GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Taylor’s ideas for an overhaul:

1. Turn to an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural curriculum

2. “Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs…Consider, for example, a Water program.”

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. “Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff.”

4. End the traditional medieval dissertation with crappy writing and footnotes, and produce something useful in the form of a website, a film, or a video game.

5. Expand the range of professional options for grad students.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure.

My advice to current grad students (like my wife) is to pay close attention to numbers 4 and 5: push to make your dissertation something that will speak to a mass audience, and do your best to seek out networking and job opportunities outside of academia while you’re still in school (producing #4 will help with #5).

My own undergraduate program, the School of Interdisciplinary Studies (Western College Program) had been doing the first two for 30 years, but was shut down in part b/c of number 6: a stale, tenured faculty with no real motivation to re-haul the program.

(via @scd)