Nipping at the heels of equivalent programs at Harvard, Stanford and Princeton universities, the economics department has begun a major overhaul to bring its doctoral candidates one step closer to the top dogs.
Curtis Taylor, director of graduate studies and author of a report on the changes to be submitted to the Graduate School next month, said the department is focusing on getting graduate students to conduct research earlier and more often.
In recent years, the graduate program has suffered from attrition, a dearth of middle-aged faculty to serve as Ph.D. mentors and a lack of critical student research at an early stage in the program, Taylor said.
"We've got a U-shaped distribution of ages of faculty--either very young assistant professors or very senior professors," Taylor said.
"And the faculty most useful for grads are 35 to 55 [years old]. They aren't stressing out about getting tenure, they have their own research agendas."
The department has lost "some key people" in the fields of applied econometrics and macroeconomics, he said. But four new hires--professors Stephanie Schmidt-Grohé from Rutgers University and Martín Uribe from the University of Pennsylvania, associate research professor Pat Bajari from Stanford and associate professor Han Hong from Princeton--should provide a shot in the arm for research-ready graduate students. Restructuring of the graduate student course load, meanwhile, could free up more time for research.
"Students end classes at the second year and then do research, but if they have to do two majors and a minor, they have no freedom in determining their field courses," Taylor said. "We don't bring students in who have specific areas... first they study a core of micro, macro and econometrics. Later they specialize. So we're trying to give students some more latitude."
In addition, the trend in recent years of delegating instruction of large introductory economics classes to faculty has already helped provide more opportunities for graduate research. Other boons to the push for research have included a new set of faculty-student mentorships, a series of weekly lunch meetings and economics workshops. The department is also working out incentives for summer research.
Schimdt-Grohé, who leads the macroeconomics lunch meeting Wednesdays with Uribe and assistant professor Arpad Abraham, said about eight or nine students come regularly. During the first half of the year, students in the group--who are all third-year doctoral candidates or higher--read seven fundamental papers on lending under limited enforcement, and during the second half, they present their own works in progress to the group.
"It's very difficult to just sit at home and come up with a dissertation," Schmidt-Grohé said. "There's now much more emphasis on contact between students [and faculty]."
Taylor echoed Schmidt-Grohé's praise for the program.
"An important part of the graduate reform is to formalize these seminars and make sure that students do not slip through the cracks," Taylor wrote in an e-mail. "We want them writing and presenting their own work as soon as possible, and the research seminars are designed to be a critical step in that process."
Uribe said he is optimistic that the reforms will lead to more and better research.
"We'll see how it plays out--it hasn't been in place very long, but this department places a high emphasis on students' research," said Uribe, who is working with several students on international finance.
"It's one of my priorities."
But the department does not want its graduate students to lose sight of their commitment to teaching, an area with which the EcoTeach Center has helped greatly. A number of fourth- and fifth-year students have received funding from the center for teaching upper-level undergraduate seminars. Students who work as head TAs for undergraduate courses one semester, meanwhile, earn a semester off at full pay for research, he said.
Attacking attrition will be more difficult. In addition to a make-it-or-break-it examination at the end of the first year, students must prepare for field exams after the second year and produce a prospectus--or dissertation preview--after the third year, allowing even less time for independent research. And with "a significant percentage" of economics graduate students failing the first-year exam, Taylor said the department has considered reassessment of how to evaluate performance. The new exam would likely include a broader range of data.
"It's not that hard to predict who'll pass the exam," he said. "If we wanted to get those [students] to the program, we're fighting with Harvard, Stanford and Princeton, and they're better than us. We want to get there, but we're not there yet.... But we're not out of line [in attrition] with Ph.D. programs across the country."
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