Graduate student dissonance: Graduate students of color in a U. S. research university

This qualitative investigation examined the experiences of a population of graduate students - graduate students of color - in a U. S. research university (a) to indicate reasons for their dilemmas, ambiguities, and decisions about choosing an academic career, and (b) to identify the practices of one research university's graduate programs that have considerable influence upon graduate students' decisions about pursuing an academic career. For graduate students of color, professional and social identity alignment is a significant condition for decisions about academic career choices, and the institution's norms and behavioral patterns have considerable influence on graduate students' experiences and career choices. © 2013 National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education

Marriage and Graduate Student Outcomes

This paper examines how graduate outcomes for humanities students differ by the student’s gender and marital status when they enter graduate studies. I find that being married has a positive effect on both male and female students. Male students who are married at the start of graduate school are on average 3.9% more likely to graduate by any given year and they complete their degree .32 years quicker than single male students. Married female students are not any more likely to graduate but they do complete their degree .21 years quicker than single female students

Graduate Medical Education

To expand and enhance diversity and inclusion for our resident physicians, three initiatives targeting GME have been implemented

Chasing graduate jobs?

This paper examines empirically the relationship between under-employment and migration amongst five cohorts of graduates of Scottish higher education institutions with micro-data collected by the Higher Education Statistical Agency. The data indicate that there is a strong positive relationship between migration and graduate employment—those graduates who move after graduation from Scotland to the rest of the UK or abroad have a much higher rate of graduate employment. Versions of probit regression are used to estimate migration and graduate employment equations in order to explore the nature of this relationship further. These equations confirm that there is a strong positive relationship between the probability of migrating and the probability of being in graduate employment even after other factors are controlled for. Instrumental variables estimation is used to examine the causal nature of the relationship by attempting to deal with the potential endogeneity of migration decisions. Overall the analysis is consistent with the hypotheses that a sizeable fraction of higher education graduates are leaving Scotland for employment reasons. In turn this finding suggests the over-education/under-employment nexus is a serious problem in Scotland

Supporting STEM students into STEM careers: A practical introduction for academics

Graduate employability is increasingly becoming a selection criteria used by students in their choice of university and discipline. It is also used as a metric for the quality assessment of institutions and the construction of the various league tables produced by newspapers and other media outlets. In addition to identifying levels of employment, further study and unemployment, graduates’ employment destinations are classified as “graduate” or “non-graduate” jobs. The distinction between “graduate” and “non-graduate” is also important for the various metrics that are produced from the destinations data.6 To evidence that a particular course or discipline supports graduate employability it is therefore important not only that graduates are able to find work, but also that they can find work of an appropriate level. A STEM degree should be a clear asset in achieving this aim of finding graduate level employment.National HE Stemm Programm

Graduate Quantum Mechanics Reform

We address four main areas in which graduate quantum mechanics education can be improved: course content, textbook, teaching methods, and assessment tools. We report on a three year longitudinal study at the Colorado School of Mines using innovations in all these areas. In particular, we have modified the content of the course to reflect progress in the field in the last 50 years, used textbooks that include such content, incorporated a variety of teaching techniques based on physics education research, and used a variety of assessment tools to study the effectiveness of these reforms. We present a new assessment tool, the Graduate Quantum Mechanics Conceptual Survey, and further testing of a previously developed assessment tool, the Quantum Mechanics Conceptual Survey. We find that graduate students respond well to research-based techniques that have been tested mainly in introductory courses, and that they learn much of the new content introduced in each version of the course. We also find that students' ability to answer conceptual questions about graduate quantum mechanics is highly correlated with their ability to solve calculational problems on the same topics. In contrast, we find that students' understanding of basic undergraduate quantum mechanics concepts at the modern physics level is not improved by instruction at the graduate level.Comment: accepted to American Journal of Physic

Graduate Catalog, 2004-2005

https://scholar.valpo.edu/gradcatalogs/1031/thumbnail.jp

One-year transitional programme increases knowledge to level sufficient for entry into the fourth year of the medical curriculum

BACKGROUND: To cope with a lack of doctors and in anticipation of the Bachelor-Master structure for Medicine, several Dutch universities offer graduate entry programmes for students with degrees in areas related to Medicine. The graduate entry programme is a four-year programme: after a transition period of one year students enroll in the fourth year of the regular six-year training programme. AIM: The research questions in this study were (1) whether and when graduate entry students' knowledge reached a level comparable to that of regular medical students and (2) whether there were differences in knowledge levels between graduate entry students with a university or HBO (college) degree. METHODS: The progress test results of ninety graduate entry students who were enrolled in the transitional programme between 2002 and 2004 were compared to those of regular third-year students. RESULTS: Initially, graduate entry students scored significantly lower on the progress tests, but differences disappeared within a year. No differences were found between graduate entry students with a university or HBO degree. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study indicate that the increase in knowledge after a one-year transitional period is sufficient to enroll students with related degrees in the fourth year of the regular medical training programme