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

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

On the other hand, it may be helpful to acquaint undergraduates with the culture and expectations of graduate study. Hierarchization, competition, devotion to the profession, and other features of graduate study that may not characterize the undergraduate experience should probably be signaled in advance. Socialization to graduate school (learning the role of the graduate student), rather than socialization to the professoriate, is the more relevant preparation. Once students are in graduate school, however, socialization to the profession becomes critical; it partly compensates for the hierarchical world of graduate education by offering an alternative view of the profession based on intellectual pursuits among equals.

Broadly speaking, it is a lack of integration into the departmental community that contributes most heavily to the departure of graduate students. Constant for nearly half a century, the high rate of attrition is rooted in the organizational culture of graduate school and in the social structure and cultures of the larger process of graduate education. Notably, the lowest attrition rates among the three major domains of knowledge are in the sciences, where students often work in laboratory groups focused on collaborative research and where intellectual and social interaction is most intense. The highest attrition rates are in the humanities, where study and research are most fully individualized and isolated.

Lower attrition rates still (5 to 10 percent) are found in law and medical schools, no doubt partly because they lack the major challenge of the Ph.D. dissertation, but also because their requirements, expectations, performance feedback, and structures for integration are so much stronger. In any case, more than a third of those who exit doctoral programs do so during the first year, mostly because they have been decisively disillusioned. Academic failure accounts for but a small percentage of these or later departures, and even academic failure often flows from poor understanding of program requirements, lack of adequate advising, and a deep conviction that the department is indifferent to one's fate.

Faculty Role

As we noted earlier, faculty members typically attribute departure to student failure. And as our detailed interviews-which we each conducted separately with faculty at Urban and Rural Universities-show, faculty frequently see themselves as active agents when students complete their degrees and as passive onlookers when students depart. Failure to persist is often attributed to students' personal characteristics: lack of interest in the field, lack of academic ability, lack of drive, and so forth. The fact that most departing students trickle out silently makes it especially easy for faculty to sustain the illusion that they have no role in student attrition, that the "best" succeed and the "worst" fail. Faculty and administrators are reinforced for holding the institutional culture blameless.

Of course, faculty play a role in both persistence and departure. The data suggest that the single most important factor in student decisions to continue or withdraw is the relationship with a faculty adviser. Students who complete their degrees are fully twice as likely to express satisfaction with their faculty advisers as are students who leave (see table 4). A concerned faculty adviser is the person best placed to assess an individual student's progress and to reinforce the student's sense of self-worth. Given that most departers are succeeding academically, some decisions to depart are probably calls for help from students suffering from self-doubt; these are decisions that could be reversed with more attentive and sympathetic advising. Overall, many students who depart are conducting a referendum on the departmental culture; they are voting with their feet.