If our undergraduate students are the lifeblood of the College of Arts & Sciences, our graduate students are its central nervous system. Outstanding graduate students are key to creating new knowledge on our campus and beyond. They contribute to our intellectual life by engaging with us in our labs, seminars, and offices, and carrying out the research that will define the future of disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship and discovery. Our reputation as a global research university depends on the quality and variety of our graduate programs, and on the positions that our graduates take in academia, industry, and governments around the world. Their value is very high, yet so is the investment we make in them through our faculty time and our funds. To properly steward our resources and maximize this value, we must invest strategically.
Within Arts and Sciences we offer 28 PhD programs and 44 masters degrees. While all of our graduate programs further the mission of education and research, PhD and masters programs play different roles in Boston University’s strategic plan, Choosing to Be Great. PhD programs produce the next-generation researchers who largely determine the reputation of our university as judged by other academics and thought leaders. For BU to be great, these programs must be globally ranked and highly visible, which means producing graduates who create transformative knowledge that sets them up to be academic and industry leaders. A glance at the titles of dissertations by our 2015 PhD recipients attests to the extraordinary range and depth of our students’ research.
In contrast, masters programs are justified by their ability to prepare students for great employment outcomes or great PhD programs. Masters students seek technical or interpretive skills that give them an edge in a competitive market; they add an energy born of purposefulness to the classes and research groups they participate in. Our masters degree programs are most successful if they provide clear connections to the world of work, and skills that help our graduates capitalize on those connections.
Because it is both largest and broadest, Arts & Sciences is the college whose performance is most critical to the reputation of the university. We must produce the variety of PhD programs that vault BU to the highest level of universities that we wish to compete with our peers. NYU has 27 PhD programs across its arts and sciences, USC has 22, Syracuse (including the Maxwell School) has 22, the University of Miami 20, and Penn hosts a whopping 31, but has recently suspended admissions to four of its programs. This is an inexact way to compare variety and tells us nothing about how these programs interrelate or address transformative inquiry, and rankings are crude measures of quality. But both can provide some rough guidance as we determine the appropriate number of PhD programs for BU.
Constraining our ability to build our graduate programs are the realities of our budget. We currently spend $12 million annually on graduate stipends for PhD programs, spend another $8-10 million supporting them out of the funds we bring in from grants, fellowships, and philanthropy (including $1-2 million secured by individual graduate students themselves), and raise $3 million from the tuition of masters degree revenues shared with us from the Provost. This is the third year of the shift to mandatory coverage of five years of graduate student support, which means that we will not reach steady state until we add two more years of PhD support. Growth in graduate student funding must come from grants and revenue-producing masters degree programs. That means we must increase the number and size of our masters programs and we must make every effort to raise grant support.
I am confident that we can grow masters programs significantly. Nonetheless, prudent stewardship demands that we ensure we are investing in only the highest quality and reputation-building PhD programs in a sufficiently broad range across the arts and sciences. We need outstanding graduate students to invigorate our research and our standing, and we owe them outcomes that are worthy of an outstanding research university.