CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog
Tracking Humanities Students, Obama-Style
In a major education address earlier this week, President Obama made the following observation:
Far too few states have data systems like the one in Florida that keep track of a student’s education from childhood through college. And far too few districts are emulating the example of Houston and Long Beach, and using data to track how much progress a student is making and where that student is struggling.
We need the same thing in humanities graduate programs. Within history doctoral programs, for instance, the dropout rate is about 50 percent. The recently-passed stimulus legislation has made $250 million available for educational data systems. I believe the time to act is now.
This concern was raised five years ago by the American Historical Association's Committee on Graduate Education:
The Committee found surprisingly little departmental concern about attrition. Very few departments conduct exit interviews to learn why students are leaving. Instead, anecdote and opinion reign—especially the opinion that most attrition can be accounted for by the students' own needs or (in)capacities. In fact, attrition is more complicated and important than that. On an individual level, attrition has obvious costs for the students involved, while on a programmatic level patterns of attrition may say something important about the admissions process, the intellectual content and quality of the program, and the departmental culture. We therefore strongly recommend better data collection and exit interviews.
Too many history departments show too little concern for their doctoral students. If the dropout rate is 10 to 15 percent in business, law, and medicine professional programs, there is no excuse for why it can't be similar in the humanities. I would like to see student tracking used to improve retention in history doctoral programs and to hold those programs more accountable. I sincerely hope the AHA and like-minded associations will coordinate efforts to tap into newly-available federal dollars and improve our tracking of students in humanities doctoral programs.
- Money by Tim Lacy (March 13, 2009 at 11:58 AM)
- Re: Money by Sterling Fluharty (March 13, 2009 at 2:04 PM)
- Which metrics? by Sage Ross (March 13, 2009 at 3:27 PM)
- Re: Which metrics? by Sterling Fluharty (March 13, 2009 at 5:23 PM)
- Which metrics? by Sage Ross (March 13, 2009 at 3:27 PM)
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