October 19, 2004

Time to degree

Posted by Eszter

Kudos to Duke for collecting and making public data about the time to degree and the rates of completion in their PhD programs. I would be curious to see similar data from other campuses. It’s unclear how many schools collect such data systematically and they certainly don’t make them public very often as the details are usually not very glamorous and can seem pretty discouraging. But it’s important information for people to have as they prepare for their graduate school experiences. It can also help students from other campuses as they try to argue for better/longer support for their training.

Posted on October 19, 2004 05:09 AM UTC
Comments

Here is a fun page of data at a UC school. Apparently some schools hide their data behind links titled “Prospective Students Click Here” and “Graduate Student Data.” Sneaky!

Posted by lago · October 19, 2004 08:48 AM

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).

Posted by VJ · October 19, 2004 10:32 AM

In the biomedical sciences it is v. common for programs to provide information on degree completion times as well as a list of previous graduates and where they are now.

I just assumed that was the norm.

Posted by Sean Hurley · October 19, 2004 02:15 PM

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” ;)

Posted by jet · October 19, 2004 02:24 PM

try to argue for better/longer support for their training

I guess that’s one possible use, but I generally think of longer time to degree as a bad thing.

Jet, Duke is a private university, so I’m not sure what that has to do with trickle-down. But anyway, people in PhD programs are not going on to make a lot of money in life, compared to what they would make if they chose alternate career paths. So I don’t really see this as a “tax cut for the rich” issue.

Posted by Matt Weiner · October 19, 2004 03:05 PM

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.

Posted by Giles · October 19, 2004 04:38 PM

I can’t speak for the US but I am in the final few months of my D.Phil in the UK and it will — assuming no disaster in the next 2 or 3 months —- have taken me a little over 3 full time academic years (but chronologically actually just over 4 as I took a full year leave of absence to work).

[This doesn’t translate into US PhD terms as I know they are structued very differently…]

I could certainly have finished many months sooner if it wasn’t for the fact that a larger percentage of time than I’d have liked was spent teaching, or otherwise working, in order to earn money for luxuries like food and a place to live. Several friends of mine are in a similar situation where they’d really rather not work but have to and all of the people in the situation have complained that working interferes with their thesis time.

I wonder if financial burdens are the main reason for longer PhD times.

Posted by Matt McGrattan · October 19, 2004 04:52 PM

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.

Posted by cure · October 19, 2004 05:09 PM

Of course the plus side of a US PhD (in the sciences) is all that extra training, the down side all the teaching to pay for it.

Posted by RS · October 19, 2004 05:14 PM

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.

Posted by Richard Zach · October 19, 2004 05:28 PM

The US average numbers are a little disspiriting. It’d be nice to see numbers broken down by specialty; for instance, as I understand it, it takes theorists in physics less time to complete a PhD than experimentalists.

Posted by Junius Ponds · October 19, 2004 05:38 PM

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.

Posted by trish · October 19, 2004 06:02 PM

Re: physics

It is true in general that theorists take longer than experimentalists, but that was not true for my class, where all the experimentalists but one got out before something like five theorists.

Time in degrees is increasing as job possibilities are worsening. It’s not a good combination.

Posted by James Landry · October 19, 2004 06:06 PM

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.

Posted by Matt Weiner · October 19, 2004 06:23 PM

Trish, it is not at all uncommon in the UK to be on similar or worse wages going from PhD to post-doc I’m afraid.

Posted by RS · October 19, 2004 06:59 PM

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.

Posted by djw · October 19, 2004 07:04 PM

It’s more complicated than that. Many of the theorists who took a long time went directly into management consulting after they got out.

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.

Rationally, one would expect people to just buckle down, finish as fast as possible, and then get a job doing something else, but that’s not how people reacted. Most of them never expected to do anything but physics when they got in, so there was a strong cognitive dissonance, and it became extremely difficult to resist the feeling of failure and thus spend your time cultivating hobbies not at all related to finishing your Ph.D.

Posted by James Landry · October 19, 2004 07:50 PM

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.

Posted by Uncle Kvetch · October 19, 2004 09:30 PM

There is also the fact that PhD and Masters Degree candidates represent cheap skilled labor. The continual expansion of project requirements mid-project leads to certain unpleasant conclusions on the part of students.

Posted by james · October 19, 2004 10:26 PM

“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.

Posted by tim · October 20, 2004 05:20 AM

Tim, grad students as cheap labour must depend on the university. At UBC in Vancouver, health care is free for everyone and tuition is free for PhD students so the only cost to the supervisor is the student stipend (only 17K even if the student isn’t TAing). Add on a couple scholarships to this and grad students can be very very cheap labour. I feel lucky that my supervisor didn’t try to take advantage of that!

Posted by trish · October 20, 2004 06:51 AM
Followups

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.