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From the issue dated January 16, 2004
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Doctor Dropout
High attrition from Ph.D. programs is sucking away time, talent, and money and breaking some hearts, too
By SCOTT SMALLWOOD
On the first day of graduate school, everyone is still a success. All
of the students gunning for Ph.D.'s have lived an academic life of
achievement: honor roll, summa cum laude, certificates, scholarships,
and parents who praise their intellectual prowess. Yet as many as half
of those bright students -- many of whom have never tasted failure
-- will drop out before they can claim their prize.
In some humanities programs, only one of every three entering students
goes on to earn a doctorate. No comprehensive national statistics are
available, but studies suggest that the attrition rate for Ph.D.
programs is 40 percent to 50 percent.
That has been the way graduate school has worked for years. It's about
separating the wheat from the chaff, some professors will argue. Others
may spout additional clichés about cream rising and sink-or-swim
environments. The good students get through, they say.
Nearly everyone involved, from graduate deans to professors,
acknowledges that Ph.D. programs will never have the completion rates
of shorter, more clearly defined programs like law and business
schools. Some dropouts are to be expected, since getting a Ph.D. can
often take six or seven years, and some of that attrition is healthy,
administrators and professors say.
But given the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into graduate
study by institutions and the federal government, not to mention the
years of the students' lives, should we accept a system in which half
of the students don't make it?
"If actual attrition is really around 50 percent, then this is a
scandal," says Michael S. Teitelbaum, a program director at the Alfred
P. Sloan Foundation. "It's a serious waste of resources and a terrible
waste of time and energy on the part of students."
Some researchers have tracked attrition for years. Their studies don't
suggest a rise or a fall in the dropout rate. What is changing is
university administrators' willingness to do something about the
problem.
At the recent annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools, in San
Francisco, one of the most talked-about sessions focused on attrition.
Lewis Siegel, chairman of the council and dean of the Graduate School
at Duke University, calls it "the central issue in doctoral education
in the United States today." Debra Stewart, the council's president,
calls it a "wedge issue." Start dealing with why people are leaving
graduate school, she says, and you'll fix a whole bunch of problems.
The timing seems right as well. Ms. Stewart says that the council has
been overwhelmed by requests for its new booklet examining the research
that has been done on the issue. Just after the meeting, the council
announced that Pfizer Inc., the pharmaceutical company, was donating
$2-million for 10 pilot projects to study and develop ways to stem
attrition.
Why It Matters
Lots of people can't cut it in graduate school, runs the common
wisdom. That's the nature of the beast. In his presentation at the San
Francisco meeting, Peter Diffley, an associate dean of the Graduate
School at the University of Notre Dame, posed the essential question:
"Why care? Doesn't it just cull the bottom part of class? Won't solving
the attrition problem just worsen the placement problem?"
After studying 10 years of data in four representative departments at
Notre Dame, Mr. Diffley found that those simple explanations don't hold
water. His research suggests that there is little to no academic
difference between the people who complete their degrees and those who
drop out -- at least as measured by their Graduate Record
Examination scores and undergraduate grades. So, ultimately, the high
attrition is a waste of time and talent.
He also calculated that Notre Dame would save $1-million a year in
stipends alone if attrition went down by 10 percent, because programs
would not over-enroll students to compensate for attrition. "We don't
mind spending if there's a product at the end," he says.
Graduate-school administrators also argue that decreasing the number of
doctoral dropouts is the fastest way to graduate more American and
minority Ph.D.'s. Many of the deans at the San Francisco meeting were
worried about what they called a shrinking "domestic talent pool." In
the past five years, the number of Americans earning doctorates has
fallen by more than 8 percent. Meanwhile, the number of foreign
students on temporary visas earning doctorates has risen by more than 5
percent.
The most important reason to care about attrition, most researchers
agree, is the effect it has on students' lives. "This is tremendously
painful," says Barbara E. Lovitts, who left two doctoral programs
before finishing a third one, in sociology, at the University of
Maryland at College Park in 1996.
Now a research scientist at Maryland, she is the author of Leaving the Ivory Tower: The Causes and Consequences of Departure From Doctoral Study (Rowman
and Littlefield, 2001). She saw several people who had not completed
their degrees cry during interviews about their grad-school experiences
and the effect it had on their lives -- no matter what their
reasons for leaving.
"There is a tremendous opportunity cost," Ms. Lovitts says. "These are
people who have never failed before in their lives. They were summa cum
laude, Phi Beta Kappa. And for the first time in their lives they've
experienced failure. It takes people a lot of years to get over it."
What We Do Know
Even though no comprehensive national studies have been done on
attrition from Ph.D. programs, researchers still know a lot about the
problem. Many institution-specific studies in recent decades bear out
the same trends: Women drop out at a higher rate than men. Minority
students leave at a higher rate than white students do. Americans drop
out more often than international students. And students leave
humanities and social-science programs at a higher rate than those in
the sciences.
Researchers and deans concerned about attrition say the first step in
reducing it is to gather and publish data on the issue. Admittedly,
those would be slippery statistics. How do you decide who counts as a
doctoral student? What about students who entered Ph.D. programs but
left with master's degrees? And when do you count them as gone? What if
they just took a leave for a year and expect to return?
Chris M. Golde, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching who is one of the nation's foremost researchers
on graduate-school attrition, tells departments "not to get hung up on
the technical part." Just come up with a definition that can be easily
explained, and a way to gather the data. Then keep putting those data
in front of people and ask them to confront the problem.
Many departments, deans agree, don't realize the size of the problem until they see the statistics.
Prospective students often have to hunt around to find information
about completion rates or attrition. If they knew that a program had a
low completion rate, perhaps that would change their decision to apply.
But at some graduate schools, such information simply isn't available.
Institutions that make it easily accessible are in the minority. At the
University of California at San Diego, a comprehensive table of
completion statistics is included in the graduate school's annual
report, easily found on the Web. Duke University's Graduate School
includes links to a wealth of admissions, enrollment, and completion
data for prospective students on its Web site. There you can learn very
specific information about individual departments -- for instance,
that the Ph.D. program in literature bucks the national trend. Of the
27 students who started from 1992 through 1995, 17 earned their
degrees, and only 6 have withdrawn.
The Selection Factor
While some students certainly leave Ph.D. programs because they
can't do the work, deans say the problem is not usually students'
struggling to measure up. A larger portion of the dropout total can be
attributed to grad schools' having made bad admissions selections. That
doesn't mean the students aren't bright enough. Deans and researchers
talk, instead, about that hard-to-define "bad fit."
Even students who make it through the rigorous selection process to win
National Science Foundation graduate-research fellowships finish their
Ph.D.'s at a rate of only about 75 percent. That's just a bit higher
than other doctoral students in the sciences.
At Duke, Mr. Siegel, the dean, has taken to asking department chairmen
what proportion of their conversations with prospective graduate
students is "about informing students rather than selling your
program."
At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Richard Wheeler,
dean of the Graduate College, says avoiding bad matches is tough in a
highly competitive environment. "The higher you crank up the screws on
recruiting, the more likely you are to bring in students that don't fit
with your program," he says.
Ms. Golde, of the Carnegie foundation, suggests looking at how science
departments, which have higher completion rates than humanities
departments, generally select students.
"One reason the sciences have lower attrition rates is that you are
admitted to be in the Joe Schmoe lab," she says. You and Professor
Schmoe "have spent some time getting to know each other and vet each
other." That's quite different, she says, from a student who plans to
study international labor economics but, after doing years of course
work, realizes that there is no one in the department for him to work
with.
"Why did you admit me?" the student asks. "Why did you come?" the department counters.
"It's like a bad dating situation," says Ms. Golde. "No one is taking
responsibility for the match. Instead everyone needs to take
responsibility for the match."
The Money Factor
You don't need a Ph.D. to figure out that struggling to rub two
dimes together for the seven years it takes to get a doctorate makes
getting the degree harder. Money does matter. But maybe not in
predictable ways.
Holding a research assistantship improves a student's chances of
completion. Teaching assistantships help too, although to a lesser
degree.
Maryland's Ms. Lovitts, who studied attrition at two research
universities, says money alone isn't enough. Students on fellowships,
for instance, do not complete their degrees at a higher-than-average
rate.
Assistantships really help, she says, because they increase the
likelihood that graduate students will interact with other graduate
students and with faculty members. "You have to come up on campus and
engage in the professional task of the department," she says. "You have
to interact with faculty. You get to interact with undergraduates.
You're far more likely to get a desk with other graduate students,
which puts you in contact with the graduate-student subculture."
Ms. Golde emphasizes that this is another way that the sciences are
structured differently from the humanities. In a science department,
students are in the lab from the start, working next to undergraduates,
researchers, and professors. In English, on the other hand, the first
couple of years of graduate school are taken up mostly with classes.
"It's just like being a supercharged English undergraduate," she says.
"It's not anything like being an English professor."
About 10 years ago, Washington University in St. Louis made a policy
shift that administrators credit with substantially raising completion
rates. The size of the graduate school was changed to match the number
of assistantships that departments could support. That meant a
reduction in overall enrollment, but also that every student was now
assured of a fellowship or teaching assistantship for six years.
The move has cut attrition, says Robert E. Thach, dean of the Graduate
School of Arts and Sciences. The average completion rate is now 70
percent, and he hopes to keep pushing it higher. In some disciplines
the change has been sharp. A decade ago, the completion rate was 34
percent in the humanities. Now it's 68 percent.
Attrition "destroys people's confidence in themselves when they
perceive themselves as failures, when the problem should be laid at
other doors," says Mr. Thach. "We don't want to be in the business of
disappointing people."
No Prospects
For Ms. Lovitts, tackling the problem of attrition means that
everyone involved -- from deans to department chairs to faculty
advisers -- must take more responsibility for what happens to
their graduate students. "My personal feeling is that when a university
admits a graduate student to a program, they have an implicit contract
to get them through," she says. "But a lot fall down on that score."
Yet the pot of gold at the end of the Ph.D. rainbow may not be there
for every candidate. For many of them, despite their love of the
subject and their dreams of reveling in the life of the mind, the most
logical decision may be to leave.
After a year in a Ph.D. program in history at City University of New
York, Nicole Kalian left to take a job as a publicist with a book
publisher. Hers was the sort of early attrition that almost everyone
agrees is the best kind.
"I didn't see any prospects for when I graduated," says Ms. Kalian, who
was shocked to read an article about new Ph.D.'s who couldn't find jobs
as adjuncts on enough campuses to earn at least $25,000 a year. "It was
frightening, and I could never really shake that thought from my head."
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Faculty
Volume 50, Issue 19, Page A10
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Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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