Graduate Education at Stanford

Mark Horowitz, Associate Vice Provost for Graduate Education at Stanford, gave a talk at Google a few weeks ago about some of the things Stanford is working on to enhance the quality of its graduate programs. After many years (a decade or more?) of having no senior leadership with responsibility for graduate education at the university level, Stanford has finally created an office of graduate education. Mark's talk was an overview of the initiatives coming out of the new office.

Stanford's new activity in graduate education is based on an internal report. The basic thrusts are

• more interdisciplinary education,
• greater diversity, and
• leadership training.

These are all fairly standard ideas, but a few things struck me about Stanford's approach.

• Stanford has a ridiculous amount of financial resources. It appears that the university is backing this initiative wholeheartedly. This is not just a few seminars cobbled together by an underfunded graduate or postdoc office - it looks like the real deal.

• Stanford has amazing courses throughout the institution, but usually access to courses in one department is limited to students in that department. The new Office is doing the smart thing of trying to better leverage existing resources. To give a sense of how serious the university is about this, they are talking about things like moving the Law School from a semester to a quarter system (maybe the other way around? this is from memory) so that students outside the Law School can more easily take graduate courses and vice versa.

• One problem people have with taking classes outside their department is that it's hard to find appropriate classes in other fields because there are so many classes out there. The catalog is paper based (!) and there is not much descriptive material on courses. Stanford has set up a web site called CourseRank, which is an exercise in using collaborative filtering to help students find relevant courses outside their departments. I suspect that CourseRank may be an exercise in trying to set up a social networking site for the sake of cool points, but the idea seems sound. One lower tech and much cheaper way to accomplish some of the same goals would be to do some basic mining of data from the registrar. Looking at past cross-disciplinary enrollments would be a simple way to provide students with suggestions for possible good courses to take outside their departments.

• Stanford is setting up career development as formal classes during the summer and before fall quarter (the Stanford Graduate Summer Institute ). Students have to apply, and in some cases pay a fee. Having an application process is smart - it makes the course into a desirable thing that you have to compete for rather than a freebie extra thing that people have to be dragged to. The fee accomplishes the same purpose, plus provides resources to sustain the effort.

• Career development workshops are being pitched as "leadership training". It's the same thing, but "leadership" is much sexier and probably easier to sell. I suspect that because of the word's additional usage as "leader in a field", "leadership" has positive connotations even for the most unreconstructed students-must-always-be-at-the-bench faculty.

• Stanford is trying to set up mentors for students outside of the regular faculty advisors. The vision appears to be pairing students with area professionals, e.g. people at dot-coms, biotechs, etc. Definitely a good way to provide some guidance that many faculty are ill-equipped to do.

All in all a good effort. It's especially promising because places like Stanford tend to inspire places that want to be like Stanford. I'm looking forward to seeing the results and to seeing other universities try to follow in their footsteps.