In a previous column (November 2011) I noted the dilemma presented by the oversupply of qualified doctoral graduates for the available tenure-track positions, certainly in the United States but, I suspect, also in many other parts of the globe.

The disparity between the production of new PhDs and openings for junior faculty hires in the US has been well documented in many fields. As cited recently by Louis Menand, between 1989 and 1996 the number of starting positions in numerous fields dropped sharply: 11% in history, 26% in art and art history, 37% in political science. Yet, he continues, "every year during that period, universities gave out more PhDs than they had the year before. It was plain that the supply curve had completely lost touch with the demand curve in American academic life. That meant if not quite a lost generation of scholars, a lost cohort."

The present era of economic collapse will only accelerate the shift from full-time and tenure track to part-time, contingent, and adjunct faculty, especially in the public colleges and universities.

At the same time, university administrators, as well as ranking bodies such as the National Research Council in the U.S. and, I trust, its counterparts elsewhere, define placement in these scarce jobs as the central criterion for success in doctoral education. Having participated in numerous "external reviews" of communication departments, and having served as chair of USC's University Committee on Academic Review for the past four years, I can attest that the placement of a program's PhD graduates, especially in elite university positions, is an invariable and central criterion in assessing departmental strength.

The problem is particularly notable in the field of communication, certainly in the United States, as we are not represented in most of the elite universities at which doctoral programs aspire to place their graduates. Among the "Ivies Plus" schools, only Cornell, Northwestern, Penn, Stanford, and USC have substantial communication programs. Thus, communication programs enter the race for placement success with a significant handicap, being shut out of many of the most prestigious targets.

At the same time, the field of communication has an important advantage in undertaking this necessary rethinking. Unlike such liberal arts fields as classics, history, literature, etc., where doctoral training is famously unrelated to "real world" employment, there are numerous career paths for which doctoral study in communication is, or readily can be highly appropriate preparation. Among these are health communication, international development, media industries, and policy-related research and engagement. But realizing this advantage requires that we confront individual and institutional obstacles to rethinking our approach to doctoral education.

The current situation raises issues of ethics that need to be addressed: Is it acceptable for us to admit larger numbers of doctoral students than the academic world can absorb, while at the same time promulgating a set of values and expectations that dooms many of our graduates to failure?

As we all know, many faculty and administrators view nonacademic career choices by their students as an institutional and/or personal disappointment if not outright failure or betrayal.

Of course, tenured faculty at doctorate-granting institutions are not necessarily likely to see the problem the way their students do. After all, they're the ones for whom the system worked, the holders of what Stanley Aronowitz once called the last good jobs in America. Further, those choosing not to pursue academic careers, or failing in their efforts, are usually not as visible to the inhabitants of the institution. They don't publish in the journals, show up at professional conferences, send their students to their graduate alma mater. Anecdotally, we can always rationalize every exception from the rule of "replication" but cumulatively we need to recognize and confront the reality.

Should the balance between demand and supply be more rational? Should we drastically reduce the size of our doctoral programs? Or, is the answer to this dilemma the broadening of our explicitly articulated goals and implicitly held values to acknowledge the viability and importance of various career paths for our Ph.D. graduates?

Once we embark on this path, we need to work backwards from the reality of multi-directional career paths to ask what this implies for the shape of our doctoral programs: what are the curricular and training implications of a broader definition of doctoral education in communication?

Fortunately, it is not necessary to undertake the rethinking process from scratch. In the past decade a number of projects directed at "re-envisioning the PhD" have been carried out in the US. Among the fruits of these are two books, Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline (edited by Golde and Walker, 2006), and The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century (Walker, et al., 2008), based on projects funded by the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID). While clearly U.S.-based, I suspect many of their observations and analyses would be relevant elsewhere as well.

The Carnegie Initiative asked scholars across a range of disciplines to reflect on their fields and to consider how best to move forward. As reported in the second volume of the series,

Their answer converged on a number of trends: a move towards greater interdisciplinarity and interaction with neighboring disciplines; growing commitment to team work - even in disciplines traditionally marked by solitary scholarship - with more collaboration in both research and teaching; and greater purposefulness in reaching out to partners and audiences outside of academe in ways that connect academic work with the larger social context (Walker, et al, 2008).

I want to note one point in particular: the importance of collaborative and team work in research. The CID scholars emphasized the importance of collaboration for research, noting that the "emphasis on specialization and individual effort (originality and independence) in doctoral training, and on rewards for individual success in academic careers, has supported a culture of competitive individualism in the academy that impedes the development of students and of knowledge." While these reports reflect a belief that scholarship in the 21st century requires team work: "today's harder, bigger, more complex problems call for multiple perspectives and collaboration," it is also true that when researchers venture outside the university they find a very different reality than the one the dominated their student years. As a student everything focuses on your work - your paper, your ideas, your dissertation - with an emphasis on individuality, and sometimes with penalties for anything smacking of collaboration. In the nonacademic work environment in which many PhD graduates find themselves, the opposite is true: Nearly all efforts are collaborative, and team work is the norm, not the exception. The authors of the CID volumes do not offer very many road maps for this particular mission, but clearly it will be important for us to devote serious attention to exploring ways to enshrine collaborative engagement among the methods employed in doctoral education. I will return to this topic in a future column, and once again I invite others to join in the conversation, especially by offering perspectives based on circumstances and experiences from other parts of the world.