Looking Ahead:
2015 Summer Workshop


July 11-15, 2015, Quebec, Canada

From July 11-15, 250 members of the graduate community will gather in Québec, Canada for the 2015 CGS Summer Workshop and New Deans Institute. The Summer Workshop offers an opportunity for colleagues to network and discuss the most pressing issues in a more casual setting than the Annual Meeting. This year’s Summer Workshop will feature sessions on Holistic Review â€“ the topic of a project sponsored by Hobsons – as well as a technical workshop on the Future of the PhD Dissertation. High-profile speakers will present at the plenary sessions, including Jim Goodnight, the CEO of SAS, and Tom Ross, the President of the UNC System. A full program can be found on the CGS website.

CGS Partners with ProQuest to Explore Future of PhD Dissertations 


CGS recently announced it will partner with ProQuest on a new project on doctoral dissertations. The project will identify the issues related to doctoral dissertations that the graduate community needs to consider more deeply. A two-day capstone workshop in 2016 will convene graduate deans, publishers, library and information professionals, and other stakeholders to discuss how emerging technologies and other innovations in doctoral training may shape the Ph.D. dissertation of the future. 

Welcome, Elsevier! 




CGS is proud to announce that Elsevier, a leading academic publisher, has joined the Council as its newest member. Elsevier is well-known in the graduate community for the SCOPUS database of academic journal articles as well as other information products. The company also provides an online Publishing Campus to early career researchers that offers free lectures, interactive training and professional advice.
 

Q&A with Academic Analytics 



CGS Ally, Academic Analytics, explains how it’s helping its clients address new challenges in graduate education.
Read more.  


In a nutshell, how would you describe your company’s services?
Academic Analytics provides business intelligence solutions for higher education. Subscribers receive comprehensive faculty scholarly productivity data and tools to facilitate monitoring, assessment and improvement at the individual, program, department, school and institutional levels of analysis. The Academic Analytics database presents national metrics on the primary areas of scholarly accomplishment and includes information on over 270,000 faculty, 9,700 Ph.D. programs and 11,000 departments at 387 universities nationwide.
 
From your company’s perspective, what are some of the biggest challenges faced by graduate institutions?
Continued reductions in federal and state funding are challenging the day-to-day operations of graduate institutions. In particular, decreasing support for basic science research is forcing institutions to re-think their approach to funding opportunities. Institutions are changing their management of research projects to attract industrial and non-profit funding as well as traditional funding sources. Increasingly, research initiatives are framed in terms of “large problems” or topics that require interdisciplinary cluster hiring. Team-oriented research requires new paradigms for training and mentoring graduate students.
 
How does Academic Analytics help institutions address those challenges?
Academic Analytics provides tools and data to conduct:
  • Analysis and assessment at the individual, program, department, school and institutional levels
  • Modeling interdisciplinary scenarios
  • Identifying existing collaborative networks
  • Modeling hiring and retention scenarios
  • Tracking academic outcomes of graduates and their success in the academy
How has the work of Academic Analytics changed over the past five years?
Academic Analytics has evolved from a focus on assessment and rankings to providing the tools, analysis and decision support for investment, resource allocation, retention, promotion and tenure, cluster hiring, establishing interdisciplinary research groups or centers, identifying collaborative teams, tracking graduate placement and success…
 
How do you see the future of its work with graduate institutions?
We expect to see the continuation and deepening of current challenges. There will be greater emphasis on innovative, interdisciplinary research and entrepreneurial projects, as well as increased focus on the outcomes of graduate education within and outside the academy.  

Ally Spotlight: Aramco 


 
Learn why this global energy company is investing in graduate education.
Read more. 


Saudi Aramco is diversifying its business portfolio. This process has increased the need for a wide range of professionals dedicated to transforming the national oil company into the world’s leading integrated energy and chemicals company. 

Education figures prominently into the business transformation. The staff at Aramco’s Houston office is a team of more than a dozen counselors dedicated to supporting Company-sponsored students in more than 150 colleges and universities throughout the United States and Canada. 

The number of graduate students sponsored by Aramco has doubled in the past two years. There are approximately 1,300 sponsored students in the United States and 300 students are graduate students.  “We are very selective about where we place our graduate students based on the curriculum and our long-term business outlook,” notes Henryk Marcinkiewicz, Supervisor for Academic Programs in Aramco’s Houston office. 

Aramco has been a member of the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) since 2013 and values the resources, best practices and data available on graduate education. Because Aramco is a global company and the world’s leading energy provider, insights gained from the CGS perspective of global engagement and collaboration are particularly valuable. 

Some may think of Aramco graduate students as focused solely on technical fields or petroleum engineering; that is not the case. Besides the critical STEM subjects, interdisciplinary programs also teach students new approaches to tackle today’s energy challenges. In addition to trends in interdisciplinary education, the Company monitors current discussions concerning the nature of the master’s degree, managing the duration of doctoral studies, and graduate enrollment trends using information provided by CGS. 

Aramco finds value in keeping up with academia and graduate school trends in both discipline-specific advancements and also in the “art” of how people meet a challenge. “CGS lets us look at the latest interdisciplinary research trends as we calibrate our company programs to provide the best talent to feed innovation,” said Marcinkiewicz.  

Members in the News
 


QS World University Rankings by Subject: Academics and employers name the world’s top universities in 36 disciplines. QS Newsroom.
Recognition of Cambridge English continues to grow. Cambridge English Newsroom.
ASHA Recognized as One of the DC-Area's Top Workplaces. Washington Post.   
Nearly 1 Out of 4 GRE Test Takers Retest, Most Improve Scores. ETS Newsroom.
Study Finds Just 35 Percent of University Faculty Expect to Retire by "Normal" Retirement Age. TIAA-CREF Newsroom.
Unique Government Documents to be Digitised by ProQuest with the National Library of Scotland. ProQuest Newsroom.  
Advancing Petroleum Geosciences at AAPG Convention. Aramco Services Newsroom.
School Superintendents Association, Hobsons Partner on Improving Access to Community Colleges. THE Journal.  
Nominations Open for 2016 Elsevier Foundation Awards for Early-Career Women Scientists in the Developing World. Science 2.0. 

 
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