Tennessee Tech Sees Record Doctorate Graduates

Tennessee Tech saw a record number of Doctoral graduates during the May commencement.

Senior Associate Provost and Dean of College of Graduate Studies Mark Stephens said the university graduated 25 Ph.D. students.

“We currently have three Ph.D. programs at Tech. The largest is the Ph.D. in engineering,” Stephens said. “They have the largest number of graduates this year. We also have a Ph.D. in Environmental science and a Ph.D. in education. ”

Stephens said Tennessee Tech wants additional graduates to keep their new Carnegie Classification.

“We have moved up in our University Carnegie Classification.  We are now an R2 University, which has a threshold of a minimum of twenty Ph.D. graduates a year,” Stephens said. “And we are working to be comfortably above that threshold.”

Stephens said the university put forth recruitment efforts to increase the number of graduates.

“Probably the most significant thing that we have done over the last three years,” Stephens said. “We have been putting additional resources into establishing more graduate assistantships.”

The graduate assistantships cover tuition and fees while also providing a stipend for the students.  Stephens said Tech set aside approximately $150,000 last year to create new assistantship positions.

Stephens said the school wishes to recruit students with more program options.

“In addition, we are in the final stages of approval for a new Ph.D. in Counseling and Supervision,” Stephens said. “So once that program comes online, we will have a larger number of students actually enrolled in various doctoral programs.”

Tennessee Tech graduated approximately 1,450 undergraduate and graduate students in May.