Introduction from the Dean

Introduction from the Dean: A Very Different Graduate School

Dean Larry Lyon with Rachel E.M. Johnson

A Sea Change in Enrollment

Throughout Baylor’s history, graduate and professional students have comprised only a small proportion of our student body.  The graph below charts 30 years of enrollment and illustrates how graduate students consistently remained around 15% of the total enrollment.  Then, rather abruptly, in only the last three years, graduate and professional enrollment rises to over 25%.  Further, Baylor plans to maintain its current undergraduate enrollment levels while growing its graduate and professional enrollment.  So, after decades of relative stability, Baylor’s recent trend of significant graduate student growth should continue.

Still, in and of itself, simply growing graduate enrollment, while significant, would not constitute a fundamental “sea change” for the Graduate School.  Not only has the quantity of graduate students increased, the qualities of our graduate students have changed—changed in terms of who they are, why they are here, how they learn, the support they need, and what they expect upon graduation.  This is the paradigm-shifting sea change in graduate education at Baylor; and it is change that is closely tied to our new R1 research status.

A New Categorization of Graduate Programs

These changes require a new way of thinking about and categorizing graduate programs.  Originally, we distinguished between two types of graduate programs: the master’s that typically focused on further disciplinary study beyond the undergraduate major, and the doctorate, with even more detailed disciplinary study resulting in original research.  And both types of programs were offered in a similar way: on campus, in a classroom, with face-to-face instruction.

In only a very few years, these traditional two types of graduate programs both changed significantly at Baylor. Moreover, we have added a third type as well: the online professional program. The Graduate School now oversees three broad categories of programs at Baylor:  1) on-campus research doctorates, 2) on-campus master’s programs, and 3) online professional programs. 

Our traditional on-campus research doctorates enrollment patterns have changed. Baylor’s largest on-campus research doctoral programs are now in STEM disciplines, surpassing in size the PhD programs in the humanities.  Thus, the dominant image of what it means to be a PhD student at Baylor has changed:  Laboratories have come along side libraries; experiments are more common than exegesis, and our research teams are often larger than our seminars. 

Our on-campus master’s programs have changed as well. Once a “junior version” of the PhD, Baylor students pursing an on-campus master’s are now likely to be pursuing a specific career rather than further study in a specific discipline. By far, our three largest groups of master’s students in Waco are aiming for a career as: 1) a musician or music educator, 2) a speech-language pathologist, or 3) a business executive. 

And for our new categorization, the online professional programs—led by the Doctor of Nursing Practice, the EdD in Learning and Organizational Change, and the MS in Communication Sciences and Disorders—have quickly become Baylor’s largest graduate programs.  Almost two of every three graduate and professional students under the purview of the Graduate School are now enrolled in online professional programs that, until 2015, did not exist. 

Our on-campus master’s programs and research doctoral programs now account for only 40% of our enrollment. With a few exceptions, we have a large number of small programs at the master’s level with little growth.  Our PhD programs are often larger and growing, at least among the STEM disciplines, but they are not growing at nearly the rate of our online programs.

The size of the graduate enrollment pie is growing rapidly, and the categorical slices of the pie are resizing dramatically.  However, the important change, the sea change, the paradigm-shifting change, resides more in the changing characteristics of our graduate students. 

A Paradigm Shift in Graduate Education at Baylor 

In thinking about how we should deliver and support graduate education at Baylor, consider how these three kinds of programs enroll distinctive types of students.  The on-campus doctoral student is likely a male, in his late 20s or 30s and perhaps due to international recruitment, may be Asian.  The minority status of the on-campus master’s student is more likely to be a Latina in her early 20s. Finally, the online professional student is probably a female in her 30s or 40s and much more likely to be a Latina or African American than other Baylor graduate students. 

 

 

We have very different kinds of students enrolling in very different kinds of degree programs than we had just a few years ago.  They arrive at the different stages in the life cycle, from different cultural contexts, with different goals.  A fully employed African American female with a family, who is seeking an online professional degree to enhance her chances of career advancement, is quite different from the Asian, male doctoral student coming to Waco to learn and work in lab that may not exist in his home country.  These differences, when combined with unprecedented growth and growing emphasis on research, constitute the sea change in graduate education.  This sea change demands a new way of thinking about graduate education at Baylor—a paradigm shift for the Graduate School that affects graduate student recruitment, professional, social, and spiritual development, and what it means to be member of the graduate faculty. The articles in the 2021 Annual Report describe the nature of this paradigm shift as Baylor accelerates its “quest toward preeminence as a Christian research university.”