Why and When Ph.D Students Finish http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/07/17/phd Site Reviews(0)
Why do some graduate students seemingly zip through programs, straight to the Ph.D., while others languish for a decade or even longer? Or never finish?
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These questions are at the root of the Council of Graduate Schools’ Ph.D. Completion Project, which aims to study these issues, identify promising practices, and identify strategies so that more graduate students finish their programs in a timely way. On Monday, the council released preliminary data it gathered from surveys of graduate students who earned their Ph.D.’s, and data on completion rates by disciplines. The results come from 29 of the universities participating in the Ph.D. Completion Project, which involves both public and private universities, elite and up-and-coming institutions alike.
The results reinforce the belief about the role of money in promoting completion. Those who finished up their doctorates ranked financial issues as the top factor in enabling them to do so. And to the extent the data show differences among disciplines in financing, those differences carry over to rates of completion (humanities students need to borrow more, and take longer to finish).
With regard to the “main factors” contributing to completion, new Ph.D.’s (who could pick more than one item that applied) ranked the following: 80 percent cited financial support, 63 percent mentoring/advising, 60 percent family support, 39 percent social environment and peer support, 39 percent program quality, and 30 percent professional and career guidance.
Added: Nov 30, 1999 Last Update: Nov 30, 1999 Category: W Hits Out: 14 |
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