Meeting Minutes - April 10, 2008

1. The minutes of the March 27, 2008 meeting were reviewed and approved.

2. Dean Keller thanked the Graduate Student Senate and the faculty judges/participants for all their work on the Jakobsen Conference. It was a very successful event with a record number of abstracts/presentations. The conference will be held the last weekend of March next year. Likewise, the D.C. Spriestersbach Awards Reception held just prior to the Jakobsen Conference went very well. Dean Keller thanked the staff and the attendees for their efforts and participation in that event.
• Nominations for the Graduate College Outstanding Mentor Award are due in the Graduate College on April 11. Details are available on the web at http://www.grad.uiowa.edu/Awards/MentAward.asp
• Nominations for the 2008 D.C. Spriestersbach Dissertation Prize are due July 2. Information about the eligibility criteria can be found at http://www.grad.uiowa.edu/Awards/DCSprie.asp
• Dean Keller reminded the Council members that the Graduate Commencement will be Saturday, May 17 at 3:00 p.m. at Carver Hawkeye Arena. President Mason will confer degrees and Dean Keller will give the commencement address.
• Dean Keller and Interim VP Cohen are planning a joint meeting of the Research Council and Graduate Council for sometime after the end of the semester. Dean Keller will update both groups on the college’s strategic reallocation of funding through the fellowship programs and SIF.
• In follow-up to the March 27 meeting, Ms. Mast reported that most members who provided feedback on future meeting times of the Graduate Council preferred that the meetings remain from 8:15-9:45 on Thursdays, especially in the fall semester.

3. Associate Dean Wurster distributed revised language for the section of the Manual of Rules and Regulations of the Graduate College pertaining to examining committees (IX.P.). At the March 27 meeting, the Council chose version 2 as the preferred text but suggested some additional changes. The text presented at this time responds to those suggested revisions. The following sentence in the first paragraph was revised to read (added text is underlined): “At least two of the faculty members are from the major department (defined as faculty who hold a primary appointment, based upon salary, in the major department) or program.” One Council member then suggested that the sentence “For interdisciplinary programs which do not have salary lines...” be moved from the third paragraph to the first paragraph. In addition to the above, Associate Dean Wurster proposed one further revision. He explained that it was the practice of the Graduate College to require that the two program representatives be tenure-track faculty, and that the outside committee member be tenure-track. This was an accepted practice but not a written policy. Dean Wurster suggested that since wording changes were being made, that this practice be formalized by adding wording to that effect in the Manual. Associate Dean Wurster will make all the suggested changes and either submit the revised language to the Council for an electronic vote or bring it to the April 24 Council meeting for action.

4. Dean Keller distributed 10-year placement data on doctoral students who graduated from August 1997 through May 2007 and 1-year data for those who graduated August 2006-May 2007. The actual placement information is sent to the Graduate College by each department and updated yearly. The data is then reported by placement categories (i.e., postdoc positions, academic faculty positions, government, industry, etc) and by disciplinary areas. In 2006-07, 81% of the biomedical science graduates went on to a postdoctoral position immediately after graduation which is in line with national trends. The second highest group to go into postdoc positions in 2006-07 was the Mathematical and Physical Sciences at 30%. On the other hand, only 8% of graduates in the biomedical sciences are immediately hired into college/university teaching positions, compared to 85% in the Humanities. Of those 85% in the Humanities, 66% were tenure track positions.

5. Dean Keller next reviewed data on the completion and time to degree for all entering doctoral students for the 5 year period 1996-97 through 2000-01. Data was only available for the 50 doctoral programs that participated in the NRC Survey. Data on all PhD programs will be available for review at a fall ’08 Graduate Council meeting. The data counts all graduate students with a PhD degree objective from their entry date into a graduate program during the 5 year reporting period. It then indicates (1) how many of them earned a PhD by December 2007, (2) their time to degree, (3) how many are still enrolled, (4) how many left after receiving their master’s degree, and (5) how many left without any degree from Iowa. Dean Keller recently attended a CGS/NSF meeting in Washington DC where data from a CGS completion study was discussed. CGS has published a document titled “PhD Completion and Attrition: Analysis of Baseline Program Data” (2008) which will be made available to members of the Council and to all Directors of Graduate Studies next fall. Dean Keller noted that the national 10-year completion rate of PhD graduates was only 57%. Duke University had the highest completion rate at 62%. Take home lessons discussed at the CGS/NSF meeting were (1) the investment in attrition is staggering; (2) early attrition is better than late; (3) the focus should be on the student, not on the service they can provide or the needs of the program or its faculty; (4) programs need to pay attention to details from recruitment to completion; (5) more attention needs to go to fields with job availability so as not to cause a degree glut in fields were there are no jobs. For the 50 Iowa programs that participated in the NRC assessment, the rate of student completion by December 2007 of the doctoral students who entered from 1996-97 through 2000-01 was only 51%. Students in the Biological/Biomedical and Health Sciences completed at the highest rate at 62%, Mathematics/Physical Science and Engineering at 51%, Humanities at 45%, and Social Sciences at 41%. (National comparisons for 10 year completion rates are 63%, 57%, 49%, and 55% respectively.) Although most of the Council members indicated that they would expect at least a 60% completion rate, only 17 of the 50 programs had a completion rate of 60% or higher. One Council member suggested that there may be cases where students are coded with a PhD degree objective even though their personal degree objective is to finish with a master’s degree. Some departments also only admit doctoral students into their program in order to have funding available for them. This data will be presented again at the next Directors of Graduate Studies meeting.

The meeting adjourned at 9:45 a.m.