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Indicator II-17
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Attrition in Doctorate Programs
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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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Attrition in humanities doctorate programs is a topic of considerable interest to
higher education researchers and administrators, but data that could be used to
systematically assess the extent of attrition have been scarce. Information compiled
by individual universities and programs suggests that attrition rates are substantial,
but just how many people begin work toward a humanities Ph.D. and then drop out—and,
more important, why they drop out—are significant questions that have long gone
unanswered.
Fortunately, three recent studies enhance our understanding of graduate attrition.
Findings from the first of these, the Council of Graduate Schools' Ph.D. Completion Project, were published in
the autumn of 2007. Supported by funding from the Ford Foundation and Pfizer, Inc.,
the project involved 29 U.S. and Canadian research universities in collecting data
on doctorate completion rates, as well as on interventions designed to raise these
rates.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation–funded Graduate Education Initiative, another new
source of data on attrition, involved both the implementation of a set of interventions
designed to improve graduate education in 54 humanities departments in ten major
universities and an evaluation of the ten-year project’s outcomes. The findings
of the evaluation are described in Educating Scholars: Doctoral Education in the
Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2009).
The attrition data presented by the Humanities Indicators (HI) are from a third
recent study, a comprehensive assessment of U.S. research-doctorate programs administered
by the National Research Council (NRC) and funded by the National Institutes of
Health, the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation, and participating universities. The assessment involved the
collection of a variety of data on doctorate programs, including Ph.D. completion
rates. These data were then used to develop multidimensional ratings of programs
at approximately 200 institutions of higher learning (see http://sites.nationalacademies.org/pga/Resdoc/index.htm for more information about the project). While each of the three studies mentioned
here is a source of important insight regarding attrition in humanities doctorate
programs, the HI has used data from the NRC assessment because this study included
the largest number of programs in the greatest variety of humanities disciplines.
Doctorate completion was defined by the NRC as obtaining a degree within eight years
of entering a Ph.D. program for students of the humanities, and within six years
for students in other fields. A completion rate—essentially the proportion of all
students entering a doctorate program who completed their Ph.D.’s within the specified
number of years—was computed for every research doctorate program at the participating
institutions.1 Students who finished their doctorates but not in the specified number
of years were not counted as completers. The completion rates presented here are
thus conservative measures of doctorate completion. The figures are also for a group
of doctorate programs in a given field (or discipline), not the student population
in that field. The determination of the share of all doctoral students in a given
field who ultimately obtain their Ph.D.’s will require detailed analysis of individual
programs’ responses to the NRC survey.
Figure II-17a depicts the interquartile range (IQR) for doctorate program completion
rates in the humanities and several other fields. The IQR is widely used as a means
of describing the “typical” or “usual” values exhibited by a group of persons or
objects and involves excluding the most extreme values of a particular variable
(in this case, doctorate program completion rate). Quartiles are statistics that
divide the observations in a batch of numeric data into several groups, each of
which contains 25% of the data. The lower, middle, and upper quartiles are computed
by ordering the values for a particular variable from smallest to largest and then
finding the values below which fall 25%, 50%, and 75% of the data. The lower quartile
and the upper quartile are the two values that define the interquartile range. The
middle quartile is also known as the median.
The doctorate program assessment data reveal that the completion rate in the humanities
is similar to that in the mathematical and physical sciences field. In both fields,
the middle half of the programs graduated from slightly more than a quarter up to
55% of their students within the specified number of years (i.e., eight years for
students of the humanities, six years for science students). The median program
completion rate for both fields was 42%. The engineering and biological and health
science fields had the highest median completion rates, 50%. The field with the
lowest median completion rate, 35%, was the behavioral and social sciences. This
field also had a somewhat greater range of “typical” completion rates (IQR) than
others.
Median completion rates among the humanities disciplines showed considerable variation
(Figure II-17b). With 56% of their students completing their Ph.D.’s within eight
years, theater and performance studies programs had the highest median completion
rate. Languages, societies, and cultures programs had a median completion rate of
33%, the lowest recorded within the humanities field. Programs in two of the most
populous disciplines, history and English language and literature, had rates of
42% and 46%. The span of IQRs among the disciplines was similarly broad. While the
completion rates of German programs were clustered relatively tightly around the
median (for an IQR of 20, the lowest of all the disciplines), typical completion
rates for French programs, those with the highest IQR, ranged from 17% to 64%.
Note
1 Doctorate programs at participating institutions were asked by the
NRC to report the number of “graduate students who entered in different cohorts
from 1996–1997 to 2005–2006 and the number in each cohort who completed in 3 years
or less, in their 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th years, and in 10 or more years. To
compute the completion percentage, the number of doctoral students for a given entering
cohort who completed their doctorate in 3 years or less and in their 4th, 5th, 6th
years were totaled and the total was divided by the entering students in that cohort.
This computation was made for each cohort that entered from 1996–1997 to 1998–1999
for the humanities and 1996–1997 to 2000–2001 for the other fields. Cohorts beyond
these years were not considered, since the students could complete in a year that
was after the final year 2005–2006 for which data were collected. To compute the
average completion percentage, an average was taken over 3 cohorts for the humanities
and over 5 cohorts for other fields” (National Research Council, Committee to Assess
Research-Doctorate Programs, “A Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs
in the United States: Data Table in Excel (2010),” http://www.nap.edu/rdp/, under “Guide” tab
in Excel workbook).
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