SOME NOTES ON GRADUATE EDUCATION WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO SOCIOLOGY.

The question of how one should view graduate training in sociology allows many types of answers. The comments that follow are, at least in part, the kinds of things one might say to a student about to embark on a career of gradual!e training in sociology. Although some institutions that call themselves colleges have graduate programs. graduate schools are usually associated with universities of sufficient size to provide the research and faculty base. required for advanced training in a discipline. Universities can he classified in many ways. One common way is by size, another by whether the institution is privately or publicly supported. Large private institutions at present tend to he smaller than large publicly supported institutions, and possibly the gap in size is spreading. The university itself must be viewed as the milieu in which any graduate program is given meaning. The attitudes associated with the administration of the institution, the common culture of the faculty! the general expectations of the whole academic community, all these enter into defining the situation in which graduate training is conducted.