if I had a hammer...I'd hammer in the morning...

Based on a 10-year study of more than 9000 grad students in 12 "top research universities" in the United States, a new text by Johns Hopkins University Press documents "Why Grad Students Succeed or Fail" (from Inside Higher Ed). Some snippets (with a little experiential editorializing):

• More than 30 percent of all graduate students never feel that they have a faculty mentor. [I'm actually astounded that the percentage is that low...]
  

• Two-thirds of graduate students enter Ph.D. programs without any debt, suggesting that those concerned about expanding the pipeline to graduate education should pay attention to the affordability of undergraduate education. [And to the costs of Master's level education, and realistic hours and expectations and fair wages and overall applicability of TAing, RAing, editing, organizing, meetings, lackie work, etc.]
  

• Students rate their social interaction with faculty members as high in the engineering, sciences, mathematics and education — and relatively low in the social sciences and humanities. [Wait - could a correlation between institutional worth be made here? Between expectations of faculty in different departments and fields? How about a link between shared publishing opportunities? Can this be gendered? Raced? Moneyed?]
  

• In rating the quality of academic interactions, students in the humanities think highly of their professors while those in the social sciences and math and science are more critical. [See editorial comment above.]
  

• Significant gaps exist in the experiences of minority and female graduate students — from admissions to getting teaching or research assistant jobs to publishing research while still in graduate school. Generally, these gaps do not favor minority students. [Again, op. cit.]
  

Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, called the book “the first effort to describe and interpret the empirical realities of the doctoral education process from the perspective of different socioeconomic groups, in different broad fields, and across a variety of universities.” Stewart said she hoped the data could lead to real reflection in graduate programs. “This is the kind of work that encourages me to believe we are actually learning something upon which we can make policy decisions in graduate education.”

I wonder if the U's respective administrations have even heard of this study. And I wonder if anyone's working on a sister-to-the-north version of this sort of research. I for one would be happy to participate.