For one thing graduate education seems to be interstate and international. Undergraduate education consists of about 80% of the students being in state whereas most graduate students come from out of state or internationally. Why is there a discrepency so that most grad students come from other countries or other states while most in state students are in state? I assume the in state tuition is the main factor in undergraduate in state college education, but who made that rule up? Why don’t more graduate students attend college in state?
Also, why is graduate work usually paid for via research or teaching assistanceships while undergraduate work does not really offer teach or research assistance work?
In my experience undergraduate work is usually in state and paid for by loans and family. Graduate work is either international or interstate and paid for by TA or RA work. Why the discrepency?
Is it because when these rules about education funding were made the vast majority of people did not do graduate work and as a result the rules of undergrad work were taken to be the main
I don’t know the exact statistics, but I know that 25% of americans have bachelor degrees and 5% have graduate degrees. So I’d assume when these rules about education funding were developed even less people went to graduate school.
It is healthy for the academic community to shuffle people around and expose them to as many different schools of thought as possible. Also, a graduate student is studying a narrower field than an undergraduate, and needs to find a program and a professor that he or she can work with. This is not always an easy thing to do; one cannot always find such a place in one’s own country.
At my university there are such things as undergraduate TAs. All they are allowed to do is grade papers. This is because undergraduates generally do not possess the knowledge and experience necessary to do valuable research or to teach.
Good. We don’t need graduate school to be reduced to the depths that undergraduate degrees at most universities have.
I’m not sure about most. However, in graduate school, it is often the case that you are looking far more specifically to work in a particular field with a particular advisor than as an undergraduate. Finding a particular advisor to support your career path reduces your choices and makes you more likely to pursue a degree at an institution far from where you already live.
State-run universities did. It serves the state to have an educated population. It doesn’t fit as closely with state interest (or ability) to ensure that other states have a well-educated population.
Gradute students have already gained considerable expertise in their field of study - enough to be useful in teaching to others, and to do more than menial work as part of a large research project. Few undergraduates are well-enough educated yet to answer a wide variety of questions from other undergraduates (although there certainly are some). Also, few undergraduates have sufficient depth of understanding to take on major tasks in a research project (again, there are some). Most undergraduates that work in research do so as a bit of an exchange: they want to learn more, and in exchange they perform a lot of the drudgery. This relationship is not entirely absent from graduate students too.
These are trends, but I wouldn’t think of them as rules. A lot of graduate students do take out loans, and many work in their state of residence.
I think if it weren’t economically feasible for the system to work this way it would change rapidly.
Graduate study is much more focused than undergraduate study. If you are talking about Ph.D programs then students usually pick the school based on who they will have as an advisor as much as the program itself. The school as a whole should rank below those two. You generally go to Ph.D. programs to do research. That research has to be tightly focused. For instance, I went into a Ph.D. program at Dartmouth to study steriod hormone influence on the sexual differentation of the rat brain. There were only a handful of people doing that work. Because of that, prospective students have to be very specific and cast a wide net to everyone who is doing something similar.
Graduate science programs are often flooded with foreign students because there isn’t such a push for American students to go into pure science research. In addition, American students are competing with well-qualified foreign students from all over the world and the foreign students often get in.
The reason grad students get paid is because:
They produce meaningful work for the university both teaching and doing research. I have never worked as hard as I have in grad school. I mean that seriously. I was blown away by how easy the workload in a corporate setting is when I decided to change and pursue that path instead. Grad students generally don’t get paid much (I made 14k)
They have to have a way to support themselves. Working is frowned upon or prohibited in most reputable Ph.D. programs.
There is such a thing as a paid undergraduate and research assistantship. I had one but that was only because I was so great. They are very rare.
Undergrads are there to take classes until they’re given a degree. They don’t have the experience to contribute original research or to teach classes, so they pay for the privilege to earn a degree. Graduate students contribute original research, teach classes, taking load off busy professors. They do this not only because it’s what they’re hired to do, but because if they don’t, they won’t be employable no matter how many degrees they have. They are hired to do it, and get paid by a regular (meager) paycheck plus being allowed to take classes towards an advanced degree for free. Graduate work is a job; undergraduate work isn’t. My experience, like Shagnasty’s, is that graduate school is the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life.
As for the preponderance of foreign students, America’s universities are the best in the world. Almost anyone who’s smart enough and amibitious enough to want to go to graduate school in the first place is going to want to study in America.
> I don’t know the exact statistics, but I know that 25% of americans have
> bachelor degrees and 5% have graduate degrees.
Where did you get those statistics? It’s possible that 25% of Americans who are between 25 and 29 have a college degree and 5% of Americans who are between 25 and 29 have a graduate degree (although I have my doubts about these numbers too), but there’s no way that that is true of older Americans. Does anyone have any more exact figures for all Americans above, say, 25?
Undergraduates aren’t (with some exceptions) offered jobs that would support them because the tradition has grown up in the U.S. that a middle-class family is willing to support someone between 18 and 22 until they have graduated from college. Of course, this tradition started before there were very many students from working-class families and very many students older than 22. Many colleges these days are willing to offer students from working-class families or older students substantial financial aid that comes closer to supporting them. On the other hand, graduate (and professional) students tend to be between about 22 and 35. The tradition in the U.S. is that even an upper-middle-class family doesn’t support someone of that age. Because of that, in the U.S. virtually all grad students are either:
Teaching assistants
Research assistants
Living on competitive fellowships that support them completely
Being supported by their spouse
A part-time student who works some other full-time job
There’s nothing intrinsically impossible about undergraduate students not being supported by their families nor about graduate students being supported by their families. (Indeed, even now both happen occasionally.) All this is just a matter of what the tradition is in the U.S. We could do it differently if we wanted to. (And I’m NOT advocating doing so. I’m just saying that it’s largely an arbitrary choice what we do.)
This is going to vary a lot depending on the major and and the university. For example, I started an MBA program at Baruch College (part of the City University of New York) in the late '80’s. The earliest graduate classes began at 4:30 pm , because nearly everyone worked full-time and attended classes part-time. Looking at the websites for Queens College and Baruch, it seems to still be true for the City University as a whole that most graduate students are part-time. Queens College in Fall 2003 had 4647 graduate students, 91% of whom attended part-time. Baruch’s School of Business still offers most courses in the evening or on Saturdays.
To illustrate: When I was applying to undergraduate universities, I found 23 schools in the country with the program I was looking for. From that, I was able to eliminate all outside the northeast quadrant of the country, since I didn’t want to be too far from home. I applied to half a dozen, and got into three, then chose the one of those three I liked the best.
When I was applying to grad schools, my area of interest had narrowed to the point where I could only find four schools to match in the country. I applied to all four, and got accepted to one, which happened to be across the better part of the continent. So that’s where I went.