Time to degree

Always good to know, along with those ever elusive ‘job offers/filled stats’. Someone needs to cost out the lost opportunity costs of pursuing higher degrees (esp. Ph.D’s).

Isn’t subsidizing higher education a bit of a regressive thing to do? It is taking the people most likely to make a lot of money in life then giving them free/low interest cash to get started. If you were against the tax cuts for the rich, then what do you call this? :P

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for it. But this is the ultimate in “trickle down economics” ;)

I think the interesting thing is that the time to complete seems to have doubled in the last 10 years.

I can think of a no of reason why this might be:-

1) Technology and research is evolving so rapidly that doing reearch at the phd level has become more difficult;
2) IT has made the actual job of writing a dissertation easier, thereby making it harder to separate the innovative from the journeyman phd hence the assessment period takes longer;
3) Faculty are increasingly trying to restrict entry to the profession to preserve wages;
4) A higher proportion of phd students in the US are foreingner whom the universities aren’t really competent / able to assess, hence they take longer issuing them with degree;
5) Peoples rate of time discount has fallen over the last 10 years.

Matt, the UK PhD certainly seems to be shorter in general than the US version. I’m finishing up an M.A. in Economics right now; with that degree, I could be out the door at LSE with a PhD in econ three years from beginning. In US economics, it seems that 4 years is quite quick, and 5 years is the norm. Given the salaries that an economics degree commands, the opportunity cost of a US degree nearly makes up for the high tuition/no stipend for Americans in a UK program.

The last (1994) NRC ranking of graduate programs (data searchable at phds.org) includes a “median time to degree”. This data, however, is difficult to interpret. Probably it can at best give a relative measure of time-to-degree.

It took me five years (and one month) to complete my PhD in Ocean Sciences. I’m now looking for a postdoc and I’ve noticed that there seems to be a big difference between North American and UK postdoctoral positions. The ability to do my own research seems limited in the UK and it looks like I’d have less academic freedom that I had during my PhD. Is this the norm for UK positions? Is it something to do with the reduced length of time in the PhD program? (I know that my abilities to do research have increased greatly in the last two years of my PhD). The salaries also seem a lot lower, and one postdoc I was shortlisted for in London seemed to assume that I was still in my early to mid 20s and could “put up with” student-style living for a few more years. We turned them down for financial as well as academic reasons, as I would have had less buying power than provided by my PhD stipend. Maybe a system with longer PhDs results in better positions afterwards. Of course, this is based on the very small sample of jobs in my field, so I’d be very interested to hear from others in similar situations.

James–Perhaps time in degree is increasing because job possibilities are worsening? A worse market encourages you to try to fatten your cv before you leave grad school; not to mention that it makes an extra year in school look better compared to going on the market.

Matt, exactly. There are perverse incentives to stay on the student rolls even when you’re substantively done (if you don’t have a job) in many cases: keep deferring student loans, easier to access teaching work in your home dept in many cases, etc.

At least in my experience, it was just harder for everyone to finish because they realized it wasn’t really for anything. You spent a lot of time enduring the general negativity of grad school and at the end the best you could hope for was the downward spiral of increasingly irrelevant post-docs. But you are too invested to get out without a Ph.D., so it was hard to be terrifically efficient getting something that would mean less and less to you at the end, and when you finally finished, you left physics anyway.

It’s anthropology in my case, not physics, but otherwise: hoo boy, can I relate to the above. Having given up on the idea of an academic career, I have only a fairly nebulous sense of personal achievement as motivation to finish: “I’ve come too far to give up now” and “Just think how great it’ll feel to be done!” and so forth. And just as James says, the “rational” thing would be to just buckle down and finish the damn thing and get on with life, but when you’re working full-time and you haven’t done any coursework in years and the whole thing seems utterly disconnected from the “real world,” it’s easier said than done.

“There is also the fact that PhD and Masters Degree candidates represent cheap skilled labor.”

Hmmm. By the time you pay for graduate tuition, stipend, summer health care benefits, and 60% IDC, a graduate student runs about 60K per year, at least in the private school where I work. It would be much cheaper for me to hire a data manager or statistical consultant on an hourly basis, especially if you calculate the additional time it takes me to train graduate students, check their work, and provide professional (or, almost inevitably, personal) counseling. I see funding and training graduate students more as a service to the department and discipline — and, for some of my colleagues, a way to achieve a form of academic immortality — than as a cost-effective way to get research done.