The graduate faculty now numbers 18 and awards about seven graduate degrees per year. Forty to 50 graduate students are in residence at a time. The department holds to an apprenticeship philosophy of graduate education in which the faculty and graduate students engage in a joint enterprise of education. The department is noted for the intense exchange of ideas among its graduate students and faculty members. The graduate program allows students to develop programs emphasizing traditional and nontraditional specialties in sociology or a combination of sociology and related fields.
Students can readily develop programs of study in each of the following fields.
The labor process, bureaucracy, industrial sociology, work and gender, organizational theory. For most students, the master's degree is an integral part of the doctoral program. Nonthesis, thesis, and research paper master's degrees are available. Besides a baccalaureate degree with a 3.0 grade-point average, prerequisites for regular admission to the graduate program in sociology are 15 hours of college credit in sociology, a course in sociological theory, and a sociology course in statistics. Applications for admission must include scores on the Graduate Record Examination aptitude tests for all those whose native language is English and for all other applicants who have degrees from colleges or universities at which English is the language of instruction.