Department News - 2004

History MA Program Among National Elite in Educating Future PhDs

Confirming what faculty have long suspected about the quality and strength of their MA program, the Texas State Department of History has gained national recognition for the number of its MA students who later earned a PhD in history during 1981-2001.

The department’s achievement surfaced in the January 2004 edition of Perspectives, which is the newsmagazine of the American Historical Association. In his article, Philip Katz summarizes a specially commissioned National Opinion Research Council report on the entire graduate careers of history PhDs earned during 1981-2001 (Perspectives, 42:1, 41-44). Our department, listed under the recently changed Southwest Texas State University moniker, ranks in the top 15% of 246 American history departments that awarded at least five master’s degrees to future PhDs who earned a master’s degree from a different institution than the doctorate. Twenty Texas State history MAs subsequently earned PhDs at other U.S. institutions during the period.

Prestigious institutions with history doctoral programs dominate the list published, including Harvard University, The Ohio State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, UCLA, Georgetown University, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of California-Berkeley. In fact, Texas State is one of only eight “leading MA ‘feeder’” programs that did not award doctorates in the period studied.

With another six former MA students having earned PhDs at U.S. institutions since 2001 and approximately six more in the pipeline and likely to receive PhDs in the next three years, our status as a leading MA feeder department stands to rise even further. This record of achievement is a sound testament to the overall academic quality and strength of the Texas State Department of History.

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