Attrition; or, an interesting tidbit about grad school

A conversation with a colleague the other day prompted me to wade through Dissertation Abstracts and figure this out:

There were about 26 students who entered grad school with me (in *cough* the early 90s *cough*).

Eight of us have completed our degrees.

Comments

[Celandine]

Whoo! Well, of the 5 of us who started together doing medieval in one year, 1 got an MA as planned and left for other things, 3 have now finished the PhD, and 1 switched fields (and I think has not finished the PhD yet). So does that mean that medievalists are actually better at finishing than others, despite having to learn all the $#(%&%$ languages?

[Powerprof]

We started with 13 and 5 of us finished; no clue what happened to the others. Interesting, huh?

[Bardiac]

Wow, that seems like an especially low percentage, New Kid. I'd heard (in the early 90s) that about one third of students entering a PhD program never finished. But your stats seem far higher.

Imagine the job market with one third more candidates. Wow.

[timna]

I'd say 4 of 14 finished from my cohort (went in Fall 1997) but there are still some in the program...

[Another Damned Medievalist]

I honestly don't know who all finished from my year -- I know there were a couple of terminal MA people. I think one person dropped out. I lost touch with a lot of my cohort, though -- and I was the only medievalist my year, so I tended to hang out with people the year ahead and the year behind. But I do know that, of the people who cane in right before and right after, there were quite a few of us you took between 8 and (ulp!) 13 years to finish.

[dr. m(mm)]

I was the only one from my MA program to eventually get a PhD. In my doctoral program, I think it was closer to the one-third not finishing. Does anyone know what fields have the lowest success rate? My guess is some of the departments in the humanities like English and Philosophy.

[Rudbeckia Hirta]

Checking Mathematics Genealogy Project shows that HALF my cohort has finished (10 out of 20).

[Sherman Dorn]

When I entered there was a Europeanist who had been at Penn for at least four or five years. When I left five years later, he was still there. Checking dissertation abstracts makes clear that he never finished. A friend from college never finished her dissertation, even though she was ABD. Yep, it's sad.

[ExitOnly]

What does ABD mean?
This sounds scary! I am an undergrad and applying to all these graduate school for Public Health (PhD in Biostat)...but everything looks discouraging! So, do you think "Humanities" type of fields have higher drop out rates than the "sciences"? Or it's the other way around? Or it's the same! Why is life so hard? *sigh*

[Karen]

It's not just a liberal arts thing, nor a PhD thing. At the state school where I'm studying for an MS in geology (the terminal degree here), we have a disappointing track record of graduate students who finish their research but not their dissertation. Life -- job, family, whatnot -- happens, and the thesis slides until units are outdated and must be re-taken. Then it's too much trouble.

For those of us who come after, it's a real pain. Grad Student A's research is in the same area as Grad Studen B's. B needs to avoid repeating A's work, and in fact wants to use A's work as a background to build on, but A hasn't published. And may never publish! Nobody's heard from him/her in months, and s/he had a new baby born last year and... sigh.

[Bardiac]

For ExitOnly: ABD means "All But Dissertation," and it's used to denote those students who've finished every requirement in their program, classes, languages, exams, except the dissertation (and a defense, perhaps).

In my experience, there are two ways to "leave" graduate school. The first is to decide graduate school isn't what you want to do and choose to leave. People who choose to leave tend to be happy about their decision, and usually it's a good decision.

The second way is to get caught up in other things and don't focus on graduate school. This usually (but not always) happens at the dissertation stage, especially when people who are ABD lose funding on campus and have to adjunct, get a second job, or whatever. Sometimes people have kids or just enjoy real life a lot.

The problem with leaving this way is that the people who do so don't make a real choice and often seem bitter or unhappy. At some point, most departments have a time to degree cut off and you have to petition to continue, so these people petition once, maybe twice, and then either give up or get turned down.

(Ok, there's a third way, and that's to be "asked to leave" your program, but I was lucky enough NOT to be in a program where that was common. Some programs had horrid reps for cutting 1/3-2/3rds of their students.)

[Laura]

Wow, scary statistics. But completely believable. I think most people go into a Ph.D. program without a full understanding of how difficult it is. That's especially true once you get to the dissertation stage. Unless you're partnered with someone who makes real money, the life of abject poverty can be difficult. For me, it was difficult because I knew I was smart enough to get a well-paying job. I suspect that many people feel the same way--that this life is not a life they *have* to live.

And, sometimes people realize that the profession they're preparing for is not one they want to enter and then see no reason to finish the degree. As NK has pointed out before, more people might finish if there were other alternative careers for Ph.D.'s. Of course, most of those Ph.D. candidates served their purpose as cheap labor, so there's not much incentive to change the system.

[Richard]

Bardiac -- I was told that (in the late 90s) the retention rate nationally for English Ph.D.s was only around 35%... which means that instead of one third dropping out, only one third finished!

Of course, in English there are waaaaay too many grads for the number of available jobs anyway... but that's just awful!

[senor wences]

Not original to me, of course, is the nonetheless important observation that information like a completion rate is just what graduate programs would never, ever want to research, record, or release. Graduate student attrition is only a problem for graduate schools or programs when it's made for an insufficient pool of laborers ...

[ExitOnly]

Thank you for the enlightenment. I am only applying. If I do get accepted somewhere, I will have to think about all these before I make a move. I need to follow these academia related blogs. :)

[Jane Dark]

Yeah, I keep thinking about this sort of thing, if only because my cohort is still pretty close.

[Jane Dark]

Yeah, I keep thinking about this sort of thing, if only because my cohort is still pretty close, and I wonder whether things will change if people start to leave...

[trillwing]

I'm wondering if there's a difference in the percentage of people finishing up in newer programs vs. established programs. I'm in the second cohort of an interdisciplinary humanities program in its 6th year, and 6 out of 7 of us remain in year 5, and it's looking like we'll all finish this year or next. That said, I think the fact that we all went in w/Master's degrees helped us deal better with all the, um, "issues" (harrowing ordeals) that attend the creation of a new program where many on the faculty executive committee have little experience with graduate students (because their own departments don't offer graduate degrees). Many of those in the first year of one of the later cohorts threw up their hands and left during a particularly bad year. I feel like a real survivor. . .

[Rana]

I wish I could add my own department's stats to the conversation, but I'm embarassed to say that I've largely lost track of most of the people I knew. As far as I'm aware, though, I can't think of anyone in the 10-person subfield cohort I started out in who has a job in academia, and only two besides myself who I know graduated. (It's not just the attrition rates that are terrible; it's the un(der)employment afterward that's really brutal.)

[AxisofPeter]

Rana has a good point. In my case, I did not complete my area exams, though (and I say this just for perspective)I was thought to be a really good grad. student. Knowing what the job market was like, I found it very hard to focus on the project (there were also some problems with the project I picked--my fault entirely). I also started adjuncting at a community college and found I really enjoyed it, and at that point, the extra work for a degree that would only marginally improve my earning power waned in significance compared to doing a good job, participating in committee work, and nailing down a permanent position, which I did.

For me, it was the right move, and I regard not completing the PhD as a minor failure, though I have a qualm or two about having received funding.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

There are so many factors that go into people finishing/not finishing. Interestingly, I consider my grad program an extremely supportive one, which doesn't necessarily fit with the numbers I cite. Of course, a number of those people never came back after the first year, and they clearly realized this wasn't what they wanted to do. I think that's perfectly reasonable. I do think my grad program rode that fine line between admitting the number that they could fund/thought could get jobs, and filling up TA slots, so I suspect that when I started there was a little bit of overadmission (that's not the case now). By which I mean - perhaps more people who, while fully qualified for admission, didn't quite know what they were getting into. Although I'm not sure anyone ever knows. For me the most interesting case was a friend of mine from college, who got a full ride to Impressive Ivy, coasted through courses and exams, and came to a screeching halt come dissertation time. She hated doing research - was lonely and miserable - and wrote her first chapter three times before she decided she didn't want to do this. I think there are quite a lot of people who encounter this, if they end up somewhere that they don't really think about/work on the dissertation until exams are done, and they're faced with an entirely different beast.

[almostadoc]

Newkid--like your site! Didn't know it would hit close to home, though. I'll be defending my (theoretical) dissertation in clinical psychology next month, then be quit of grad school after almost ten years! Whew! I am the last of my cohort as far as I know in my program. Fully two-thirds didn't make it to this point--I wouldn't have made it either, without the support of my wife who makes more money than I probably ever will. At the same time, I was a stay at home dad for three kids (ages two, four and nine) while my wife kept up her full schedule of work, and my schoolwork was generally the first thing to get put on a back burner. Lots of negotiations occurred to make this all work--my school has generous expectations for satisfactory progress, as long as tuition remains paid. Pretty soon now, my wife plans on retiring, and I'll support her while she devotes her type A energies to whatever else she sets her sights upon. Anyway, I would guess the most fatal things to progress through grad school are financial and familial realities. Parents and spouses getting sick, having kids, and the fricken paying of tuition are enough to make many give up. For what it is worth, I don't know why someone would even go to grad school unless they already had their dissertation in them, in some form. A Ph.D. means you're not only a master of your field, but you're capable of making an original contribution to it. Getting a doctorate is a self-selection process, not everyone is meant to be educated beyond two deviations from the mean. If you're not really meant to be in that two percent, be happy with a master's.