The pandemic forced many graduate schools to innovate on the fly — revising longstanding policies and creating new procedures — to keep their students on track. In reflecting on what all of those changes mean for the coming academic year, we are reminded of that old quip: “This is all very well in practice, but how does it work out in theory?
In our recent study, released in January, we documented the many challenges that confronted graduate STEM education in the wake of Covid-19: Graduate courses moved to virtual classrooms, doctoral advising shifted to videoconferencing, laboratories operated under hastily devised safety rules or, in some cases, shuttered entirely. [...]