THE PREPARING FUTURE FACULTY PROGRAM: WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?
by A. Leigh DeNeef

II. General Findings from the Survey
It is useful to begin with the eight general categories of the survey:

• Non-PFF Professional Development Programs on home campus
• Knowledge PFF added regarding Academic Job Search
• Knowledge PFF added regarding Faculty Roles/Responsibilities
• Knowledge PFF added regarding Teaching Issues
• Value of PFF Mentor Relationship
• Value of Cluster Site Visits (represents two survey categories)
• Value of PFF Activities at Home Institution
• Overall Impact of PFF

Of these categories, the mentoring relationship and the PFF programs organized at the home institution proved the most valuable to those surveyed, closely followed by the site visits to the cluster campuses (see Table C. All Tables are in the Appendix). By some significant gap, the least valuable component of the students' experience were the non-PFF professional development programs offered (or in many cases, not offered at all) at the home institution. These findings are not surprising, and they corroborate what many have believed for some time, namely, that graduate programs pay little attention to the overall professional development of their graduate students, that graduate faculty have very little direct knowledge of or interest in faculty life at non-research universities, and that an effective way to provide this broader professional knowledge is simply to give graduate students organized access to a variety of academic settings.

Also important in these figures is the strong sense that PFF students sought from their faculty mentors more than guidance on research matters. They really valued the opportunity PFF provided to speak with a faculty mentor about a wider range of issues and life experiences than they felt comfortable discussing with their own faculty advisors. In fact, although not all PFF alumni had direct experience with a cluster faculty mentor or even a visit to a cluster campus, five of the eight most highly valued experiences of the alumni were clearly focused on the relationship they had with cluster faculty (see Table A). One might posit any number of explanations for this: It is easier to talk about some professional issues with a faculty member who does not hold your successful completion of the degree in his or her hand; or, cluster faculty, generally volunteering to serve as graduate student mentors, took this responsibility more seriously and thought about it more deeply than the graduate faculty. Yet, it does confirm what many other surveys have found about the relative weakness of the typical graduate-faculty mentoring system.

Looking more closely at the “value questions” of the survey (Tables A and B), two distinct types of analysis are possible. First is the simple summary of mean scores: of the forty-two questions asking students to rate the value of a particular PFF experience, sixteen received mean scores of 3.6 or higher (on a 1 to 5-point scale, with 5 representing “highly valuable”). It could be argued, then, that the majority of PFF alumni found the following experiences moderately to highly valuable in their overall preparation for subsequent academic careers:

• Discussions with individual faculty mentors and faculty groups on both the home and the cluster campuses regarding faculty roles and responsibilities (4.0 mean score); balancing the three faculty duties of research, teaching and service (3.9 mean); differing structures of institutional governance, including the politics of individual departments (3.6); hiring criteria and expectations of new faculty at different institutions (3.6); and the general nature of faculty life at those institutions, including evaluation, reward and tenure systems, salary levels, teaching loads, research and service expectations (3.9).
• Direct observation (often followed by further discussions) of classes on the cluster campus (4.2 and 3.9), faculty meetings (3.7), the daily routine of the faculty mentor (3.7), and strategies for teaching diverse student populations (3.7).
• Opportunities for and assistance in developing a statement of teaching philosophy (4.0), developing a professional portfolio (3.8), assessing one's own teaching (3.8), and developing practical strategies for teaching large lecture classes, smaller seminars, and discussion or laboratory sections (3.6).

One question, coming at the very end of the survey, may be said to stand out from the others receiving high scores. When asked whether or not PFF had been valuable in terms of helping them better understand and make an informed choice about the options available for their academic careers, nearly all alumni agreed that the program had been very important in preparing them for that decision (3.9). This score, as shown below, was borne out in the narrative comments alumni provided on the survey and might itself be taken as eloquent testimony to the overall success of the program in better educating graduate students about the range of career prospects before them.

A second level of analysis might focus on those activities that a majority of the seventeen national PFF programs put in place and that proved valuable for the PFF alumni. In other words, what particular kinds of programs might graduate education in general take away from the PFF experience in order to better prepare all graduate students for future academic employment? (It is often objected that graduate education needs to address the entire spectrum of potential post-graduate or post-doctoral employment, not just academic options. The Preparing Future Faculty program has never disputed this assertion; it has, however, insisted that its own mission is more narrowly focused on the preparation of future academics). From this perspective, it is instructive to return to Table A where it is clear that, except for opportunities to observe a variety of classes or faculty meetings on the cluster campuses, over 80 percent of existing PFF programs offered the same set of fifteen or sixteen highly rated core experiences. It is important to emphasize that at least ten of these experiences took place on the cluster campuses and five originated on the graduate school campus (see again Table C). This suggests that the overall mission of preparing the next generation of academics should not be viewed as falling to the nation's graduate schools alone. A far better model would be one that seeks active participation and collaboration of the other sectors of higher education.

A somewhat different perspective can be gained by examining Table E, particularly in relationship to Table A. Table E is sorted by those activities not covered in the PFF program of the survey respondents. Many of these activities are understandably minimized in most PFF programs: While a few PFF alumni did have valuable experiences in collaborating with a cluster faculty member on a research project, working with the cluster mentor in developing their statement of research interests or locating potential academic employment, these activities are effectively handled at the home institution and in discussion with the Ph.D. advisor. And yet, several of the most valued experiences of a number of alumni, as evident from their narrative comments, were never available to many of their PFF peers. In this category one might put crafting a cover letter for job applications, preparing for job presentations at different kinds of academic institutions, handling job offers (i.e., what can/should you ask about and who can/should you ask), or negotiating the first years on the job. Graduate programs have very little expertise in these matters for any institution other than a research university, and PFF alumni often spoke of the benefits of getting the “cluster school” perspective on them. Thus, while all PFF programs developed discussion groups on faculty roles and expectations at various institutions, not all of them followed through at the very pragmatic levels of preparing their graduate students for either opening inquiries or on-campus interviews/presentations for academic positions at those institutions. Here too more active collaboration among research and non-research schools could provide a richer preparation for developing academics.

Tables F and G offer a demographic snapshot of the survey respondents: Table F reports mean “value” scores sorted by ethnicity; Table G reports the same scores sorted by the academic discipline of the respondents. Two points are worth making here. The first is that PFF experiences are consistently valued more highly by Asian and African American students than by majority students. This observation was corroborated in subsequent alumni interviews, which emphasized that for many participants in graduate education, PFF served a doubly important acculturation function.

Second, in terms of academic disciplines, alumni from professional programs and the physical sciences generally found PFF activities more valuable than alumni from the humanities or the biological or social sciences. Such differences suggest that graduate programs in these areas have not devoted as much programmatic attention to matters of concern to PFF, perhaps because academic careers are here more the exception than the rule. Still, it also means that graduate students in these fields who seek academic employment frequently need extra-departmental programs to provide adequate preparation for that goal.