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Take, for example, the concept of apprenticeship, to which the Carnegie researchers devote an entire chapter. The faculty-master and student-apprentice relationship as the signature pedagogical structure of doctoral education dates back to the university's medieval roots. But, the Carnegie authors say, it's time that model was updated.

The study recommends that doctoral programs adopt new structures that allow students to have several intellectual mentors and come to think of mentorship as less an accident of interpersonal chemistry and as more a set of techniques that can be learned, assessed, and rewarded.

Arizona State University that awards an annual $5,000 cash prize to an "outstanding doctoral mentor" or another at the mathematics department of the University of Southern California that places new graduate students in "mentoring triplets" with both a faculty mentor and a more experienced graduate student.

"Mentoring" is in vogue, thanks in part to the Bush administration's emphasis on volunteerism.

The effects of mentoring are smaller than people think

But if you begin to control for the quality of the relationship, how long it lasts, the level of supervision, the kinds of kids who are recruited into the program, there are much larger effects.