Easy, fast and convenient

Students who have no clue or interest in research or nature of programme, only focus on the ranking of the institution

It’s the graduate school application season again. Students, by the droves, are starting to work on their essays, scheduling their GREs and as per the new trends, contacting professors en masse. Like my colleagues, I do get a fair bit of emails, with students asking about graduate programmes, and lately I have got quite a few from our part of the world. It’s a good sign that the students are proactive and thinking hard about their future. But that is where the good part ends. A large number of students, particularly from Pakistan and our northern brotherly country who contact me, send emails that show very troubling attitudes towards higher education. A student recently wrote to me asking about the ranking of my university, since according to her, her goal for higher education (in this case a PhD) is to be admitted to a highly ranked institution. It would be sad (or funny, depending on your perspective) if this was an anomaly. Unfortunately, it is not. Every year, I get several dozen emails from potential graduate students who have no clue or interest in the research or the nature of the programme, and only focus on the ranking of the institution.

While it is easy for us to dismiss this as an absurdity, the reality is that more and more students are now relying on rankings by the newspaper industry, to define what their graduate career needs to be. Gone are the days when people would pursue their passions and would look at the research portfolio of individual professors and their areas of interest. Gone are the days when reputation of a scholar mattered more than the ranking of a department or, even worse, the university as a whole. Gone are the days when mentorship of a professor mattered. Gone are the days when the pursuit of knowledge and the quest for inquiry determined where one wanted to go and learn, and not a single number that defined a whole institution. Even more troubling is the complete loss of the age-old tradition of reading papers, defining ideas and coming up with provocative questions. While the tradition of reading and trying to work under a particular scholar is still alive, to a certain extent, in humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and engineering often find students on their doors who are simply following what the rankings tell them. The irony in this stark difference in approaches is that a supervisor in the natural sciences controls one’s graduate career to a much greater extent than the one in humanities, yet it is students in natural sciences and engineering, who are much more enticed by rankings. While I understand and recognise that many students may want to enter graduate school with an open mind, using rankings of the institution alone is hardly a justification for that argument. Not knowing is perfectly fine, not caring is indefensible.

In my experience and that of many of my colleagues, we also find a clear difference in attitude from domestic students (from institutions within the US) and those who apply from our part of the world. Even students, who are not from the US, but attend US institutions for undergraduate studies are more likely to pursue their passions, follow the work of the professors and be intrigued by specific areas than those who come from South Asia and China. While this may seem somewhat pessimistic, it is actually a sign of hope. It can, therefore, be argued that the problem may not be in the students, but in the mentorship that the students receive and the environment that is fixated on reducing everything to a rank or a number. Turn on the TV and you find every other product sold as the ‘No 1’ brand! Better mentorship, one can argue, can change attitudes for the better.

The most common argument provided in defence of following the rankings is that it is easy, fast and convenient. Nothing could be more useless than this piece of advice. For anyone who has ever attended graduate school, or is in graduate school, would tell you that three things a graduate school is definitely not are easy, fast and convenient!

Published in The Express Tribune, July 28^th, 2015.

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