Graduate School Dean Jo Rae Wright

Durham, NC - First, to the new students, I'd like to extend my heartfelt welcome and my sincere congratulations on your admission to Duke. You are here because you are among the best and the brightest. On average only 8 percent of the applicants who apply to graduate or professional school at Duke are offered admission. You were chosen by the faculty because they saw something special in your application beyond the test scores and grades. Test scores and grades alone will not get you into Duke; we have many applicants who have outstanding scores and grades. You are here because the faculty saw potential in you and were willing to make an investment by offering you a highly coveted position here. And it is my experience that having a Duke degree--whether undergraduate, graduate or professional--will open many doors for you in the future. Congratulations on your achievement and welcome to one of the world's great universities. I believe you have chosen wisely.

As I was reflecting on my topic for today, I did a little research on top news stories in the media this year. Although the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico dominated much of the news over the past few months, unemployment and the economy, of course, have also been major topics. A Google search yielded 1.5 million hits for job related headlines so far this year, and unemployment has been hovering around 10 percent since January. I know from talking to current students, recent graduates, and the senior leadership and faculty, that career paths and future employment for our students are foremost on many minds.

Even though the headlines paint a rather grim picture for future employment prospects, you will have several advantages after obtaining a graduate or professional degree. A recent report from the Council of Graduate Schools showed that unemployment by degree awarded was highest for those with less than a high school degree, at about 15%, whereas the average unemployment rate for those with master's degrees dropped precipitously to about 4%, and for those with professional and doctoral degrees to about 3%. Finishing your graduate or professional work will vastly improve your employment opportunities and open many doors for you.

And remember, these are data from all over the United States. The information I have collected from the programs at Duke suggests that of our graduates are doing much better than the national averages. But in order for you to have you best shot of aligning your actual opportunities for employment with your aspirations and ambitions, you will have to take some responsibility for ensuring that you get what you need while you are here. To do that, I believe, will require that you open some doors and learn some things that you might not now think are necessary and, in fact, may not be easy to learn. Acquiring a depth of knowledge in a specific field is your primary mission while you are here, but you must also take some responsibility for determining what else you need to learn in order to be marketable in a changing employment landscape.

Alan Blinder, an economist from Princeton, recently wrote a working paper published on the Princeton web site entitled "Education for the Third Industrial Revolution." As the title implies, Blinder posits that we are entering a Third Industrial Revolution (the first being the shift from farm to factory [or the mechanical revolution] and the second being the growth of technology after World War I [or the technological revolution]). He calls the Third Industrial Revolution the Informational Revolution or Informational Age, which is being enabled by the internet and mobile communications. For example, in one generation, the term "text" has morphed from a noun into a verb, or consider that you are the first generation for whom the expression "apps" refers to icons on a telephone or iPad screen that potentially launch an interaction with a correspondent half a world away. Blinder further writes that this revolution will cause a shift in the "mix of jobs available to American workers" over the next 20 years or more and that we must redesign our educational system to match the jobs that will be available. Although the focus of his article is largely on the K-12 curriculum, I believe his point that we must emphasize training in areas such as creativity, interpersonal relations, and communication skills, applies to higher education as well.

I assure you that we at Duke are aware of and in deep discussions and planning about the changing landscape of the job market. Our most recent strategic plan looks beyond the traditional model of universities as places of specialization and tightly bound disciplines. Rather, the plan emphasizes university wide signature themes that are particularly relevant to the changing job market and include interdisciplinarity, internationalization, and knowledge in the service of society. We at Duke are committed to working together and across school boundaries to pursue this vision. We have instituted new programs that are responsive to these issues, including a new Master of Management Science, a new Master of Engineering, and a joint PHD program between the Sanford School of Public Policy and the Nicholas School of the Environment. Such collaborations are facilitated by the relatively compact geography of the campus, by the commitment of the senior leadership to innovation and collaboration, and by the fact the people at Duke are simply friendly, collegial, and collaborative. When I first moved here from after spending twelve years in a very big city, San Francisco, I found it odd and frankly somewhat annoying that around here check-out clerks in grocery stores and restaurants like to chat and ask how you are. Now I find the collegiality both charming and reassuring, and I miss such friendliness when I return to my former home. And, importantly, I have found that this collegiality has enhanced my research and the research and training of my students in very many ways--as well as my ability as Dean to develop collaborative programs.

So, although the news headlines on employment are grim, your future remains bright because of the rich preparation you will receive at this institution. But I believe this will be true only if you understand that narrow specialization, although critically important, is not enough. You cannot be complacent, rest on your laurels, and assume that all you need to do is stay the course and finish your degree.

What, then, can you do to be most prepared for your future and to maximize your chances that your ambitions and aspirations will align with your opportunities? First and foremost, you must focus on your classes and scholarship and you must acquire the knowledge and research skills that can put you at the cutting edge of your field. A graduate and professional degree will help you acquire the ability to formulate questions and to develop methods to answer them. But you can't just walk straight down the hallway of your discipline, passing by all the other doors and opportunities on the way. You need to open the doors and take advantage of the richness of the diversity that Duke has to offer: people with different backgrounds, religions, races, languages, and cultures. They will enhance your lives in ways you may not be able to imagine, but not if you don't seek them out. There are and will be many new opportunities for you to gain experiences and ro grow in areas emphasized by Blinder's paper--communication, leadership, interpersonal and management skills. You can get involved in student government, in volunteer organizations such as Habitat for Humanity, or one of the many student organizations on campus. You can participate in the Duke-Durham partnership program called "Doing Good in the Neighborhood" or the new initiative called "A World Together: Duke and Global Development," which is focused on Duke's dedication to service in all areas of the world. All of these and many more options are open to you.

I also want to emphasize that all my colleagues at Duke are cognizant of the changing employment landscape and have your best interests at heart. When preparing my comments for today, I queried all the Deans about the developing job markets for their students and what special things they are doing to help their graduates be most competitive. As you might guess, job prospects vary greatly by discipline. However, all the Deans and the leadership teams in their schools are attuned to the job prospects for their students and are developing new and innovative programs. .

I don't have time to tell you everything going on in all the schools, but let me mention a couple of examples. Many schools have established new programs including, a program in the Nursing School that emphasizes teaching skills, and in the Pratt School of Engineering, an innovative communication workshop called "Thinking on Your Feet", which is lead by an Improv Artist. The Nicholas School, the School of Medicine, and the Divinity School all are expanding team based projects. I am working with the Career Center and all the Deans to develop a coordinated program in career and professional development for graduate students. I have also begun to engage our graduate alumni in a new Graduate Board of Visitors, and they, as well as alumni in other schools, are enormous assets for our current students. The Deans of the Law School and the Pratt School of Engineering have both written editorials to journals about the job markets for their graduates. I also learned that one of the Sanford School of Public Policy faculty members, Jake Vigdor, did an informal poll of colleagues around the world to discover what they think it takes to be successful in the job market now, and the number one skill they cited was the ability to "communicate with non-specialists"As Albert Einstein put it, "It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid"; obviously gender relations were not foremost on his mind, and I'd prefer to say "bartender." Moreover, times have changed, and I am happy to say that women make up almost 50% of our incoming class of graduate students.

I hope you can see that there are lots of opportunities and venues in which you can acquire the skills you need to be successful to complement the knowledge and scholarship you obtain while fulfilling the requirements of your Duke degree. Part of your challenge is to think carefully about your own career and professional goals--do you want a job in academics, in the private sector, in the government, in private practice, in a nonprofit organization? And, with that in mind, you can seek out the opportunities that will maximally position you to achieve your career goals.

And to the Deans and faculty here: we at Duke, as a university at the forefront of preparation and planning for the new economy, must continue our focus on collaboration and continue to be creative and nimble in providing our students with the skills and training that they will need as job markets continue to evolve. We all know that there are many doors through which our graduate and professional students may pass on the way to their degree. I look forward to continuing to work with all of you to help our students know what opportunities to take, what doors to open, to give them the tools and empowerment to do so.

So, in closing, new students, I welcome you through the doors of our chapel to a great institution. You are here because the faculty has great hopes and expectations for you and faith that you will live up to those expectations. My personal hope is that you will be successful in the pursuit of your degree, that you will have fun while you are here, that you will use your Duke degree to do something for the greater good of society and the world, and that you will find a job that you enjoy as much as I enjoy mine.