According to some 2,300 graduate students who responded to an online survey last year, academic life on the Farm is generally satisfying. What’s more, about 90 percent of them would choose to attend Stanford if they had to make the choice a second time.
“When you look at the results, there are a lot of very positive things, and there are some things that students are unhappy with,” says Luke Miller, a second-year doctoral student in education who co-authored a report about the 2004 Graduate Academic Life Survey with education graduate students Donna Winston and David Waddington, both MA ’04. Miller, who is a member of the Graduate Student Council, presented the survey results to the Faculty Senate in February.
The survey aimed to identify strengths and weaknesses in graduate academic life and to generate conversations that could help change University policies. It posed 182 questions about course work, academic advising, the PhD qualifying process, dissertation research, the academic environment and career preparation. The response rate of 32 percent was high compared to previous attempts to survey the graduate student body.
Nonetheless, Miller and other members of the survey committee note concerns about whether the responses are representative. “One, do you have only people who are upset, and therefore the results are painting a bleaker picture than it actually is?’ Miller asks. “Or, two, it could be that the people who are unhappy are, like, ‘There’s nothing that’s going to improve my situation, so I don’t care about this survey.’ Then you only have the happy people responding.”
The idea for a survey emerged in winter quarter of 2003, when then-GSC chair Grace Chang spoke to the Faculty Senate about academic issues that concerned graduate students, including adviser-student relationships and the quality of teaching. Faculty wanted more information, so the senate’s committee on graduate studies formed a subcommittee to develop a survey. In February 2004, an e-mail request to take the online survey was sent to all graduate students.
“It was an incredibly challenging project,” says Chang, ’92, MS ’94, who estimates that she put in 1,000 hours on the survey during her third year of medical school. But it was also, she adds, “entirely a labor of idealism based on the hope of improving the graduate experience.” Chang would like to see an ongoing effort that would survey students every few years.
Committee members, chaired by education professor Eamonn Callan, decided to analyze responses to 41 questions they thought might influence the design of new policies and programs. A representative question: “How satisfied are you with your current academic adviser’s ability to mentor you?” The raw data have not been released, to protect student confidentiality, but each school has its own chapter in the report.
Miller and Callan’s school, Education, came out well, with a 51 percent response rate. More than 80 percent of those surveyed were satisfied with the overall quality of their courses, and 74 percent were satisfied with their advisers. Their main areas of concern—shared by survey respondents in other schools—were conflicts with advisers and the clarity of the process of the PhD qualifying exam.
“I wasn’t surprised by that at all,” says School of Education Dean Deborah Stipek. “The qualifying-exam process is unclear to faculty, and we’re actually having a retreat [to discuss] that. It’s not just a communication problem.”
Stipek says the survey is “a very valuable resource,” and she’s considering forming focus groups to address some of the issues that appear to need attention. “In some degree, it confirmed where we have work to do, and in some degree it told me I wasn’t quite understanding [some issues] from my more informal approaches to getting feedback from students.”
Miller, who is researching teacher labor markets in rural New York for his dissertation, falls in the “very satisfied” cohort when he’s asked about the impact of the survey. “What we wanted to do was to generate a document that could generate conversations in various schools and departments about things they can do to improve their programs.”
