Doctoral Program Review: Department of Psychology Strategic Plan

Transcription

1 Doctoral Program Review: Department of Psychology Strategic Plan The over-arching goal of the university is to become one of the world s truly great universities. The Department of Psychology defines its mission with that goal in mind and with the intent of assuming its position nationally and internationally as one of the premiere research departments of psychology. Psychology, a vital and growing discipline, employs rigorous, often laboratory-based, scientific methods to understand and predict people s perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, especially as they are influenced by biological, developmental, cognitive, and social factors. From analyzing the functions of single nerve cells, to understanding the decisions and actions of social groups, to investigating how children perceive objects or learn language, to understanding how we come to know other people and hold positive or negative attitudes toward them, perhaps no other field of inquiry has such enormous breadth and complexity. Moreover, few disciplines play as central a role in developing the knowledge base necessary for understanding and solving so many of the most pressing health, educational, and social problems currently confronting the State of Ohio and the country. By virtually every measure and for three primary reasons, the Department of Psychology is uniquely positioned to be a leader in OSU s efforts to become a world-class university. First, it is a core unit of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and one of the highest quality departments at Ohio State University. Second, it has one of the strongest graduate training programs at OSU. Third, psychology is one of the 7 hub sciences (along with math, physics, chemistry, earth sciences, and medicine); therefore, strength in psychology is essential to the development and enhancement of multidisciplinary 1 work across campus. We discuss each of these in turn, with a particular focus on the strength of or graduate programs. OSU Psychology: A Center of Excellence Department Quality: For several decades, OSU s Department of Psychology has ranked among the top programs in the country. The 1995 National Research Council rankings placed OSU Psychology 21 st in the nation. Because raw scores contain some bias attributable to differences in ratings across disciplines, standard scores also were provided in the NRC report. These data showed that the quality of the faculty in the Department of Psychology ranked first at Ohio State. This NRC quality ranking placed the Department at the 11 th percentile in psychology nationally, which also was the highest percentile ranking of any OSU department. The Department s quality score represented the fourth best improvement rating in the nation. More recent reputational ratings of the department are available, but they are so badly flawed 2 that the department has had to seek other indicators of its overall quality. The department routinely uses two: 1 By multidisciplinary we mean, in the broadest sense, the process whereby researchers in different sub-disciplines of psychology or in psychology and other disciplines either work independently, or together, but each from their disciplinary perspective, to address a common concern. 2 Another index, the most recent U.S. News and World Report ratings place the department within the top 15 public university departments of psychology nationally. However, to arrive at the rating is not a simple task; the latest ratings unfortunately included educational psychology and human development departments. Moreover, chairs of Graduate Programs in Psychology largely boycotted the ratings as a way to get the publication to improve its very poor methodology. As a result, a low percentage of psychology chairs filled out the survey. The same was not true of educational and human developmental departments. Care, then, should be used in relying on the ratings as an indicator of the department s quality. Finally, better studies that examined data for over 100 programs and over a 50 year period support the report s #3 ranking of OSU s social psychology program (e.g., Ferguson & Crandall, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, in press).

2 trends in our faculty eminence, productivity, and funding over time; and external benchmark data. As Figure 1a (top panel) demonstrates, the citation impact of work by OSU Psychology faculty has skyrocketed over the past 14 years moving from an average of 32 annual citations to an average of more than 107 per faculty member per year. This improvement also was evident in a recent ISI analysis of citations to work published by psychology faculty at all public and private institutions between 1995 and. In that report, OSU Psychology ranked 12 th in citations, and 15 th in terms of the total number of papers produced during that time period (see Table 1 below). As Figure 1b (bottom panel) also demonstrates, the Department has made significant strides in extramural funding, expenditures increasing nearly 412% from 1993 to. Millions of Dollars Figure 1 a, and b Grant Expenditures FYs Average Citations to Faculty TABLE 1 Rank Institution Citations Papers 1 HARVARD UNIV UNIV MICHIGAN UNIV CALIF LOS ANGELES STANFORD UNIV UNIV ILLINOIS URBANA UNIV MINNESOTA YALE UNIV UNIV PITTSBURGH UNIV WISCONSIN MADISON UNIV WASHINGTON UNIV PENN OHIO STATE UNIV COLUMBIA UNIV INDIANA UNIV UNIV CALIF SAN DIEGO The overall quality and centrality of the Psychology Department also has been recognized by its receipt of two Challenge awards, two Ohio Eminent 20 Scholar awards, a Selective Investment award, and a 0 Targeted Investment in Excellence Award. These awards have provided essential funding to help the department achieve its primary goal of being recognized as a Top 10 department Graduate Program Quality: The Psychology Department s graduate program also is among the very strongest at the university. Indeed, the program in Psychology is highly selective in its admission of students and very focused on timely completion of degrees and high quality placements. Since at least 1998, the department s number of graduate applications has averaged 469, a figure that is >150% of the median number applications received by programs nationally. Of those applications, on average only 14% were offered admission. (The national median rate of admissions was >20% for U.S. doctoral programs (APA, Graduate Studies in Psychology, )). Because we are so selective and are competing with the very top programs in the country (e.g., in the last several years we have lost students to Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, University of Chicago, Cornell, Michigan, NYU, and Stanford) only about 4 of those offered admission enroll (see table 2). The average GPA for our entering cohorts from was 3.71 with little fluctuation. Similarly, the average combined Verbal + Quantitative GRE scores for our admitted students was 1323 over that same 10-year period (see figure 2a and b).

3 Table 2 Selectivity and Enrollment Yield Rate Year * # of Applications # Admitted # Enrolled Yield Rate 42% 46% 41% 46% 53% 43% 56% 44% 4 * averages Figure 2a Figures 2b GRE-V GRE-Q GPA As further evidence of the quality of the graduate program, the department currently has more National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellows than any other department on campus. It also is always among the top departments in terms of the number of University Fellowships (see table 3), Homeland Security Fellowships, and APA Minority Fellowships awarded to its students. It is notable that the department also regularly has students awarded the prestigious OSU Graduate Alumni Teaching Award (9 since ). Finally, last year alone the department s graduate students made over 120 presentations to regional and national professional conferences, and they published over 30 scientific papers. Table 3 University Fellowships* - Psychology Year Nominated Received Accepted/enrolled * includes both regular University Fellowships and Graduate Enrichment Fellowships and reflects the cutbacks in our graduate programming necessitated by departmental fiscal realities. The department s emphasis on admitting quality students has led to strong and improving rates of successful degree completions. Figure 3 shows Psychology s rates of completion for the Master s degree

4 beginning with the class of 1996 (ave. for most recent 3-year period is 85%). It shows, additionally, the rates of Ph.D. completion among those admitted to candidacy (ave. for most recent 3-year period is >86%). 3 The median time to degree for Ph.D. graduates in Psychology at OSU is 6 years. That compares favorably with a median of 8.7 years in Psychology for research-extensive U.S. universities (NSF report, Time to Degree of U.S. Research Doctorate Recipients, March ). Figure 3 100% Graduate student placement is another source of 90% distinction. With an average of 27 Ph.D.s awarded 80% per year from -2007, the Department is an 70% important source of psychologists for postdoctoral 60% and faculty positions at other universities institutes. 50% Table 4 shows the percentages of OSU Psychology 40% graduates who, during each of the past 7.5 years, 30% have assumed postdoctoral, academic, and industry/ 20% business positions. These figures can be compared 10% to the national averages in for Psychology 0% Departments at U.S. universities (NSF, Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science Completion Rates: Pre-candidacy Completion Rates: Post-candidacy and Engineering: Fall ). In terms of specific national comparisons, the most recent data (APA s Graduate Studies in Psychology Guide) available are for -05. A comparison of OSU Psychology with the top-rated NRC departments (Michigan, Yale, UCLA, Illinois and Harvard 4 ) shows that only UCLA placed a higher percentage of its graduates in postdoctoral positions, and only Illinois placed a higher percentage in academic positions than did OSU (see Table 5). (See appendix A and B for a complete listing of the initial placements for OSU Psychology graduates over the past 10 years). Table 4 Initial Placements of Ph.D. Graduates Year 2007 ** U.S. N * Postdoctoral 21% 24% 4 36% 5 42% 3 18% 42% 29% 26% 23% 36% % 34% 2 Industry 38% 53% 26% 9% 14% 16% 21% 2 * With complete records ** total N and average percentages as of Importantly, an examination of the data shows no systematic, demographic pattern in attrition rates either pre- or post-candidacy. Women and ethnic minority students are not at greater risk of leaving before completion of the M.A. or Ph.D. 4 Stanford did not provide to APA any data regarding placements of its graduates.

5 Table 5 Comparative Initial Placements of Ph.D. Graduates - Departments * Michigan (2) Yale (3) UCLA (4) Illinois (5) Harvard (6) Average of above OSU (21) *1995 NRC ratings in parentheses; Stanford (1) failed to provide data to APA s Graduate Studies in Keys to Graduate Program Quality: Postdoctoral 52% 53% 59% 41% 41% 49% 5 The OSU Psychology Department has developed over the years three programs or practices that are key to its success in graduate training. Perhaps most critical is our Department Fellows Plan, originally developed in 1993 and revised in The purposes of this plan are twofold. The first is to maximize the quality of our graduate students by attracting the best with guarantees of five years of support, assuming reasonable academic progress and job performance. The second is to provide incentives for faculty to seek grant support to fund graduate RA s. There are two ways that students can qualify for department fellow status and therefore be guaranteed 5 years of support. First, students who are awarded University Fellowships automatically qualify. Second, students not receiving University fellowships also can be named Department Fellows if a PI guarantees two of the years on an external grant. Additionally, all Department fellows receive a one-month, early start stipend. Finally, with the help of the new SBS fellowship program, our Department Fellows who meet the Graduate School criteria for fellowship nominations also receive two years of summer support. The department program, then, successfully controls the quality of admitted students by tying funding levels to criteria set by the Graduates School for Fellowship competitions. It also helps to recruit the best of our applicants. Continued funding and raise decisions are tied to academic and job (TA or RA) performance. To monitor students progress, graduate students are asked each year to complete an electronic Annual Activity Report (AAR). This report is cumulative and contains a listing of students courses completed and grades obtained, scholarly presentations and publications, awards and honors received, degree completions, and sources of support for each year in the program. Importantly, the AAR also permits students to provide self-evaluations that then are used by program faculty to set annual, individualized goals. It also allows students to provide anonymous program evaluations that are used as input to our ongoing efforts to offer the very best in graduate training at OSU. Finally, a recently restructured committee with expanded responsibilities oversees the department s efforts to improve the diversity, recruitment, and retention of graduate students in Psychology. A recent report (NSF Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering: Fall ) shows that OSU Psychology produced more African American Ph.D.s than any other department at OSU and, in fact, accounted for half of OSU s total production. Additionally, an examination of the current demographics of faculty and graduate student groups (see Appendix C) shows that overall, OSU Psychology compares favorably to national and to university figures for the percentages of ethnic minorities. Fully 15% of our students are members of ethnic minorities, and another 1 are international students. We have, however, this year for the first time fallen behind national and OSU figures in terms of our representation of African/Americans at the graduate student level and women at the full and associate 21% 23% 4 18% 28% 36% Industry 29% 14%

6 professor ranks. In an effort to improve the diversity of our graduate program, this restructured committee has undertaken the development of a new diversity website and recruitment brochure, both of which highlight the diversity of faculty, students, and training opportunities available in the department. Committee members also host minority students during visitation days, and they volunteer to give colloquia at a number of smaller schools in Ohio where they might recruit future students into our graduate training program. They additionally regularly host the APA s Summer Scholars Program (40% of the enrollees are by design undergraduate minority students), the APA s MUSE program (minority undergraduate students of excellence program), SSBN program, and SROP students.) In terms of new initiatives, the committee has begun work on two surveys. One will be sent to all students who were admitted to our program, including those who elected to go elsewhere. The second will be completed by all graduate students as they leave the program. It is hoped that the former survey will help us to identify the factors that are key to our successful recruitment of students and that the latter, along with the AAR, will yield useful information about factors that result in successful and timely degree completion of our students. Strategic Plan for Graduate Program: Research in psychology is critical to understanding human adaptation and maladaptation. Indeed, the research produced by faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates forms an essential foundation of any effort to understand and address the pressing health, educational, and social issues facing the State of Ohio and the country. The Department of Psychology s overarching goal of our graduate training mission is to position our students, through coursework and laboratory-based, apprenticeship-style training, to assume leadership roles in those efforts. Success is measured by the placements of our students in prominent academic, research, and industry (including mental health services) positions. Currently, the Psychology Department offers 7 graduate training specialties: behavioral neuroscience, clinical, cognitive, developmental, intellectual and developmental disabilities, quantitative, and social psychology 5. Much of our graduate training takes place within these programs. However, the Department recognized in its current 5-year plan that it will not easily achieve its top 2 goals (significantly improving the Department s national ranking to Top 10 status; attracting the top students nationally to our graduate programs; and increasing external funding (both grants and development efforts) without greater coordination and collaboration of its specialty training programs. That, in turn, will require that we tap into existing synergies and build bridges among our program areas. Only then will we accomplish our shared goals and organize our research and training programs in a way that reflects the future of the discipline. At present, 3 broad topical areas to which faculty from a number of our specialty programs contribute can be identified: Integrative Neurosciences, Health, and Judgment and Decision-making. Current faculty work in these three, broad areas and their work proceeds at various levels of analysis, from a focus on individual differences, to basic cognitive mechanisms, to life span issues, to social and cultural processes. And they rely on various methodologies (e.g., involving both psychophysiological measurement and neuroimaging techniques) and an array of approaches (e.g., experimental, animal and computational 5 Due to state budget cuts, a decision was made in 1998 to allocate department resources in a way that would assure the continued strength of the foundation areas of the field. As a result, the department s graduate training program in Industrial/organizational psychology stopped admitting students and by the end of academic year all students had matriculated through that program. Similarly, because of the budget cuts and beginning of the enrollment-based budgeting system in, the department needed to cut back further. Our counseling psychology program stopped admitting students in.

7 models of human behaviors). But what is most critically needed is an explicit and more systematic incorporation of these multidisciplinary research foci into our training of graduate students. That, in turn, will require that, as we hire faculty, we keep as a major priority the hiring of scientists whose training and research reflect these three topical areas and a multidisciplinary approach to work on fundamental problems of scientific and applied concern. The department currently is in the early stages of building on these emerging foci, but notable changes already have occurred. We have identified and begun to address key aspects of our training programs that would need to be modified to accommodate new, multidisciplinary programs (individualized or more formal cross-specialty programs) within the department. We also have hired several faculty in both Health and JDM areas as a result of our participation in the Provost s and the SBS TIE initiatives in those areas. At present, our strategy for building Neuroscience throughout the department relies on having that as a primary focus in hiring done to maintain the critical mass necessary to have stable specialty training programs. Importantly, the department is making every effort to assure that new appointments contribute in substantive ways to more than one of our specialty training programs and to emerging multidisciplinary foci across campus. Challenges and Opportunities: As already noted (footnote 6), the Psychology Department has had to cut two of our specialty training programs in order to simply maintain the strength of our foundational programs. Although targeted in 1998 to grow to 62 faculty, we now are down from 56 in 1998 to 49 faculty in Our graduate student enrollments similarly have declined (from 174 in - to 130 in ). These cutbacks were necessary because of the FY state budget cuts and because the university s enrollment-based budgeting system began at a point where enrollments in Psychology courses and grant indirect levels were at all time highs. Not surprisingly, but unfortunately, both enrollments and grant indirects immediately returned to their pre-budget restructuring levels, and the department was faced with an additional loss of more than $500,000 in annual rate. With hard work and college help our budget picture has improved; but this year we faced a new challenge with an increased POM charge of over $200,000 associated with our move to a new building. Clearly, the impact of the department s fiscal situation on our graduate training program has been severe. As we have had to downsize the faculty, so too have we had to downsize our graduate admission numbers in order to meet our obligations with respect to the provision of quality training and in light of increases in graduate student stipends, tuition, and benefit costs. This downsizing of our graduate program sadly occurred at a time when national figures (Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering: Fall ) on full-time graduate students showed a substantial increase in graduate enrollments in psychology. Indeed, in, all of the Biological Sciences and all of the Math and Physical Sciences at U.S. universities enrolled 57,651 and 47,647 students, respectively. Psychology alone had enrollments of 38,957 students in Ph.D. granting departments. At present, we spend annually a little over $2 million on graduate stipends, tuition, and benefits. If we were to have a 10% reduction in the resources devoted to graduate training, we would have to move money from our operating budget to cover the shortfall. The OSU Psychology Department simply cannot accommodate any further reductions to our graduate program and still have any hope of being a major player at a national level. If we were to experience a 10% increase in funds devoted to graduate training, our first priority would be to increase the stipend levels for our students. We currently offer 9-month stipends that are a bit below the national average and considerably below the $18,000 to $23,000 offered by our competitors. An improvement in our enrollment yield of the top quality students probably will require that we address this issue.