April 1, 2025
The UW Taskforce on the Future of PhD Education is a joint initiative of the Provost and the Graduate School charged with charting innovative and proactive directions for the University of Washington’s PhD programs and PhD students. As an R1 institution with over 4,000 PhD students, the UW has a unique and important role to play in modeling best practices in developing the next generation of leaders, researchers, and innovators while advancing the public good.
In particular, the Taskforce will be focused on three areas: (1) ensuring PhD students get the type of education, training and experiences they need for the current and future job market, including outside academia; (2) ensuring the UW has a vision for PhD education that fits with our RI goals, public mission, and fiscal challenges; and (3) ensuring our graduate students are getting a high quality experience in their programs. As the taskforce does its work, it will identify where there should be flexibility for departments and programs and where there should be common elements in the student experience.
The Taskforce will answer questions such as:
- What is “success” in PhD education at an R1 institution like the UW?
- What metrics should we develop and monitor to assess our success and inform a cycle of continuous improvement?
- How will we ensure our PhD curricula, milestones, co-curricular requirements (e.g. field work, internships), etc. are aligned, relevant, and prepare students for the future (e.g. 2050) not the past or present?
- How might a dissertation be different in the future, and how do we accommodate change or build in flexibility?
- How can we best balance budget constraints, our research and instructional needs, and our duty to prepare future leaders in research, education, and innovation?
- How can we align factors like revenue, costs, job market changes, and cohort size to inform how we deliver PhD education?
- What role should graduate students play in our instructional mission, and what are the goals in having PhD students serve as instructors at any level?
- On what specific areas should we focus our attention to improve and enhance the experience of PhD students, especially to promote
- Excellence in disciplinary training
- Interdisciplinary training
- Responsible research
- Open science and scholarship
- Career and professional development for paths both within and outside academia
- Communication, leadership, and “soft” skills
- Health and wellness
- Sense of community and belonging
- High-quality mentoring by faculty of graduate students and accountability for mentorship successes and failures
- Timely degree completion
- Cohort diversity
- Funding packages
- Applicability to the diversity of the graduate student body
In exploring these issues, the taskforce is encouraged to adopt a practical approach including:
- Adopting solutions that are cost neutral, including through suggested rearrangements of workflows
- Identifying key barriers to adopting recommended solutions
The taskforce will be supported in filling this charge by working groups. The taskforce will identify areas of focus and then select faculty, staff, and students with relevant expertise on the issue. With the input of the working groups, the taskforce will craft a vision for the ideal graduate education experience and make recommendations for short-term and long-term actions.
Timeline
April 2025: supervisory committee convened
May 2025: working group foci and membership proposed by supervisory committee
Summer 2025: Graduate School creates resources for the task force, distributes an initial set of data identified as useful for decision-making regarding the PhD to colleges/schools, and provides a scan of peer institutions and UW programs for best practices
October/November 2026: Working groups launched
December-March 2026: Working groups begin creating recommendations, identifying barriers, and proposing solutions
April 2026: Preliminary report and related materials produced
May 2026: report and related materials finalized and submitted to the Provost and Dean of the Graduate School