Alan Brinkley, Columbia's provost, said the biggest pressure to improve graduate student compensation was competition with other top universities.
Many universities are taking it upon themselves to offer work experience and industry placements to improve graduate's prospects.
Others are worried about how to pick a course and find out which degrees improve graduate prospects.
George Ofori-Amanfo, a Ghanaian associate professor of pediatric cardiology at Duke Children's Hospital in Durham, N.C., is involved with the Ghana Physicians and Surgeons Foundation, whose members, based in the United States, work to improve graduate education in Ghana's four medical schools.
He also expects to help NIH carry out plans to improve graduate education and attract minorities to research, both areas he has worked on at Hopkins.
As is the case for the agency as a whole, NSF's plans to improve graduate education will be affected by the reaction of the congressional spending panels that oversee its budget.
In addition to putting up $350,000 for the study, Pew is a partner with AACU and the Council of Graduate Schools in the Preparing Future Faculty project, a national effort to improve graduate training.
Osmer says he hopes the commission's findings, to be presented next spring at the council's annual meeting, will be part of a "continuing national conversation" on ways to improve graduate education.
BOSTON We've been covering the important report of the American Chemical Society (ACS) presidential commission tasked with coming up with ways to improve graduate education in the chemical sciences; see our coverage here and here.
The competition calls for graduate students studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to submit proposals describing how they would improve graduate education, whether by overhauling student and faculty training policies, modifying funding structure, bridging connections to professional societies, or changing the culture of graduate school.
