October 13 2009
Educating Scholars
Ehrenberg and co-authors publish book on Mellon project
Tracking an experiment that began 18 years ago to improve Ph.D.-level humanities education, Ronald G. Ehrenberg and three co-authors examine issues that haunt the field in a new book.
"Educating Scholars: Doctoral Education in the Humanities" will be published by Princeton University Press in December.
Ehrenberg, in an essay published this week in The Chronicle of Higher Education, writes "We found that times-to-degree and attrition rates were helped most by improved funding, clear statements of departmental expectations for the degree, and by advisors counseling timely completion of the dissertation."
Ehrenberg was first author of the book (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9073.html) and essay, both co-authored by Harriet Zuckerman, senior vice president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and professor emerita of sociology at Columbia University; Jeffrey A. Groen, a research economist at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Sharon M. Brucker, a project coordinator at the Survey Research Center of Princeton University.
Ehrenberg is Cornell's Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics and director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute.
Ehrenberg's team examined the Graduate Education Initiative begun in 1991 by the Mellon Foundation. It spent $85 million between 1991 and 2001 to enable 54 humanities departments at 10 universities – including Cornell – to improve the structure, organization and funding of their Ph.D. programs while maintaining or improving the quality of education they offered.
Funds supported planning, student support, endowments, challenge grants and data collection.
In The Chronicle of Education essay, Ehrenberg and his colleagues recount their findings, including:
- Multi-year financial-aid packages, established in the 1990s in the heated competition for first-rate prospective students, appear to have reduced attrition early in students' graduate careers. But to a large extent, this reduction was offset by increases in attrition in the later years of doctoral study; there is a clear trade-off between "weeding out" unpromising students early and having them "languish" in graduate school for years, neither finishing nor leaving.
- About 25 percent of the graduates in the study completed their degrees after remaining for 10 years or longer; one should not assume that students beyond their tenth year of graduate study in humanities fields will never finish their degrees.
- 12 percent of the students in our study counted as having left graduate school ultimately received Ph.D. degrees, either in the same field at other institutions or in other fields. Another 18 percent earned professional degrees in fields such as law and business. Many of the students who left Ph.D. programs in the humanities were employed within three years in managerial and other professional positions.
- Students who completed their degrees in five or six years did no better in the job market than students who finished in seven years. However, the probability of getting a tenure track position declined as degree times lengthened beyond seven years.
- Completion rates of women in the study and their times to-degree were not adversely affected by their being married or by having children at the beginning of graduate school. On average, both married and single women did as well as single men, although married men did have higher completion rates and shorter time-to-degree than single men.
- The proportion of graduates who received tenure-track jobs upon degree completion fell during the 1990s and early 2000s, yet the probability of moving from a non-tenure-track job to a tenure-track job within three years of graduation remained constant at about 60 percent throughout the period.
There is no single answer, Ehrenberg wrote in the essay, to the question of how long it "should" take to earn a Ph.D. in the humanities.
Neither speedy completion (in three to five years), nor unhurried completion (in eight or more years) are as preferable as finishing within the period between the two extremes, he said. Finishing in six or seven years is positively associated with the chances that graduates will get tenure-track jobs and publish their research.
"Perhaps the most heartening lesson learned" from the study, Ehrenberg wrote, "is that raising awareness of how much attrition there is and how long degrees actually take can stimulate thoughtful review of programs and sensible decisions to change them."
The full text of the essay can be read at http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Help-Graduate-Students/48752/.
An article on the "Educating Scholars" book was also published this week in Inside Higher Education. It can be viewed at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/10/12/doctoral#