“OSU seeing results in grad-school review” |
| OSU seeing results in grad-school review Posted: 25 Dec 2010 02:33 AM PST Ohio State University has eliminated three doctoral programs, reorganized dozens more and increased graduate-student stipends over the past two years to better compete on the national stage. "If we want to become one of the best universities in the world, we have to build state-of-the-art, cutting-edge programs," said Joseph Steinmetz, OSU's executive dean and vice provost of Arts and Sciences. "The programs will attract the best students, and they will draw the top faculty members." Three years ago, the university spent a year reviewing its Ph.D. programs in the first comprehensive evaluation of its kind in the country. Ohio State wanted to determine how to improve the best academic programs and weed out the weakest. And it had collected much of the data for a national assessment of doctoral programs that ended up being delayed until this October. Rather than wait for the national review, Ohio State rated its 90 doctoral programs on measures such as students' time to get a degree, graduates' job placement and the rate of Ph.D.s produced for each program, compared with other schools in Ohio and the nation. Ohio State has nearly 11,000 graduate students and more than 3,000 professional students. In the end, 34 programs were singled out to be reworked, including five that were recommended for elimination if they couldn't be improved. Since the 2008-09 school year, campus officials have cut Comprehensive Vocational Education, stopped accepting students in Rehabilitation Services and Technology Education, and moved the remaining two low-performing programs - soil science and welding engineering - to other colleges, where they are gaining momentum. Ohio State is now the only school in the country to have a welding engineering program for graduate students in materials science, which is fast becoming an emerging field, said Patrick S. Osmer, vice provost of graduate studies and dean of the Graduate School. Other programs have merged so that faculty members can do interdisciplinary work they might not have thought of if they had stayed in their previous departments. The faculties of chemistry and biochemistry, for example, have formed a new department with a single graduate program, said Osmer, who oversaw the doctoral-review process. The university has identified life and environmental sciences as two of its most-promising areas for groundbreaking research and has formed a group to find grant money. Stipends to doctoral students also were found to be too low to attract the best students. To bolster recruitment, Ohio State started giving students in "strong to high-quality" doctoral programs an extra $3,000 a year in fellowship money, for an additional $12,000 over four years. Officials said the effort is paying off. The percentage of students accepting graduate fellowships has increased from 35 percent to 45 percent, Osmer said. The school has dedicated an additional $3.6 million a year for the stipend increases. "There's no point in doing these comprehensive reviews if you don't back them with resources," said Joseph A. Alutto, executive vice president and provost, who came up with the money for the stipend increases. The university also has made strides to better balance the teaching and research demands of students so they don't take too long or drop out before completing their degree, but like most schools, OSU has more work to do, said Robert Sowell, vice president of programs and operations at the Washington-based Council of Graduate Schools. For years, state officials urged Ohio's public universities to trim mediocre or redundant programs, but they had little success. Then, in 2007, Chancellor Eric D. Fingerhut decided to try a new approach: using honey by asking the schools to identify "centers of excellence" rather than threatening to take away their money. "Ohio State was a groundbreaker in this," Fingerhut said. "I appreciate that they are persisting with it, especially since this is the kind of thing that ruffles feathers."' Since then, at least six other universities, including five in Ohio, have conducted similar reviews.
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