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Indicator II-15
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Years to Attainment of a Humanities Doctorate
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NOTE TO READERS: Please include the following reference when citing data
from this page: "American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Humanities Indicators,
http://HumanitiesIndicators.org".
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Updated (1/18/2012) with data from 2009.
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Obtaining a doctoral degree in any field involves a significant investment of time,
energy, and monetary resources (both tuition and foregone earnings). But as data
from the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) shows, the road
to the humanities Ph.D. has traditionally been an especially long one: from 1979
to 2009, the median number of years from the start of graduate school to a doctorate
award was consistently greater in the humanities than in the sciences and engineering
(Figure II-15).
What the humanities do share with most other fields is a retreat from the particularly
lengthy completion times recorded in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1989, the
median number of years to completion of a humanities doctorate was 10.7. However
by 2009, after several years of incremental decline, the time to completion was
down to 9.5 years.
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