A working group chaired by Dean of the Graduate School Sheila Bonde will evaluate the number of graduate students at Brown in order to determine "where we're going (and) what our goals should be in doctoral and master's education," Bonde told The Herald.
The group will include four administrators - Bonde, Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron, Vice President for Research Clyde Briant and Associate Dean of the Graduate School William Heindel - as well as four faculty members and two graduate students. The faculty and student members will be chosen by the start of the Fall 2007 semester.
"We will be looking at the size and scale (of the Grad School) and making some recommendations," Bonde said.
The group will begin meeting next semester and will "have some preliminary things to say in the fall and more definitive things to say at the end of the (academic) year," Bonde said. She said the group will take the first major look at the Grad School's size since she became dean in 2005.
Provost David Kertzer '69 P'95 P'98 told The Herald at a faculty meeting in March that the committee is expected to release its final report at the end of the Spring 2008 semester and deliver budget recommendations to the University Resource Committee earlier that semester. He said the expansion of the faculty has "put pressure" on the Grad School to expand its student body.
Bonde said the introduction of new master's programs may have resulted in an increase in enrollment in certain fields - one of the trends the working group will examine, many of which are reflected in data released by the Office of Institutional Research.
The data show that a number of fields of graduate study at Brown - including engineering, biology and computer science - have grown, some substantially, over the past nine years while other graduate programs, such as those in the Department of English, have shrunk slightly.
The number of doctoral and master's students studying biology at Brown has more than doubled in the past nine years, leaping from 104 students in Spring 1997 to 265 in Spring 2006. The number of engineering grad students has risen greatly in the same period, climbing from 85 to 130 students, according to the OIR data.
Bonde said the increase in the sciences and engineering reflects a national swell of interest in new, cutting-edge programs in these fields.
"There are new fields like ... biomedical engineering (and) computational biology and the subfields of biology and engineering (that) have seen a growth across the nation, and that's something we're certainly seeing at Brown as well," Bonde said.
Bonde said, in some cases, funding and students have transferred from older departments into newer ones.
The number of students in doctoral and master's programs in computer science has also grown steadily, from 63 students in Spring 1997 to 106 students in Spring 2006, according to the OIR data. The number of grad students enrolled in those programs reached a 10-year high in 2006 at the same time that the number of undergraduate concentrators fell to a 10-year low of 37 students, according to OIR data.
Maurice Herlihy, director of graduate study for the Department of Computer Science, said much of the growth in the department has come about as a result of doubling the size of the department's faculty. When he came to work at Brown in 1994, the department had 16 faculty members, and the number has since increased to the low 30s, Herlihy said.
He added that the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2000 caused an increase in the number and quality of applicants to the program.
"People who went off to join a start-up suddenly realized they were not going to become millionaires by the time they were 25, so they may as well get an education," Herlihy said. "Since then, I think, it's still the case that people who would have gone off to start a company stick around to earn a master's or a Ph.D."
While many graduate programs have grown, others - such as the master's and doctoral programs in the Department of English - have decreased in size over the past decade. The English graduate program has seen a drop from 73 students in Spring 1997 to 45 in Spring 2006.
Much of the reason for the drop was a decrease in the number of admitted students in the mid- to late-1990s, from approximately 10 per year to 6 to 8 per year, said Daniel Kim, director of graduate study for the English department.
The English department plans to suspend admission to its master's program next year due to issues with funding and the vague goals of the program. The decrease in English grad students also reflects cuts - made by the department in the late 1990s - of students who had been enrolled in the department for 10 to 15 years but had not yet earned a degree. "We asked them either to finish up or withdraw," Kim said.
