Graduate Programs: Experiments with Off-campus Learning.
American higher education has commingled characteristics of the German graduate school and the English undergraduate college to the detriment of both. Currently, graduate students are expected to be resident on a campus, take large numbers of courses to accumulate credit, and to write a dissertation, often highly structured and carefully guided by the adviser, to the point that it adds little to knowledge generally and little more to the education of the student. This emphasis produces the Ph.D. syndrome-much talk about research and publication of something somewhere. In actuality, it produces neither a researcher (which is its intent) nor a teacher (which is its obligation). On the other hand, undergraduates have increasingly been asked to specialize as though all would attend graduate school and their classes are taught by professors who know so little about teaching or learning that they either are unaware of their deficiency or make a virtue of their incompetency. If undergraduates really learned how to educate themselves, much of what passes for graduate work could be done by individ-