A graduate degree is a professional degree, intended both to furnish credentials and to prepare students for their life's work. But important aspects of their life's work have been neglected or ignored in their doctoral programs, to their detriment and that of the undergraduates they are expected to teach. The percentage of Ph.D.'s who become faculty varies broadly between fields, ranging from 83 per cent of humanities majors to 22 per cent of engineering majors. Most future faculty, however, cannot realistically expect to find positions at the 3 per cent of the nation's colleges and universities that are research universities. Yet graduate education severely neglects the professional goal of the majority of students who will become college professors, that is to say, teaching.
Many students go directly from their bachelor's degrees into graduate school.
They have great needs to acclimate themselves to a very different kind of learning experience. Simultaneously, we burden them with the responsibilities of research or teaching assistantships. Although more affluent institutions may allow them a grace period before beginning their assistantships, too many plunge them directly into their duties. Moreover, they are too often expected to know how to teach with little more than a few days or weeks of casual training and with little or no supervision throughout the year. When these neophytes enter the classroom, they rarely come armed with serious training in pedagogy.