A Competitive System: Graduate Student Recruitment in STEM and Why Money May Not be the Answer
A Competitive System: Graduate Student Recruitment in STEM and Why Money May Not be the Answer
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竞争性系统：STEM 研究生招生以及为什么金钱可能不是答案
DOI：
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发表时间：
2020
影响因子：
3.1
通讯作者：
M. Borrego
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Whitney E. Wall Bortz;D. Knight;Chelsea Lyles;Timothy Kinoshita;N. H. Choe;Maya Denton;M. Borrego
摘要 博士生招生是一个动态、复杂且研究不足的现象。项目之间在招收学生方面存在着激烈的竞争，尤其是在 STEM 领域，而且这些项目在这种环境下并不是孤立运作的。在本文中，我们探讨了研究生项目在招收 STEM 博士生时如何相对于其他项目定位自己。这项研究根据对研究生项目负责人的 47 次访谈、对研究生的 49 次访谈以及研究生项目工作人员和管理人员的 63 份问卷答复，分析了 STEM 博士项目的常见招聘做法以及学生对其决策过程的看法。我们揭示了竞争力量如何导致项目采用基于非证据的招聘策略，这些策略可能与项目负责人声明的价值观或学生的优先事项不一致。尽管项目负责人表示学生在决策中优先考虑学术因素的重要性，但我们的数据显示，项目在实践中通常利用财务资源作为主要招生机制。通过证明这种不一致，我们的论文旨在阐明一个潜在的盲点，以便项目可能会选择改变看似制度化的流程，这些流程可能与他们自己既定的价值观以及他们寻求招收的学生的价值观不一致。
ABSTRACT Doctoral student recruitment is a dynamic, complex, and under-researched phenomenon. There is steep competition between programs for recruiting students with large amounts of resources at stake, especially within the STEM fields, and programs do not operate in isolation within such environments. In this paper, we explore how graduate programs position themselves relative to other programs as they recruit STEM doctoral students. Drawing from 47 interviews with graduate program leaders, 49 interviews with graduate students, and 63 questionnaire responses from graduate program staff and administrators, this research analyzes common recruitment practices of STEM doctoral programs alongside student perspectives about their decision processes. We reveal how competitive forces may lead programs to adopt non-evidence-based recruitment strategies that may not align with either program leaders’ stated values or students’ priorities. Although program leaders expressed the importance of students prioritizing academic factors in their decisions, our data revealed that programs commonly utilize financial resources as their main recruitment mechanism in practice. By demonstrating this incongruence, our paper aims to illuminate a potential blind spot so programs might choose to change seemingly institutionalized processes that may be out of alignment with their own stated values and those of the students they are seeking to recruit.