Teacher training for PhD students and new faculty in economics

ABSTRACT

Past studies suggest that a majority of economics graduate students engage in teaching-related activities during graduate school and many go on to academic positions afterwards. However, not all graduate students are formally prepared to teach while in graduate school nor are they fully prepared to teach in their first academic position. The authors characterize current teaching experience and training of graduate students from the point of view of directors of graduate studies and of newly minted academic economists. The authors also query department chairs and new faculty about teacher training, support available for new faculty, and the degree to which newly hired Ph.D. economists are prepared to teach. Findings indicate that while some training is available, there is room for enhancing teacher training in economics.

KEYWORDS:

• graduate students
• teacher training

JEL CODE:

• A2

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Teagle Foundation. They also thank Felipe Benguria, Chris Bollinger, Bill Bosshardt, David Colander, William Hoyt, Jennifer Imazeki, Lala Ma, Mark Maier, Olga Malkova, Georg Schaur, John Siegfried, and Wendy Stock for their helpful comments and suggestions in finalizing survey instruments.

Notes

1. Fourteen of the top thirty schools replied for a response rate of 47 percent and 64 of the remaining programs responded for a response rate of 63 percent.

2. This characterization of the Ph.D. students is consistent with Siegfried and Stock (2004) who find 62 percent of students are international and the international share of program enrollment has been growing since the mid-1970s.

3. Although community colleges do advertise in the JOE, there are a limited number of job postings and the nature of community colleges made it much more challenging to identify the appropriate target to complete the survey. Thus we dropped these institutions from our sampling process. It was also difficult to contact institutions who employ economists, but do not have an economics department and these are excluded as well.

4. The foreign departments may or may not have a Ph.D. program.

5. The 2016 Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession annual report notes that women comprise approximately 28 percent of assistant professors at doctoral-granting institutions (CSWEP 2017, 12).

6. Although there are many titles for non-tenured faculty that teach, we use the term lecturer throughout as a catch-all for these positions.

7. To be clear, the percent of students engaged in a given activity is computed for each program and the number reported is the average of this number.

8. Of the 58 percent who offer a training course, 40 percent state that the course is taken for credit.

9. It is possible that this difference is simply because chairs and new faculty do not necessarily reside in the same departments.

Additional information

Funding

Teagle Foundation.