EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Identifying the underlying challenges that face doctoral education in chemistry

Melissa A Collini, Benedicta Donkor and Jordan Harshman

PLOS ONE, 2025, vol. 20, issue 5, 1-16

Abstract: Doctoral education in chemistry (DEC) in the United States is charged with producing scientists who are capable of addressing the world’s Grand Challenges, enhancing quality of life and innovation both domestically and globally through advanced science. However, many believe these doctoral programs are failing to adequately and equitably prepare students for those responsibilities. While numerous challenges have been identified, many are based in perspective and opinion rather than inferred from theory-driven education research. This is problematic as it does not give evidence-based insight into the challenges facing DEC. This qualitative research study aims to address this issue by answering the research question: What are the issues and challenges within doctoral education in chemistry from the faculty perspective? This will be accomplished by interviewing faculty members of chemistry PhD programs and analyzing these interviews to characterize the challenges undermining DEC in the United States. Our findings indicate that there are four main themes characterizing these challenges: 1) universities and faculty struggle to find balance between multiple responsibilities; 2) there are no standard or robust assessments to assess student outcomes; 3) the implementation of many programmatic elements is ineffectual; and 4) inadequacies and inconsistencies with mentorship are deeply problematic. Research implications for these findings are significant as they give insight into the underlying, systemic challenges that face DEC, rather than simply identifying symptomatic, surface-level issues. This lays the foundation for future research addressing challenges facing DEC. Our results are presented to equip those looking to reform doctoral education with essential insights needed to understand and begin addressing the aforementioned areas of concern.

Date: 2025
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0322446 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 22446&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0322446

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0322446

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().

 
Page updated 2025-06-21
Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0322446