I got a lot of responses to my post on grad school attrition. Those that were marked as okay to publish are pasted in as comments to this post.

Thanks to all who wrote in. And thanks, too, as ever, to those who read.

As a recent Ph.D., I feel eminently unqualified to discuss attrition in grad school, however I will give you a thumbnail bio and my comments.

[bio]
In 1991, I graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in mathematics and accepted a TA at Tufts University. My goal was to go on an become a professor, and teach other interested (and not-so-interested) people math. I found cut-throat grading, uncommunicative classmates, and a general dog-eat-dog mentality at Tufts (a distinct lack of collegiality, if you will). I left after one academic year. I was told that my pre-final-exam study session on Sunday was unacceptable.

In January of 1992, I went to the University of Pittsburgh and found a much more supportive atmosphere. The standard there was that a full time graduate student had seven years to finish (at least five years of support was easy to get if the student stayed on target: masters exams by the end of two years; candidacy exams by the end of the fourth year; and at least one year of thesis work support) and a part time student has ten years. I went full time until the summer of 1994, taking three courses a term and covering two recitations and a computer lab session for calculus level courses. In 1994 I had to take a full time teaching job to pay the bills. I started teaching four courses a semester at Robert Morris College (now a University) and taking one class a semester at Pitt. The workload was enormous. After six years of this, RMU was tired of waiting for me to finish, and we parted ways in May of 2000. I was finally doing full-time dissertation research at Pitt, so I went back to being a graduate student.

I lectured one course a semester (and covered one course's recitation), a 140 person lecture on algebra which had 5 _undergraduate_ teaching assistants to do grading and recitations! These were junior and senior undergraduates in Math and were full time students themselves! So the students in this course NEVER worked with a faculty member; just the UTA's and I. I did finish my thesis; I graduated in August of 2002 and had a job teaching at a bachelor-degree only (in math) institution that fall. I have no TA's, and no classes over 45 students. I've not been this happy with my teaching in years.

[opinions]
Attrition in the graduate school at Pitt was due to the disconnect between the research being done for graduate work and the teaching/TA work being done for our stipend and tuition waiver. People who are great teachers are sometimes horrible researchers (and vice-versa) so there were people who could teach incredibly well to undergraduates who would never finish a thesis. I know a couple of people who took their MAs and went to teach as part-time faculty at places like ITT Tech and local community colleges. I also know people who wrote their theses in record time and are now doing wonderful research at major institutions like CMU and IUP. In mathematics, as well as other science fields, the deeper research still uses the methodology and techniques learned in the elementary courses. I still need algebra to help me in calculus, which I need again in differential equations, which I need again in graduate work in chaos theory or the math of neural networks and so on. It may be that this disconnect is even larger in English and social sciences. This is not always communicated to the graduate applicant, so a person coming to do research may say, "what do you mean, I have to teach a course?" (or a teaching student may say, "what does my doing research have to do with becoming a better teacher?") This can prevent many students from continuing through grad school, and I think it contributes a lot to attrition.

The need for almost free labor at the graduate level comes from the need of an institution to push for continued research by faculty. Many seminar courses are given in a faculty member's field of current interest. It's almost a way to do the research for you next article and get paid for it (or at least lower your other workload) at the same time. This means that you need to generate interest in your field, and have grad students doing research under (or with) you, so that you can offer a seminar course. As the article you linked to pointed out, this means larger courses which need to be taught; either hire TA's or teaching-only faculty to do that, and TA's are cheaper.

In any case, I made it through after 11 years, so I can't tell you why I left :) But I hope my theories are somewhat relevant. Feel free to edit this as you see fit, but would you please leave my name attached? I'm not that worried about being "found out" on campus.

Thank you,
Joshua Sasmor

You're probably buried in these by now, but I decided to send my grad school attrition story. Basically, I should have been one of those attrition numbers. After spending about two years or so on my dissertation, I was informed by two-thirds of my committee (including the director, an endowed chair) that, based on what I had done so far, I shouldn't bother finishing the dissertation. (note that I had minimal interaction with said director before this point since starting the dissertation.) After a few months of unsuccessfully trying to find an alternative topic, I was very close to asking for my M.A.. I was also nearly suicidal (though this was not due solely to academic issues).

Thanks to the intervention of some fellow graduate students, I eventually found a different director and dissertation committee, and things went much more swimmingly; I finished my dissertation in about two years, even though I had a full-time non-academic job for the last several months. Of course, I still have $18K in loans to pay off, and don't currently have an academic job. So I guess this sort of has a happy ending - and I will note that attrition among the group I entered grad school with seems unusually low (also, given some of the horror stories I've heard, unusually friendly with each other).

The social sciences do not seem to be as terrifying as the humanities, but there are still a number of fatal traps and nasty surprises. My own experience concluded with my adviser resigning his academic position to take a job [outside academe]. He informed me that he could no longer continue as my dissertation chair and that, really, he would prefer to be off of my committee altogether (this is at the point when I had hoped to defend and get the hell out within a couple of months). The upshot was another year of work with a new adviser and a reconstituted committee. My adviser also slept with students and blatantly helped those he found attractive (even if he wasn't sleeping with them) and shunned those who he was not attracted to...a nice form of reverse sexual harassment.

I finished my Ph.D. for the simple reason that I can't stand working in the "real world" and I wasn't going to let the bas***ds win. I spent 10 years in a variety of jobs, including a very well-paid position with McDonnell Douglas Aircraft. But, I am so much happier in this job, despite the pre-tenure pitfalls and the nasty graduate experience, that I can't and won't go back. However, I do think that my real-world experience helped me to deal with the petty, personal attack politics and backstabbing of graduate school. I did spend a great deal of time helping my younger fellow students (those who went straight from undergrad to grad) deal with the shattering of their illusions regarding the life of intellectual pursuits.

Several of the people who started grad school with me ended up dropping out. One is now very sucessfully employed at Microsoft and much happier than at any time we were in school. Another has an up and coming political career and others are very gainfully and happily employed in a variety of fields. Yes, our faculty did try to insinuate that these folks were somehow losers and less than intelligent, but we were and are a pretty intelligent group of people and quit believing them long ago. The one thing I truly value about my graduate school experience is the friendships I made (I met my husband in grad school). We were virtually left alone by our faculty to figure out what to do and how to get through grad school and as a result we formed deep and long lasting friendships based on mutual support and common experiences (I sometimes compare it to those surviving very traumatic, life-threatening experiences together...a life-long bond is formed!)

My answer to any of my current students considering grad school is to work for at least 2 years (preferably 3 or 4) and only then start looking into it. In my experience many of them discover that what they thought grad school offered is readily available outside of academia.

In the end, I feel like the bruises are finally healing, mentally and emotionally I've recovered (again, the real world experience helps with that) and I'm regaining my sense of balance in my life. What I'd really like to do is take a number of these intellectual blow-hards and put them in an office situation for a year and see how they do. I'm willing to bet that their performance reviews (of course, they'd be shocked that their performance would be questioned) would be shockingly devoid of references to their stellar grasp of obscure theories of literary deconstruction and their coworkers singularly unimpressed with their people skills. Also, corporate politics are much nastier and viscious than academic politics. It might, just might, be an enlightening experience.

Thanks for exposing this nasty little culture to the sunlight.

I think there's some confusion amongst the various writers on this.Ý

My belief is that the attrition rate has always been very high, and this is particularly the case if you factor in those students who take basically forever to get their degrees. In 1969, I believe the average length of time was over 10 years (not counting the time it took to get the BA)--and this data was derived from the decades before, e.g., the 1950s and 1960s.

I bring this up because the situation predates the job shortage, the theory problem, and the plantation system in which graduate programs recruit to keep a good supply of slave labor in the composition gulag.

One reason that has been mentioned was and is still the primary cause: in the humanities financial support is rationed out so that basically a student has to be self supporting during the writing of the dissertation. If we did this to undergraduates, no one would ever get a degree, so it's not surprising the attrition rate is so high at the graduate level.

Admissions is also a problem--the people admitting students are the same wonderful bunch (often literally) who handle faculty hires, so the criteria are mystical. When I was an administrator I was in charge of setting up quantitative admissions criteria for the university, and when I looked at what was going on in graduate admissions (mostly at other schools), the standards essentially approximated random selection.Ý

Practically speaking, good students at elite private ug colleges (traditionally prized by graduate faculties), are often badly prepared for a graduate experience. Not academically, but personally or psychologically.

On the other hand, historically, the attrition rate in private ug universities has been surprisingly high. In the early 1960s the conventional wisdom I heard was that only about a third of an entering class would graduate from the school they entered as freshmen.

In other words, the problem has been around a long time, and it's probably systemic in higher education.Ý

What I think has changed is the swinishness of the profession. That I think is not an illusion, but a rather depressing reality which coincides with its increasing politicization and anti-intellectualism.

as I read the comments on PhD attrition, on your site and elsewhere, a
few thoughts occur to me. First of all, we need to distinguish clearly
between two kinds of "attrition," Attrition Proper and Weeding Out.

Attrition Proper occurs when people in PhD programs fail (for whatever
reasons) to receive the degree. The Master's student in mathematics whose
story you posted embodies one version of this problem, but on Invisible
Adjunct and elsewhere we can see the whole range of reasons for not
finishing one's degree program.

But I have also read comments contending that many graduate programs allow
too many people into their M.A. Programs and then, at some point along the
way, Weed Them Out; and most of those commentators seem to believe that this
practice is unethical. They argue that if graduate departments admitted only
those they felt confident would go on to get the doctorate, the departments
could better support those students and reduce the chances of attrition.

That argument makes sense only if grad admissions committees can reliably
choose the best students as they come out of their undergraduate
institutions. But it's actually quite hard to tell who, among many
more-or-less qualified candidates, will be successful. Sometimes departments
are surprised both by those who can't cut it and those who can.

Take me, for instance. I got my B.A. from a thoroughly mediocre state
university -- largely because when I graduated from high school I didn't
know a good college from a bad one. (I was, and remain, the first in my
family to go beyond high school.) Among the top graduate programs in
English, only one would accept me -- the University of Virginia, infamous
then (in the 1980s) for its ruthless Weeding-Out practices. Certainly it was
harrowing to go through the dreaded "Application for Permission to Proceed"
to the doctoral program -- and see several of my friends denied that
permission and forced to leave the department after taking their M.A. But
the flip side of that fear and trembling is this: UVA gave me the chance to
succeed that no other top-ten program would have given me. And my UVA degree
helped me to get a good job, which I still hold today.

So, while I would not wish *all* graduate departments to function in this
way, I think it is good that *some* do. For those of us who didn't have the
opportunity to attend an elite undergraduate institution, the Weeding Out
procedure of UVA's English department, however painful to many, at least
partially and imperfectly fulfilled the old American ideal of meritocracy.
That's not such a bad thing.