Facing reality in graduate education

Abstract

It's been clear for some time that we must rethink, perhaps redesign, graduate education in chemistry. Numerous conferences have chewed on the subject. But it's all been rather unofficial and unfocused. Now, an official ACS body—the Committee on Professional Training—has come to grips with at least the core problems with last week's Report on Doctoral Education: Facing the 1970's (C&EN, Aug. 14, page 35), its first report on graduate education since 1964. report should be required reading, for it focuses on questions whose answers will set the chemical stage for a decade or more to come. main question, of course, centers on the current oversupply of Ph.D.'s and gross overcapacity of the institutions producing them in the face of shrinking R&D funds and a depressed job market. As the report notes: The present central issue . . . is that the sum of the projected aspirations of all graduate departments in the country ...