Objective Measures of Ph.D. Program Quality in Agricultural Economics

Abstract

Graduate student education is an important component of the educational and research mission for agricultural economics departments across the country. A high-quality graduate program brings prestige to a department and attracts high-quality faculty and students that are invaluable in helping a department carry out its land grant mission. On the other hand, a troubled graduate program can hurt a department's reputation, demoralize faculty, and monopolize the time of departmental administrators. Assessing the quality of graduate programs is difficult because graduate education has many facets. Such factors as mentoring by faculty, classroom instruction, faculty competence, educational objectives, research opportunities, physical facilities, and student quality are all important in determining the quality of education a graduate student receives. Even the relative importance of these factors will differ across students. For example, some students will experience a great deal of educational growth when given the opportunity to conduct journal quality research, while others may find such research experiences to be of little value. A number of researchers have attempted to assess graduate and departmental programs using a few key measures. Publishing output by doctoral students graduating between 1971 and 1982 was used by Tauer and Tauer to rank doctoral programs. Although this type of measure has great appeal, it is of limited value in ranking current graduate programs. Faculty changes or a different administrative philosophy can cause a marked change in graduate program quality over a rela ively short time period. Research output is more often used as a measure of departmental quality. The two approaches utilized are publication counts (Holland and Redman; Opaluch and Just) and citation counts (Gregory and Adams; Beilock, Polopolus, and Correal). Publication counts are useful in assessing the professional activity and competence of departmental faculty. Citation counts help in assessing the long-term impact of this professional activity. To use these measures in assessing graduate program quality, one must assume that these highly-productive faculty have the ability to teach their publishing skills and field expertise to other students in both classroom a d mentoring situations. Typically, these publication counts are limited to a few journals, mainly those aimed at academic economists and agricultural economists. Thus, these counts miss much of a department's output. In the case of citation counts, a few highly-cited pieces of research done 20 years ago may lead one to believe that a particular faculty member is currently competent to teach and mentor graduate students. A third approach is to survey agricultural economists and obtain a subjective assessment of graduate program quality (Boddy; Perry). The advantage of this approach is that it measures perceptions of quality, which are important in influencing where students decide to pursue graduate studies. The disadvantage of this approach is that little timely information exists on the current status of graduate education in particular departments. Therefore, faculty largely rely on anecdotal evidence and historical performance to assess current program quality. The objective of this article is to provide agricultural economists with a more comprehen-sive set of information about U.S. Ph.D. graduate Gregory M. Perry is an Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, O egon State University. Technical Paper #10792 of the Oregon Agricultural Experiment Station. The author wishes to express appreciation to those who provided information for this study and the comments expressed during faculty seminars at Texas A&M and Oregon State. Comments by reviewers were also responsib e for improving and clarifying the interpretation of results.