help them with passage through life, Kahol has started a pilot program in which a cohort of grad students meets every week with an English professor and a communications professor.

“I think that sometimes the danger is that we forget the intangible value of the graduate education,” said Maria Di Stefano, dean of graduate studies at Truman State University, “which is not necessarily just wearing a certain career hat, but developing into individuals who value creativity and have leadership qualities.”

What Industry Wants

Laurie DiPadova-Stocks, dean of the school of graduate and professional studies at Park University, spoke to “the basic disconnect” between what industry needs and what is found in the curriculum, especially in regards to soft skills like team-building, leadership, creativity, and critical thinking.

DiPadova-Stocks was not sure she had the answer. She did not deny the value of the soft skills, “but to take that through a professional accreditation process, with the MBA and the MPA, you’re going to be challenged in terms of the outcomes for accreditation.” There is no good way, she argued, to be certain that somebody knows teamwork or has leadership qualities. “We don’t incorporate that,” she concluded. “I see this as a fascinating and interesting challenge.”

Pawan Kahol saw a real problem getting faculty to respond to industry needs. “Faculty are living in their own world,” he said. “Employers are living in their own world. There’s no connection.” He believes there is a need for a “bridge” between the two worlds.

“It’s a tenure-promotion process, if you think about it,” said Denis Medeiros, dean of graduate studies at UMKC. One of his greatest frustrations has been the professional science masters degree program. Traditional research and traditional tenure promotion discourage the faculty from interacting with industry in setting up internships. Maria Di Stefano admitted to having similar problems at Truman State University.

“How do you facilitate change when you have people that have been trained to think a certain way and you’re asking them to think in a different way?” asked Medeiros, a question for which there was no easy answer. Venkat Allada admitted that traditional schools have been very slow reacting, which is why the University of Phoenix and comparable institutions have been prospering.

Allan Rawitch does not believe having different faculty tracks solves the problem because tenure and non-tenure faculty come out of the same tradition. “I’ve come to the conclusion,” said Rawitch, “that to address some of these things, it virtually has to be extracurricular, or outside the main curriculum the students are in.”

Tom Heilke believes the way to get faculty interested in interacting with outside entities is to treat some of the issues involved as research problems. “If you treat it as a research problem, then at least some faculty will start becoming interested in it,” he contended. “If you treat it as a problem of how to mentor grad students, they will become more interested.”

That much said, Heilke is highly skeptical of graduate programs that try to teach skills as nebulous as leadership or critical thinking. “I think that kind of course would be a complete and total waste of time.” He believes that a traditional liberal arts education should fill that function. “When we talk to business people,” said Heilke, “they actually want and value some of those things that we have furnished [students] for hundreds of years in the traditional curriculum.”

George Justice largely agreed. “I feel very strongly that we don’t throw away what we have been very successful in,” he said, before adding, “but the tradition can also be hidebound. There are people on my campus who believe that categorizations of knowledge should look like they did 100 years ago. I don’t believe that”.