The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It by Leonard Cassuto, professor of English at Fordham (Harvard)
The numbers tell us that graduate school is in trouble. Too many students take longer to earn PhDs than they should, and when they finally do, the job market is not what they expect it to be. In The Graduate School Mess, Leonard Cassuto makes a case for revamping curricula to emphasize “higher education as a collective social good.” And he beseeches his fellow professors to prepare students not strictly for academic careers, which are rare, but for a broad range of employment opportunities. “When we teach Ph.D.s to be satisfied only with professors’ jobs, we are, quite simply, teaching them to be unhappy. That’s more than just an ethical failure,” he writes. “It’s a moral one.”
