联合学位:培养复合型人才的新模式

高层次复合型人才培养模式的改革是社会的迫切要求，也是我国各高校努力探索的课题。澳大利亚的悉尼大学在2001年秋开始设置联合学位，这是一个有益的尝试，即将两个非常实用的专业有机结合，学生用五年时间完成学业，毕业时学生可以同时得到两个正式的学位。联合学位制度为我们提供了值得借鉴的经验。     

Problems and Alternatives

In one of his speeches, Professor Fang Lizhi, member of the Board of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the following. We should attach importance to the graduate students we have trained ourselves. Now that our degrees are equal to those in other countries, we of course should treat them equally without discrimination. Recently, the newspapers have given a scholar who got his doctorate in West Germany wide coverage. We have our own doctors, so why don't we publicize them? Since it will have a very bad influence on students, I hope this kind of publicity will be stopped immediately. I happened to be in Japan at the time. When some Japanese asked me why we made such a fanfare about one who had merely received a doctoral degree [we used more space in this newspaper to cover this doctor than Japan did to report the Japanese chemist's winning of the Nobel prize], I was rendered speechless. Foreign degrees are not acknowledged in Japan; even a degree from Cambridge or Harvard isn't very useful in helping you land a job. Rather, you have to get your degree in a Japanese university—Tokyo University or Kyoto University, for example. This is a question of national pride. However, things in China are the opposite. Foreign doctorates are more welcome. One of my graduate students is now studying in England. I planned to have him study there for two years and then have him return to get his degree in China. But I was thwarted in my plan; the department in charge held that the student would show himself to be a failure should he return without obtaining a degree. Under the circumstances, he has no choice but to stay there and get his degree. Foreign degrees bring high pay and enjoy good repute. When such an atmosphere prevails, how can we expect graduate students to have a correct and healthy view on this matter?     

Valuing the benefits of the education provided by public universities: A case study of Minnesota

This study estimates the value of the private and public benefits that accrue to Minnesota residents from state government subsidies to higher education. In 2005, the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system received $832 million from Minnesota's state government to support educational programs. These subsidies allow these institutions to offer lower tuition rates, increasing the number of Minnesotans with bachelor and graduate degrees. We calculate that removing these subsidies would eventually lead to 14,000 fewer graduate degree holders in Minnesota, and reduce those with bachelor's degrees or “some college” by 42,000. The annual economic cost of these subsidies is about $326 million; this is less than annual state appropriations because most of those appropriations are income transfers from taxpayers to students, not an economic cost. We estimate that the annual value of the benefits of these subsidies is between $531 and $786 million ($381 and $570 million) when a 3% (5%) discount rate is used. We also discuss some of the income distribution consequences.     

STANDARDIZING TRAINING INSTITUTIONS FOR RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL WORKERS

The progressive spirit of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) spawned a myriad of graduate departments of religious education in American Catholic colleges and universities. These departments evolved to include other master degrees (e.g., pastoral studies, pastoral counseling, divinity, spirituality, and social justice). As the numbers of students in religious education degree programs significantly diminished, the degree designation in religious education was often terminated. Today, an ever increasing number of religious education practitioners in the Catholic context do not have graduate degrees in religious education. This ongoing reality significantly alters the field of religious education and its practice in the Catholic context.     

加强学士学位管理,提高本科教育质量

学士学位是我国三级学位中的基础学位 ,它反映了大学本科阶段培养人才所达到的学术水平 ,是衡量高等教育质量的一种标志。学校管理部门应以学位为动力调动学校、学生、教师的教学积极性 ,落实管理育人 ,促进校风建设 ,提高教育质量     

Classroom cybernetics

Despite the trend toward increased enrollment of minority graduate students in universities, low retention and graduation rates continue to be a problem. Many universities operate at status quo, without making efforts to accommodate to the needs of minority students to help them continue their studies and finish graduate degrees. Rather than making an effort to help students become part of the culture, these universities expect the student to change to fit the institutional academic environment. This article describes the development, implementation, and assessment of the Graduate Mentorship Program (GMP) in the School of Education at the University of California-Berkeley, which addresses this critical issue and provides a support system for students who come from varied backgrounds. In the article, we discuss the unique structure of the organization and the principles and implementation mechanisms by which GMP functions. Finally, we provide an assessment of the program and the challenges it has faced throughout its life span.     

Aspiration for global cultural capital in the stratified realm of global higher education: why do Korean students go to US graduate schools?

This study aims to understand Korean students’ motivations for studying in US graduate schools. For this purpose, I conducted in‐depth interviews with 50 Korean graduate students who were enrolled in a research‐centered US university at the time of the interview. In these interviews, I sought to understand how their motivations are connected not only with their family, school, and occupational backgrounds, but also with the stratification of global higher education. Theoretically, this paper attempts to combine the concept of global positional competition with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital in the field of global education. By critically examining a push–pull model of transnational higher education choice‐making, this study situates Korean students’ aspirations in the contexts of global power and the hierarchy of knowledge‐degree production and consumption. After analyzing the students’ qualitative interviews, I classify their motivations for earning US degrees within four categories: enhancing their class positions and enlarging their job opportunities; pursuing learning in the global center of learning; escaping the undemocratic system and culture in Korean universities; and fulfilling desires to become cosmopolitan elites armed with English communication skills and connections within the global professional network. Based on this analysis, I argue that Korean students pursue advanced degrees in the United States in order to succeed in the global positional competition within Korea as well as in the global job marketplace. As they pursue advanced US degrees, Korean students internalize US hegemony as it reproduces the global hierarchy of higher education, but at the same time Korean students see US higher education as a means of liberation that resolves some of the inner contradictions of Korean higher education, including gender discrimination, a degree caste system, and an authoritarian learning culture. Therefore, this study links Korean students’ aspiration for global cultural capital to complex and irregular structures and relations of class, gender, nationality, and higher education that extend across local, national, and global dimensions simultaneously.     

Engagement in two interdisciplinary graduate programs

This qualitative study examines two US interdisciplinary graduate programs which involve faculty and students from different disciplines. Haworth and Conrad’s engagement theory of quality graduate education was applied. It was found that when interdisciplinary programs facilitate engagement by supporting diversity, participation, connections, and interactive teaching and learning, students report positive experiences. Engagement is particularly achievable when an interdisciplinary administrative unit (e.g., a school or center) grants degrees and serves as a tenure home for faculty. Students earning degrees in traditional departments had more difficulty connecting interdisciplinary requirements to their disciplinary work, and were often faced with incompatible program requirements or advice from faculty members. Although they desire to do interdisciplinary work, the students and faculty in traditional departments are required to meet additional and often conflicting requirements. Engagement may further be complicated because these participants feel divided between collaborations, social networks, and expectations that pull them in different directions.     

Unemployment,expected returns,and the demand for university education in Ontario: some empirical results

This article presents the results of empirical analysis of the influence of labour market factors on the private demand for university education in Ontario. Contrary to a widely held belief, the analysis indicates that the effect of youth unemployment upon enrolment demand is very weak. High unemployment, by itself, does not appear to drive youths into universities. On the other hand, expected earnings upon completion of a degree is shown to have a strong positive impact upon enrolment demand, particularly for post-graduate students. A 10 percent increase in the expected earnings of persons with post graduate degrees relative to persons with only bachelor's degrees is associated with more than a 20 percent increase in post-graduate enrolment. These findings are subject to qualifications regarding certain weaknesses in the data, as well as the usual problems of making inferences about expectation behaviour from ex post data. One important policy implication of this study is that attempts to use educational spending as a contra-cyclical device may not be successful unless students are given extra inducement to enrol when unemployment is high. Second, the apparent responsiveness of enrolment demand to changes in earnings expectations of degree holders underscores the importance of providing good up-to-date information on earnings prospects. It should be emphasized, however, that this study dealt only with aggregate (undergraduate or postgraduate) enrolment, and further research is needed to examine the responsiveness of specific program and subject choices to variation in occupational earnings prospects. Moreover, the responsiveness of student enrolment decisions to prospective earnings is only one of several factors — though a very important one — which must be taken into account in deciding upon the role of manpower considerations in educational planning.     

“ETC教学法”在培养中医专业学位研究生临床能力的应用

基于规范中医专业学位研究生临床能力培养模式的探索,尝试把"以赛促学,以赛促训,以赛促教"作为理念,建立Experiment(实践E)-Thinking(思维T)-Competition(竞赛C)为基础框架的"ETC教学法"。通过对广西中医药大学第一附属医院中医专业学位研究生的临床实践应用为例,探讨"ETC教学法"实践效果并进行具体阐述和分析。经实践,结果提示"ETC教学法"不仅可提高中医专业学位临床研究生的临床能力,而且在促进中医专业学位研究生临床实践积极性、理论转换为临床思维等方面有明显提高的作用,该法值得在中医专业学位研究生临床能力培养教学中推广应用。     

Returns to a specific graduate education

The research on returns (or gains) to graduate-level education is mixed. Some graduate degrees pay off in increased earnings while some graduate degree holders actually receive less salary than their BS/BA counterparts. This study showed that a nontraditional, off-campus, master's degree from the University of Utah did pay off for its graduates. A research project matching master's graduates with nonattendees indicated significant gains for the graduates with respect to salary, promotability, and perceptions of self and job. The study will be used as a pilot for a nationwide research project surveying and interviewing some 400 graduates from Utah's program.He was assisted in the analyses by Art Schnatterly, a Teaching Fellow in Management at the University of Utah.     

全日制硕士专业学位研究生学位论文的质量管理与控制

全日制硕士专业学位研究生的学位论文质量管理存在不少问题。学校应通过招生宣传和课程设置等环节提高全日制硕士专业学位研究生的质量;通过建立有效合作的双导师制度、加强监管部门对学生实践环节的管理,双管齐下,实现学位论文的过程控制。     

Institutional factors in time to the doctorate

The aim of this study was to delineate departmental differences in the length of time that doctoral students take to receive their degrees and the institutional characteristics linked with it. Variables describing graduate departments in three disciplines (chemistry, English, and psychology) and their parent universities were obtained from available records. In analyses of departments in each discipline, a relatively small set of institutional variables correlated with average time to the doctorate for the department, after controlling for characteristics of students in the department, and these relationships differed from discipline to discipline. The clearest and most extensive findings emerged for psychology: the institutional variables identified primarily concerned faculty accessibility (student/faculty ratio and department size)—a longer time to the doctorate for departments with many students per faculty member or many students.     

Who attends and completes virtual universities: the case of the open University of Catalonia (UOC)

A highly touted feature of the so-called global “revolution” in higher education is the trend to use information technology to reach a broader clientele. Although there is evidence that students may be learning the material in on-line courses as well as in traditional face-to-face universities, how well students learn content is not the only reason they persist to a degree, and student persistence is an important goal of higher education institutions. In this paper, we make the case that the life conditions for students attending virtual universities are different from those of “traditional” students in face-to-face universities, and that this difference puts a particular (largely non-pecuniary) premium on time to degree. With our data from a Catalan virtual university, the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), we are able to test this hypothesis directly by using the heterogeneous degree structure of the Catalonian/Spanish higher education system to estimate whether the number of courses required to get various degrees (the length of the degree program) is significantly related to student persistence. The study analyzes several cohorts of students (those who entered in 2000–2003) studying in the UOC and estimates the factors that influence their degree completion. We find that the completion rate is generally low, but that students taking shorter degree courses at the UOC are much more likely to complete their degrees. This suggests that, given their clientele, on-line universities operate under very different constraints from their face-to-face counterparts. Our results are important for higher educational researchers, who have mainly focused on younger populations attending face-face universities. They also can serve university administrators who launch distance education degree programs and make high stakes decisions about them with little of no information on the likely behavior of their older students, and can serve employers who are deciding whether to subsidize their employees to take advanced degrees through on-line programs of study.     

Quantitative skills as a graduate learning outcome: exploring students’ evaluative expertise

In the biosciences, quantitative skills are an essential graduate learning outcome. Efforts to evidence student attainment at the whole of degree programme level are rare and making sense of such data is complex. We draw on assessment theories from Sadler (evaluative expertise) and Boud (sustainable assessment) to interpret final-year bioscience students’ responses to an assessment task comprised of quantitative reasoning questions across 10 mathematical and statistical topics. The question guiding the study was: do final year science students graduate knowing the quantitative skills that they have, and knowing the quantitative skills that they do not have? Confidence indicators for the 10 topics gathered students’ perceptions of their quantitative skills. Students were assigned to one of four categories: high performance-high confidence; low performance-low confidence; high performance-low confidence; or low performance-high confidence – with those in the first two categories demonstrating evaluative expertise. Results showed the majority of students effectively evaluated their quantitative skills as low performance-low confidence. We argue that the application of evaluative expertise to make sense of this graduate learning outcome can further the debate on how assuring graduate learning outcomes can enhance student learning.     

Academic careers for graduate students: a strong attractor in a changed environment

Professorship has traditionally been the single most valued career path for graduates of PhD programs. Policies now encourage graduate students to directly or indirectly engage with non-academic organizations to encourage the next generation of researchers to explore alternative careers, including opportunities in industry and government. In this article, we use data from a survey of Quebec science and engineering graduate students to examine the impact of their participation in university-industry-government research partnerships on their professional preferences. We assess the degree to which exposure to non-academic realities through different training arrangements relates to career preferences, and how these preferences evolve over time. We show that the proportion of students who did not change their preferred career path over time is high, indicating that by the time students engage in a research-training program they already, for the most part, know what career they want to pursue. However, and although students with close ties to non-academic partners may initially be more interested in non-academic career paths, over time all categories of students become more attracted to academic careers. We conclude that faculty positions continue to dominate the professional dreams of fledgling researchers, a power of attraction that increases as students advance in their program, even when it involves industrial contacts.     

Assessment by employers of newly graduated civil engineers from the Islamic University of Gaza

The evaluation process is very important to identify and recognize the strengths and the weaknesses of graduated students. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performance of the newly graduated civil engineers from the Islamic University of Gaza in Palestine. The methodology was based on questionnaires and informal interview. The population of this study consisted of 35 contractors and 7 Owners. The questionnaire was developed to evaluate the quality of the Islamic University civil engineers who have obtained their degrees in the past five years. The evaluation involved several aspects such as practical, social, ethical, technical writing, communication skills, and computer skills. The results indicate that most of the Islamic University civil engineers have some practical problems in construction sites. On the other hand, they have several strong characteristics such as computer skills, ability to develop themselves, and an understanding of ethical responsibilities. Some recommendations and suggestions are proposed to improve the performance of the graduate civil engineers in the practice.     

RESEARCH SECTION: Examining the nature and perceived causes of indiscipline in Zimbabwean secondary schools

The problem of student indiscipline is an issue of concern for teachers and parents around the world. Teachers need to maintain student discipline and for them to do so it is important that they also understand the nature of discipline problems. This study, by Lawrence Kofi Ametepee, who is studying for a PhD in special education, Morgan Chitiyo, board certified behaviour analyst and Assistant Professor of Special Education, both at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA, and Susan Abu, who is currently a graduate student in the Department of Women's Studies at Texas Women's University, was designed to examine the nature and perceived causes of student indiscipline in Zimbabwean secondary schools. The authors anticipate that such an examination will promote teachers’, parents’ and policy makers’ understanding of student indiscipline, which will, in turn, enhance disciplinary policies and practices, making schools safer for all students and more effective in their role as educational and socialising agents.     

基于可雇佣性技能开发的经管类专业教学改革研究

提高可雇佣性技能是解决大学生就业难问题的重要途径之一。基于可雇佣性技能开发的教学改革,有利于端正学习态度,培养学生良好学习习惯,提升就业竞争力和个人发展能力．形成良好的“成才导向”。为此,要抓好人才培养模式、课堂教学、实践实习三个方面,突出可雇佣性技能训练,建立可雇佣性技能指标体系,制定阶段性升级式培养方案,探寻校企合作课堂教学模式,引导学生建立个人可雇佣性技能发展档案,强化学生提高可雇佣性技能意识。     

Case study of employment trends across 25 years of graduates of a Japanese Science and Technology University

Graduates in the areas of Science and Technology are believed to have traditionally been employed in a number of specific industries, but the recent restructuring of some industries may have affected this phenomenon. In order to examine the trends concerning employment issues in more detail, a case study was conducted by surveying employment statistics for every five years between 1985 and 2010, of graduates from various departments of Science and Technology at a Japanese National University. In this period, the Japanese economy experienced a variety of changes which resulted in some leading Japanese universities with engineering programmes changing their emphasis from undergraduate studies to postgraduate studies. These influences were observed using employment statistics. According to the statistics representing degree levels and the ratios of job openings to applicants, the percentages of graduates employed by industry were compared using data measured at five year intervals. A shift in the employment of graduates can be observed. Employment of graduates of Master's degree courses increased twofold during the 1990s, and employment of Ph.D. course graduates increased significantly in the near term, while employment of Bachelor's degree holders decreased. The relationship between graduates of 13 departments and 21 types of industry was analysed using multiple correspondence analysis. Common two-dimensional scales such as basic-advanced science and technology, and broad-specific demand science and technology were extracted. Both factors of year and degree levels were also configured using the same figures. These configurations were compared between the years examined, and the changes in the structural relationships between degree levels, departments and industries were analysed. These results suggest that some industrial sectors have recently begun to require Master's or Doctoral level graduates from specific departments, though they had not strongly done so before. This also illustrates the relationship between university departments and industry with regard to human resource supply and demand.