Michael Recce, an associate professor of computer science at
the New Jersey Institute of Technology, says businesses want
to hire scientists but don't need crowds of Ph.D. researchers
with their own labs.
"It's like chiefs and Indians," he says. "We tell them we
could produce 10 chiefs for you next year. 'Great,' they say.
'Who are we going to staff them with?' "
Savvy students understand that the Ph.D. may not always be the
most marketable degree.
One professor at the Tucson meeting spoke of colleagues who
discovered that their graduate biology students were taking
simultaneous "stealth" master's degrees in the engineering
school.
While people with a master's in science may be generally
unknown, administrators and professors say businesses are
clamoring for something new from higher education. "Their
world has so totally changed in the last 10 years, and they
just can't understand why there hasn't been that shift in
universities," says Thomas H. Moss, the executive director of
the National Academies' Government-University- Industry
Research Roundtable.
But figuring out exactly what businesses want can be tricky;
administrators and professors worry about turning graduate
education into "training" for specific jobs or technologies.
Visionaries at the top of a corporation may see something that
those making the hiring decisions don't.
"You talk to the H.R. people and they say they're looking for
these skill sets," says Michael S. Teitelbaum, a program
director for the Sloan Foundation. "And then you talk to Bill
Gates and he says, 'We don't care about skill sets. We want
them to be smart problem solvers."
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