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Stanford Business magazine

 

About This Issue

Change the World One PhD at a Time

By Kathleen O'Toole, Editor

Kathleen O'Toole, EditorFor anyone familiar with large research universities, one of the more surprising statistics about Stanford is the high proportion of graduate students. At UC-Berkeley, for example, there is 1 grad student for every 2.3 undergraduates. At Purdue’s main campus, there is 1 for every 8. At Stanford, however, the ratio is 1.22 graduate students for every undergrad! So while there are quite a few research universities with more than twice as many students as Stanford’s roughly 15,000, they are not producing anything near double the number of graduate degree holders. When I finally realized that, I started to grasp a not-so-obvious aspect of this university’s leadership: Its PhD programs are powerful drivers not just of new technology companies but also of the world’s future higher education system.

Many Stanford graduate students, of course, are in professional schools with no intention of becoming university researchers, scholars, and teachers. As you walk this campus during daylight hours, you see plenty of master’s students among the undergrads heading to classes in the schools of Law, Education, Engineering, and Business. When you walk the campus after a nighttime concert or lecture, you are more likely to spot the doctoral students silhouetted in laboratory windows as they monitor their experiments.

Here at the Business School, the doctoral students are almost invisible, which is why we chose to focus some attention on them in this issue. We think of our MBA Program as small and intimate, and it is compared to our peer schools, but it swamps our own PhD Program. This year the school awarded 439 master’s degrees compared with just 22 doctoral degrees. Those numbers go a long way to explaining why I had been at the Business School for several years before I actually met a doctoral student. It didn’t happen until my office was temporarily relocated to a corner of the fourth floor of the South building, where, much to my surprise, I found a large room and interior courtyard where the doctoral students hung out as they worked—and sometimes played or slept—at odd hours. Their empirical experiments and theory-making activities span a wide range of topics from brain activation to market meltdown. It’s important to remember they are part of the implementation of our efforts to “change lives, change organizations, change the world.”

According to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, too few schools are willing to bear the cost of producing qualified professors of business-related disciplines, and fewer still are able to produce those who create new scholarship. Without us and a few peers who are also in this Academic Major League, I can imagine business education surviving but whipsawing erratically between stale ideas and the latest fad. The number of doctoral graduates we produce is not large, but their role in holding the bar high cannot be underestimated.

Our PhDs, like our MBAs, are scattered around the world in industry as well as education, but to glimpse just a little bit of their impact, think about how different this particular school would be without the faculty who were trained in our very own PhD Program: Jennifer Aaker, Mary Barth, George Foster, Robert Joss, John McDonald, David Montgomery, George Parker, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Garth Saloner, Kenneth Shotts, and Tunay Tunca.