The Changing Landscape of the Master's Degree at Penn State
Dr. Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, was the keynote speaker for the annual Graduate School Faculty Workshop held on October 3, 2001 at the Nittany Lion Inn on the University Park campus.
Master's education has become a huge enterprise in the United States, where colleges and universities award 440,000 degrees annually. Dr. Stewart addressed this recent trend, as well as innovations in curricular design and changing enrollment patterns nationally in her talk titled "The Changing Landscape of Master's Education: Implications for Penn State."
Following her talk, a panel of Penn State faculty members shared their thoughts on master's degrees at Penn State and presented their rationale for creating new degrees or modifying traditional master's degrees to meet today's needs. Panelists also examined data on the history of master's degrees and the future of these degrees in their respective disciplines.
Panelists included:
- Dr. Norman Freed, associate dean in the Eberly College of Science and professor of physics;
- Dr. Gary Kuhne, associate professor of education serving on the graduate faculty in the Adult Education Program;
- Dr. William Milheim, campus executive officer and associate dean at Penn State Great Valley;
- Dr. David DeWalle, professor of forest hydrology with the School of Forest Resources in the College of Agricultural Sciences;
- Dr. Dennis Sheehan, professor of finance in the Smeal College of Business Administration.
Links to the complete transcript of Dr. Stewart's keynote address and summaries of the panelists' presentations are provided below: