hidden crisis in graduate education: Attrition from Ph.D. programs, The

Academe, Nov/Dec 2000 by Lovitts, Barbara E, Nelson, Cary

The source of graduate student attrition is not inadequate students but indifferent and wasteful programs.

IN CONVERSATIONS AROUND THE COUNTRY-AMONG faculty members and administrators, on campuses, and at conferences-people involved in higher education are beginning to wonder whether current generations of scholar-- teachers will be able to reproduce themselves. An educational environment that seemed relatively stable for nearly half a century has begun to show the cumulative strain of slow but steady change-from downsizing and underfunding to increased corporatization and pervasive labor exploitation, including wholesale reliance on part-time labor and relative declines in graduate student and faculty compensation, the latter most notable in lower-tier institutions.

Interviews with faculty members and administrators at selected departments throughout the country suggest that applications to graduate school in several disciplines have begun to decline-not only because well-paid high-tech employment is luring potential students away, but also because the news about the long-term collapse of the academic job market has finally penetrated the undergraduate culture. Meanwhile, the increased use of part-time faculty means that new Ph.D.'s have less time to stay current in their disciplines, less time to devote to their students, and little or no time to do research. The existing tenured and tenure-track professoriate cannot reproduce itself in the form of harried part-time faculty. Neither our teaching nor our research missions are well served by the employment trends now dominating higher education.

Given these circumstances, we think it is time to give serious attention to one of the fundamental weaknesses of doctoral education-attrition. Historically, graduate programs have been astonishingly wasteful of their human capital. Although comprehensive national data do not exist on the consequences of graduate students' abandoning their degree programs, forty years of studies suggest the long-term attrition rate nationwide is about 50 percent. That rate may have increased somewhat in recent years, partly in response to the job market for new faculty; in any case, the news has certainly not improved. Moreover, the average national rate of attrition from Ph.D. programs disguises the reality in specific universities and departments.

Departments under pressure to downsize and economize are less and less likely to be held harmless (and more and more likely to be held accountable) for the costs of recruiting and training students who do not complete their degrees. And an attrition rate of 50 percent is even less tenable in smaller graduate programs and institutions.

We cannot blame this problem on anyone but ourselves. What's more, it is a problem we can fix. In addressing this issue, we bring together the very different kinds of research we have done. Cary Nelson has interviewed graduate students and faculty members on dozens of U.S. campuses over the past decade and has been active in two organizations devoted to higher education: the AAUP and the Modern Language Association. Barbara Lovitts has conducted a unique and intensive research project focused on two distinguished research universities, one a private institution in a large urban center, the other a public university in a rural setting.

To establish the short- and long-term effects of completing or not completing the Ph.D., she surveyed a cohort of 816 students (511 completers and 305 noncompleters) who entered degree programs at these two institutions from 1982 to 1984. The students came from nine departments in each of the major domains of knowledge (math, biology, and chemistry in the sciences; sociology, economics, and psychology in the social sciences; and English, history, and music in the humanities). Many of these departments have high national rankings; they should therefore represent the best that American higher education can offer. We agreed at the outset to keep the names of the schools confidential, partly because we wanted to focus on a widespread problem by way of these examples.

The overall difference in attrition rates for graduate students included in the study at these two institutions is, to say the least, striking: 33 percent at Rural University, 68 percent at Urban University. The disparity reflects major institutional differences in how graduate students are treated and regarded at these two schools. Yet the comparative attrition rates for the nine individual departments tell a still more intricate story (see table 1).

The departmental figures demonstrate that, for the most part, attrition is not discipline specific. Nor is the overall climate at a given university decisive. Even at an institution that treats most of its graduate students as thoroughly replaceable and disposable, an individual department can buck the tide, make itself hospitable, and successfully graduate most of those who enter its doctoral program.

Lovitts supplemented the detailed questionnaire she used with hourlong telephone interviews with two noncompleters from each department. Taken together, the survey data and interview comments tell us for the first time why students leave at various points in their graduate careers without finishing their studies. The results of this study also suggest how we can reform graduate education so as to make it economically more efficient and personally more humane.