That is a topic you have posed to me today. The Present and Future of Graduate Education From my perspective, graduate education has several distinctive features. The first is that attainment of the degree must be accompanied by the generation of new knowledge or an original work. This feature of graduate education is definitive and dictates an inexorable narrowing of disciplinary focus as students progress through highly individualized graduate study. While we all recognize the potential negative aspects of this feature of graduate education, there are undisputed positive attributes to the model.
Graduate students do indeed become experts within their field of study.
Done well, graduate education generates new knowledge, invigorates faculty advisors, and can establish the groundwork for an entire career of investigation. Because the ultimate goal is discovery, graduate students must become adept at consultative processes, either through textual analysis within and external to their fields, or through interaction with colleagues in associated fields. A second feature of graduate education is its disciplinary autonomy. Unlike professional programs, graduate degree programs lack an official licensure process. In place of licensure, virtually all graduate programs include a qualifying or comprehensive examination of candidates to ensure mastery of a disciplinary body of knowledge.