I was actually just reading this article on my own and saw it had been posted here....
Many of us have known this scholar: The hair is well-streaked with gray, the chin has begun to sag, but still our tortured friend slaves away at a masterwork intended to change the course of civilization that everyone else just hopes will finally get a career under way.
We even have a name for this sometimes pitied species — the A.B.D. — All But Dissertation. But in academia these days, that person is less a subject of ridicule than of soul-searching about what can done to shorten the time, sometimes much of a lifetime, it takes for so many graduate students to, well, graduate. The Council of Graduate Schools, representing 480 universities in the United States and Canada, is halfway through a seven-year project to explore ways of speeding up the ordeal.
Is this a problem of too much work, too many commitments, students not working hard enough, or a combination? Personally, I would say there is just too much on many student's plates (school, job, family, and dare I say "personal life")
Does something need to be done?
The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block.
Were these students not fit to be a PhD? Or is it too hard/too much work?
At commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33, an age when peers are well along in their professions, and 12 percent of graduates are saddled with more than $50,000 in debt.
That is a lot of debt, I wonder if they will be paid enough to pay this off in a reasonable amount of time?
There are probably few universities that nudge students out the door as rapidly as Princeton, where a humanities student now averages 6.4 years compared with 7.5 in 2003. That is largely because Princeton guarantees financial support for its more than 2,000 scholars for five years, including free tuition and stipends that range up to $30,000 a year. That means students need teach no more than two courses during their schooling and can focus on research.
Pay them to get done faster?
But fewer than a dozen universities have endowments or sources of financing large enough to afford five-year packages. The rest require students to teach regularly. Compare Princetonians with Brian Gatten, 28, an English scholar at the University of Texas in Austin. He has either been teaching or assisting in two courses every semester for five years.
“Universities need us as cheap labor to teach their undergraduates, and frankly we need to be needed because there isn’t another way for us to fund our education,” he said.
Cheap labor is the key. Sometimes the pay is just pathetic (thats what I keep hearing in North Dakota and South Dakota).
That raises a question that state legislatures and trustees might ponder: Would it be more cost effective to provide financing to speed graduate students into careers rather than having them drag out their apprenticeships?
hummmm...?
8 years! 8 years? I'm getting more and more afraid for what I have to do after I get my MS.
The things they talk about here are some of the problems at UND, at least in my department. Getting an advisor who will kick you to get your work done is a good thing. I think it needs to be more than that though--this type of research can be enjoyable as well as fulfilling I think. If all our fellow grad students were actively engaged in each others work, we could talk about it, and we'd have new ideas, better ideas, and perhaps get things done a lot faster. This may be my department, so I'll try not to generalize too much. The one thing I am sure of is that those faculty with graduate students need to pick a focus: either teach the grad students, or do your own research. We know that teaching undergrads is part of life, and we wish the best teachers on them as we can, but I want an advisor that sees me as a resource, not a burden. I especially don't want an advisor that is so wrapped up in his own work (either because he has skewed values or he is rushing for publications) that he forgets that he's being paid to advise me. It's part of your job, so do it.
Maybe that's it right there--if you always have a Ph.D student, you make more money.
There needs to be more engagement and more of a graduate community. A lot of times graduate students have no idea of some of the things going on in their department, let a long within their university. Community is essential.
I have been fortunate to have a great adviser but I know others haven't been so lucky. Advisers need to keep on top of their students and make sure things are getting done... but they must also be a great, active resource, teacher, and mentor for their students.