Objective Versus Subjective Indicators of Quality in Graduate Education

Abstract

While various investigators have explored the correlates of the Cartter report's ratings of quality in graduate education, none have concentrated on how these correlates might differ across disciplines. Using both original data and data from published sources, this study examines the relationship of the rated quality of university departments to other possible quality indicators in two physical and two social sciences. The reputations of individual faculty members were found to be more closely associated with departmental reputation in the physical than in the social sciences. Discriminant analyses of financial data and other objective indicators were 95-100 percent successful in discriminating the Cartter report ratings of quality for a stratified random sample of 20 departments in each of four scientifc fields. Similarly, multiple regression analyses gave large R2 for each field with rated quality of departments as the dependent variable. However, the same variables were not the best predictors for all fields with either technique, and no objective measure is linearly, or even monotonically related to the Cartter ratings across fields. These findings are discussed in terms of Kuhn's ideas of raradigm development: existing structures of knowledge in various disciplines differ in ways that have implications for the relationships between other variables and rated quality.