About CIRGE

As doctoral education is transforming from a national to a global system, it is being confronted with rapid and radical changes. Existing research on patterns of these changes is minimal and little information on the rapidly changing forms of doctoral education around the world is available. To meet these challenges, CIRGE provides empirical data and analyses that are immediately applicable to help understand local, national and international trends, make informed policy decisions, and successfully pursue innovations in learning and discovery.

Our surveys help graduate programs assess the educational and career outcomes of PhDs, taking as our data source the voices of graduates themselves. Engaged in highly diverse career paths that cross disciplinary, national and employment boundaries, PhD graduates are in uniquely qualified positions to evaluate the quality and success of their own programs – better than traditional exit or alumni surveys. Both national and international institutions work with CIRGE to obtain better, more rigorous data so they can be more accountable for ensuring their programs meet students’ and society’s needs.

CIRGE’s current focus is on discovering how people become researchers and on trying to understand the competencies that graduate students learn when they are involved in international activities.  Our vision is to be a catalyst for change and innovation in graduate education by establishing a critical research agenda on graduate education.  This project builds directly on the work CIRGE has already accomplished.  In its first years of existence, CIRGE developed three main emphases: internationalization in doctoral education, evaluation of innovative doctoral programs, and implications of changes in PhD scholars’ work environments and careers for defining core competencies for PhD holders. CIRGE is now in a position to build on this previous work to become the first U.S. center devoted to defining a research agenda in the study of doctoral education and also a leading actor in this field internationally. 

CIRGE has chosen the spiral as the symbol to be used in our logos and other printed materials.  The spiral is an ancient symbol, found scratched into rocks thousands of years old, on every continent in the world. This is probably because it is one of the most common shapes in nature,  occurring  in whirlpools, galaxies, plants, and shells.  A spiral is a curve that winds around a fixed point at a continuously increasing distance from that point.  Although each loop of the spiral brings us back to the same place, it takes us to a higher and more evolved level at each turn.  CIRGE chose this symbol of ongoing growth and development –  one of the things education tries to foster in students and faculty – to show our commitment to researching and analyzing innovations in graduate education.  A variation of the spiral – the nautilus – was used in the logo for our Forces and Forms of Change in Doctoral Education Worldwide network.