Recommendation:

That the Faculty recommend to the Dean approval of the request for an entitlement to plan a Ph.D. degree in Sociology, as described below.

Rationale:

See Prologue and especially Section 1 below.

Wisconsin's major metropolitan research university does not have a doctoral program in sociology. This is remarkable given the original mission of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which articulated the vision of a campus committed to the educational and research needs of Southeastern Wisconsin and which recognized the social sciences as critical components of this vision. Carlos Santiago, the chancellor of UWM, has stated that it is his mission for the University to increase its research profile and expand the number of doctoral programs to match its status as a Carnegie Research I institution, the only such institution within the Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin region and one of only two such institutions located within the state of Wisconsin. The Department of Sociology has unanimously concluded, based on the direction charted by Chancellor Santiago, its own assessment of trends within the academy and the discipline, data on employment prospects for sociologists, feedback we have gotten from our own Masters' students and from interested local employers, and encouragement we have received from the department's recent external review, that the time is ripe for the planning for a new Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology. In what follows, we discuss the need for a small but rigorous program, the curriculum for the program, its fit with the larger institutional mission, how the new degree program relates to other such programs in the region and nation, and what resources will be needed to implement such a program.

1. What is the need for the program?

National trends and employment data suggest a strong market for sociology Ph.D.s. The American Sociological Association reports that 1650 positions were listed for sociology Ph.D.s in the association's job bank in 2006, the highest listing of jobs over the last decade. This listing covers mainly the academic market for assistant professors and therefore shows only a portion of the overall job market. Compare this number to the roughly 550 Ph.D. degrees awarded in sociology each year. At the same time, the association projects that about 32 percent of the 2001 faculty in sociology will retire by 2012, even as the production of Ph.D.s has declined in recent years from a peak of 604 in 1998. And it appears that departments of sociology are not downsizing; in 2000-01, 1.5 full-time sociology faculty members were hired compared to 1.4 who departed.¹ Looking closer to home, the UW System has reported that it expects to lose almost 40 percent of its faculty by 2010, a prediction that encompasses all academic disciplines. Moreover, the Milwaukee area is home to more than 10 institutions of higher education that focus primarily on undergraduates and that tend to focus their faculty recruitment efforts locally.

This positive outlook in the academic market for sociology Ph.D.s is traceable not only to retirements, but to the strong growth in the numbers of students earning baccalaureate degrees in sociology nationwide and locally. Since 1990, the number of such graduates has increased by 70 percent, from 16,000 to more than 27,000 in 2004. Moreover, the number of masters degrees awarded has increased by nearly 60 percent. As of 2003-04, Sociology courses accounted for 21 percent of all social sciences courses taught at four-year institutions, a number on par with political science and economics. In the same year, sociologists taught more courses per semester than all but one other discipline. The discipline has also attracted increasing numbers of undergraduates within the University of Wisconsin system. System data reveal that the number of undergraduate degrees conferred in the discipline of sociology has increased by nearly 30% from 1995-96 to 2005-06. At UWM itself, the total annual number of credit hours taught by the Department of Sociology has increased by 58% from 1997-98 to 2004-05. Over the same period, the number of UWM undergraduates majoring in sociology has increased by 67%. Thus, at national, state and local levels, the demand for sociological courses and training has been rising consistently and sharply over the past decade.²

Data on the non-academic market for Ph.D.s in sociology is harder to come by, but there are encouraging signs that this employment market is strong as well. A National Science Foundation survey of earned doctorates reveals that between 1997 and 2003, only 1.3 percent of Ph.D. sociologists were unemployed (a rate among the lowest of the life, physical, and social science disciplines surveyed). And only 4.4 percent of sociology doctorates reported being involuntarily out of the field.

Our own assessment of the local and regional labor market is that there is a significant untapped potential for sociology Ph.D.s in both academic and non-academic settings. Our strong M.A. program has had a great deal of success in recent years in placing our students in both for-profit and non-profit settings as researchers and analysts, including A.C. Nielsen Research, Kohl's Department Stores, M&I Bank, Hunter Business Group, Market Probe, TrustSolutions, the Alliance for Families and Children, The Center for Addiction and Behavioral Health Research, the Center for Urban Initiatives and Research, and E jj Olson and Associates, among others. Such students have reported back to us that they would be interested in further training and credentials in sociology. Moreover, many of our students who have gone on to other Ph.D. programs have indicated that they would have strongly considered (and in many cases preferred) staying at UWM, had a Ph.D. in Sociology been available to them. Finally, the external reviewers of our MA program polled our current students (January 2007) and reported that, among the 50 percent of those students intending to pursue a Ph.D., "when asked if they would continue at UWM if there was a doctoral program, they overwhelmingly said yes." In fact, in spite of their initial questioning of the wisdom of a new Ph.D., the external consultants reported, "We independently came to the conclusion that the Department should aggressively pursue the creation of a Ph.D. program. UWM has the potential to create a highly respected graduate program that would make a contribution to the discipline" (emphasis in original).³

Beyond the evident need by sociology students for such a program and the need by employers for sociology Ph.D.s, there are the needs of the Department of Sociology itself and of UWM more generally. Ph.D. programs are a crucial component of any strong research university. The cross-fertilization of experienced researchers and intellectuals with bright, energetic, and ambitious, advanced students is central to the production of new knowledge as well as to the transmission of that knowledge. Moreover, the existence of a Ph.D. program in sociology is an extremely important factor in recruiting the best minds and most productive scholars to join the UWM research and teaching faculty.

2. Identify the learning outcomes or provide a brief overview of the curriculum for this program.

The new Ph.D. program in Sociology will be built from the existing MA program, a program with sound intellectual foundations and a proven track record in placing students in excellent Ph.D. programs and an array of positions in the greater Milwaukee area, the state of Wisconsin, and the nation.

The following represents a preliminary plan as to the curriculum for the program:

1. Coursework. Following UWM Graduate School requirements, the program will require 54 graduate credits of course work beyond the bachelor's degree. Our core requirements would consist of the following courses, all of which are currently offered, though some under different titles:
   • Sociol 701, Professional Seminar, 1 credits
   • Sociol 715, Systematic Sociological Theory, 3 credits
   • Sociol 750, Research Methods in Sociology, 3 credits
   • Sociol 760, Advanced Statistical Methods in Sociology, 3 credits
   • Sociol 979, Advanced Qualitative Methods in Sociology, 3 credits
   • Sociol 982, Advanced Statistical Methods in Sociology II, 3 credits
   • One additional elective advanced methodology course, 3 credits
2. Foreign Language or Specialized Skill. This requirement may be satisfied by demonstrating one of the following:
   • Proficiency in a foreign language useful in the student's career
   • Proficiency in mathematical, statistical, or computer skills
3. Minor. This requirement may be satisfied in one of two ways:
   • Completion of 9-12 credits in single, related discipline, leading to a minor examination
   • Completion of 9-12 credits in two or more disciplines outside the major in courses selected for their relevance to the student's particular area of concentration and approved by the Director of Graduate Studies or the student's advisor
4. Preliminary Examination. Students must pass a doctoral preliminary examination as one of the qualifications for dissertation status. Students will choose two topics in consultation with their advisor for the Preliminary Examination. The topics must be broader than, but related to the focus of the student's dissertation. The topics must be approved by the Department's Graduate Studies Committee and the Department faculty.
5. Dissertation Proposal. In addition to the preliminary examination, another requirement that must be met before students are eligible for dissertation status is the completion of a dissertation proposal and a successful oral defense of the dissertation proposal before the students' doctoral committee.
6. Dissertation. The dissertation is a major piece of original research representing a substantial contribution to sociological scholarship. This document will be formulated and composed under the guidance of the chair and members of the students' dissertation committee. A final draft of this document must be successfully defended before the dissertation committee.

3. How does this new degree program relate to the institutional mission, strategic plan, goals, and objectives?

The mission of UWM as a major metropolitan university is to serve the educational and research needs of Wisconsin and, through the completion of this primary mission, advance the economic, cultural and environmental development of southeastern region of the state. From its inception it was recognized that high quality research and teaching in the social sciences would be critical components of this mission. Currently, six of the seven traditional research disciplines in the social sciences at UWM have programs leading to the Ph.D., with sociology as the main exception.

In his first State of the University address in 2004, UWM Chancellor Santiago unveiled a challenge to increase university doctoral offerings by more than 50 percent, to bring UWM doctoral offerings to 32 by 2010. At the same time, the Chancellor argued that UWM must expand its research mission more generally.⁴ Our proposal is very much in keeping with the Chancellor's challenge and plans for the university. The department is currently making a concerted effort to improve its research profile and do more to obtain internal and external funds for our research projects. One of the difficulties standing in the way of this effort is the lack of qualified graduate students to assist such projects. In recent years, some of our faculty members who do have such funding have found it difficult to recruit qualified students to their projects. The difficulty lies less in the lack of good students, than in the limitations of a two year MA program. First and even second year students have often not yet developed the skills required for the advanced computing and statistical tasks that typically go with funded social science research. By the time we have trained strong students to be in a position to assist with or, better yet, collaborate on a project, they are heading out the door. Given the strong encouragement we have received from current and past students, we believe we could take advantage of the early training we are providing students in a way that would also benefit the students and the larger and expanding research mission of the University.

We also see the development of a Ph.D. program as a logical extension of the developments within our MA program in the past several years. There we have strengthened our admissions expectations, resulting in much stronger student cohorts. We have greatly ramped up our methodological training in statistics, methods, and survey research. This has caught the interest not only of strong Ph.D. programs admitting our students, as well as local employers seeking their advanced skills in a market where it is difficult to recruit qualified candidates from outside the Milwaukee area for research positions. Our graduation rate has also improved dramatically, thanks in part to stronger cohorts of students, but also to our revised core curriculum and intensive advising of graduate students.

4. How does this new degree program relate to other academic programs within the UW System, the region and, if appropriate, the nation? Demonstrate awareness of how this program is similar or different from other majors and also sub-majors/emphases systemwide.

Currently, UW Madison is the only university in Wisconsin offering a Ph.D. in Sociology. The Madison program is ranked among the top five Sociology programs nationally. It serves both national and international markets for students and graduates. We believe that there are state, regional, and local markets of students for a sociology Ph.D. and for students with a sociology Ph.D. that are not fully served by the program in Madison. We distinguish our proposed program in part, then, on the basis of the student and employment markets we intend to serve.

As noted in section 1, above, we believe there is a significant demand by students for such a program. Most of Madison's sociology Ph.D. students are drawn from outside of Wisconsin. Though we expect to draw students nationally because of our reputation in our specialties, our proposed program will focus on serving the urban and southeastern Wisconsin region's population, especially those students who are place bound by virtue of work or family obligations. With undergraduates and graduates at UWM, we routinely have students on a par with the best students in institutions like Madison, but who have personal and professional commitments that make it impossible for them to leave the area to pursue a Ph.D. While we have sent some of our MA students to Madison for Ph.D. work, most of our MA students who go on for a Ph.D. leave the state and often never return. We believe our program will help lessen this "brain drain" by providing an alternative for many of these students. In this way, the program will contribute to the mission of UWM by augmenting the stature of the University through the provision of additional educational and research opportunities in the city of Milwaukee and the southeastern region of the state. It will also conserve the human capital and civic potential of accomplished Wisconsin students.

In terms of the demand for sociology Ph.D. graduates, we point again to the information in section 1, which indicates that nationally there is no oversupply of sociology Ph.D.s. In fact, at a time when number of Ph.D.s produced in sociology is flat and even declining, the demand for sociology Ph.D.s is increasing, most obviously in the academic market where retirements are expected to continue to rise over the coming decade. While we expect some of our future students to compete well in this national academic market, we also acknowledge that Madison already serves that national market quite well, as most of its sociology Ph.D.s end up in other states. It is in local, regional, and state markets that we think we can make a significant contribution with our new program. While good statistics on the local market are difficult to obtain, a number of facts underscore the potential regional demand for graduates with advanced training in sociology. For instance, there are a large number of colleges and universities in Milwaukee, southeastern Wisconsin, and the state as a whole that will be needing new sociology faculty in the coming years and that will be attracted to our students. The size and teaching mission of these institutions may limit their ability to draw on the national pool of Ph.D. candidates, creating a niche for locally training sociology educators. Moreover, we have had conversations with Milwaukee area employers in the market research, banking, health care, insurance, and non-profit sectors who report that they are having difficulty recruiting and hiring highly skilled social research and data analysts to the Milwaukee area; these employers are already interested in what our MA students have to offer, but some have also expressed interest in expanding our offerings. Part of the plan of our curriculum is to give students who desire it the extensive quantitative and qualitative methodological expertise that would allow them to tap into that demand. We expect that our program will generate Ph.D.s producing knowledge rooted in the surrounding area, obviously with attention to national and global-international parameters, but also addressing problems and possibilities close to home.

Aside from our clear market-based differentiation from the Madison Ph.D. program in sociology, there are some substantive differences of note between the two programs. While we do not intend to strictly limit ourselves to a narrow set of substantive specialty areas, our current MA program has long distinguished itself as one that is oriented toward the application of sociological ideas and methodologies to practical applications and to specific social problems lying at the intersection of work, family, health, and technology and in the areas of urban social issues and services and social inequalities. We intend to build our program around these strengths.

The other academic unit that bears some relationship to our proposed Ph.D. offering is the Urban Studies Program at UWM. Though department of sociology faculty contribute significant time and resources to the USP program, we do not anticipate our proposed program would have a major impact on USP. We expect that the current sociology faculty who work with USP will continue to do so. Furthermore, it is possible that a sociology Ph.D. program will add value to USP by contributing to its potential course offerings and providing additional students for the courses it offers now, some of them already cross-listed with sociology.

That said, the substantive differences between the programs will be significant and justify the differentiation between the two programs. While the USP program clearly serves an important role in the community, an interdisciplinary program is always different from a disciplinary degree. In particular, the academic job market continues to be organized around disciplines, despite recent trends toward interdisciplinarity. A sociology Ph.D. program would provide scholars with sound training the fundamentals and complexities of sociology. Those pursuing academic careers would be well-equipped to teach foundational sociology courses at the colleges and universities around southeast Wisconsin and beyond and to pursue sophisticated research agendas that engage in the ongoing disciplinary conversations and practical concerns of sociology. Moreover, as discussed above, we expect the new program to take a decisively methodological orientation in quantitative and qualitative approaches to social research, which marks a substantially different focus from the USP curriculum.

5. If this program will be supported by unusual resources, provide description.

We do not anticipate that the development of a doctoral program in sociology will require a large infusion of new resources. Rather, we believe that if the sociology department were to receive faculty positions sufficient to approximate previous levels of tenure track faculty (some new recruiting lines have already been authorized), that we would be able to offer the additional courses and mentoring necessary for a Ph.D. program. This would allow us to operate the program with faculty staffing that is comparable to the successfully run UWM Ph.D. programs in the other social science disciplines.

In terms of office support, we currently operate below our allowable staff allocation. The Ph.D. program would require additional staff support from what we currently use, but we believe we could manage the program quite well with a move from the current 1.5 staff allocation to the 2 full-time staff that we are currently allowed but do not use.

As for support for the students in the program, we envisage a small program of 4-5 new students each year. While there are several sociology faculty members receiving and pursuing external sources of funding for their research that could be used to support research assistants, we believe that most of the funding for graduate students could be obtained via support from and for the teaching mission of the department. Currently, we fund roughly 20 masters' level graduate students via teaching assistantships in which students serve as graders and discussion section leaders. Our plan would be that advanced sociology Ph.D. students could be funded, as well, by teaching assistantships and by teaching their own courses for the department. Currently, we rely significantly on lecturers to meet our undergraduate teaching needs. We envisage gradually shifting some of this teaching load of 100 and 200 level courses from current full-time lecturers (several of whom will retire within the next 5-10 years) to our Ph.D. students. This practice is common in many top public university sociology departments and is a win-win situation for the students, the department, and the university. Furthermore, it would allow our PhD students to gain critical teaching experience, which would later prove useful in their pursuit for academic positions. We envisage expanding our own teaching assistant training program as well as utilizing campus-wide teaching development opportunities already in existence to help train these students for the classroom.

 

Endnotes

^1. American Sociological Association, Research and Development Department. 2007. "The Health of Sociology: Statistical Fact Sheets, 2007." Washington, D.C.: American Sociological Association. See also, Roberta Spalter-Roth and William Erskine. 2004. "Departures and Replacements: Are Sociology Downsizing in a Period of State Budget Shortfalls." Washington, D.C.: American Sociological Association.

^2. National level data were obtained from American Sociological Association, Research and Development Department. 2007. "The Health of Sociology: Statistical Fact Sheets, 2007." Washington, D.C.: American Sociological Association. The UW system data were obtained from The University of Wisconsin Office of Policy Analysis and Research. Various years. "Degrees Conferred." Finally, the UWM data were obtained from UWM College of Letters and Science Departmental profiles for 2000-01 and 2004-05.

^3. Barbara Risman and J. Scott Long. 2007. "Consultant's Report for Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee."

^4. Brad Stratton. 2004. "Chancellor Sets Mission of Discovery." UWM Report: http://www.uwm.edu/News/report/04.10/headline.html (accessed Sept. 7, 2007).