An article in the New York Times two weeks ago (October 3) discussed "ways to shorten the ascent to a PhD," and mentioned some frightening statistics: "The average student takes 8.2 years to get a PhD; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block." But of course the picture is a lot murkier than that - the thought that all these students drop out because they cannot complete their dissertation is downright naive. (The idea, put forward by an education researcher, that the problem lies in professors not "clarify[ing] what they expect in a dissertation" and students "trying for a degree of perfection that is unnecessary and unobtainable" is downright ridiculous.) In truth, many students enter doctoral programs because they do not know what they want to do after college and are eager to postpone their entrance into the real world - many trudge along for a few years while they take classes and drop out at the first setback in their research; others, especially in engineering, leave the program once they realize there are plenty of job opportunities for people without PhDs (typically, those were strongly encouraged by their professors to apply to graduate school by their professors but didn't develop sufficient self-motivation along the way).
Dissertation only becomes a "stumbling block" in the road to the PhD when the advisor runs out of money (or out of patience with the student) before the student has done enough research to write a thesis; in that case the student might be forced to take a full-time job, hoping to complete the thesis in his or her spare time, which in general proves tricky. (The university where I work, Lehigh, requires students who enter a graduate program to complete their studies within ten years; last year a student who had left to follow her husband to the other end of the country but never managed to complete her thesis - the university where she worked as an adjunct made her teach tons of courses - came back full-time for precisely that reason.) In that respect, the desire of universities to provide more funding is in the right place, and I do believe that the number of semesters spent on teaching assistantships has some positive correlation with the total length of doctoral studies - you always get more research done when it is the only thing you have to do. On the other hand, PhD candidates in education take so long to complete their studies because their research isn't marketable ("fundable") to the same extent that science and engineering research is - you don't need a PhD in education to be an educator - and I can't even say off the top of my head what their job prospects are, although if you want to write books on how best to educate students it certainly helps to have "PhD" next to your name on the title page. (And then you get to call yourself an education researcher and have people listen to you when you put forward silly ideas like the one mentioned above.) So in the measure that the length of doctoral studies in education helps turn away students from a field with limited prospects, it provides the right incentive by weeding out the faint of heart and keeping only the most motivated students.
Besides, the only A.B.D. people I've heard of who dropped out of their doctoral program did so either because they had a falling-out with their advisor or because their experiments-based project did not succeed and completing a thesis would have required them to start another project and delay graduation by two or three more years. So if universities really want to shorten the length it takes for their students to get a PhD, they should implement mechanisms for students to switch advisors without the new advisor fearing retaliation from the old one, for instance, or for students to appeal their advisor's decision that the work isn't yet good enough. Also, many projects in science fail because this or that technique doesn't achieve the expected goal; students (and their advisors) currently see this as time wasted but such "non-results" should also be considered as important, publishable scientific advances, as they can help other teams of scholars by telling them not to go down that road. When all is said and done, the real issue should not be to shorten the PhD but to reduce the (currently absolute) power an advisor has over his or her students, or at least reduce opportunities for advisors to misuse that power. But that also opens a whole can of worms: if time-to-degree starts being monitored closely, some students might slack off towards the end of their studies because their advisor feels outside pressure to let them graduate no matter what to keep that statistics down. That debate isn't coming to an end any time soon.
An average of 8 years to get a PhD is a lot. The results in the dissertation can be old and out of date when presented. Four years of full-time research should be the optimum for a good thesis. Never less than three but no more than six years.
Posted by: xm carreira | October 22, 2007 at 01:50 PM