Tuesday, March 20, 2018

A counter-intuitive result: median time to degree has been getting shorter?

I think you could have won $50 of me on this one. (from the Survey of Earned Doctorates).

(I wonder if people have been spending more time in postdocs? I don't think we have that data.) 

4 comments:

  1. Disclaimer: I did not completely understand the text of note A.

    CJ, I think the line that addresses time in a doctoral program directly is the "since starting doctoral program". I suspect all the others bake in the delays that come between college and grad school, and between a masters and a PhD. Until that third line shows a trend, I'm going to interpret this to mean more kids are powering through from undergrad to PhD, not that the PhD is taking less time.

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  2. Some programs have put a time limit in place. Perhaps that's driving down time? We just had a few who had to graduate within 5 years (life sciences) but they then stayed on as a postdoc in their graduate group for another year.

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    1. i believe you are onto it. Several programs faced pressure to reduce time to Ph.D. completion so they told students, after your 6th year we can't fund you anymore.

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    2. Yes, my school had a 7 or 8 year cap across the entire graduate school, so from sociology, to chemistry, to art (if we had grad programs in that).

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20