What percentage of graduate students entering PhD programs in the arts and sciences at leading universities actually complete their studies? How do completion rates vary by field of study, scale of graduate program, and type of financial support provided to students? Has the increasing reliance on Teaching Assistantships affected completion rates and time-to-degree? How successful have national fellowship programs been in encouraging students to finish their studies in reasonably short periods of time? What have been the effects of curricular developments and shifts in the state of the job market? How has the overall "system" of graduate education been affected by the expansion of the 1960s and the subsequent contraction in enrollments and degrees conferred? Is there "excess capacity" in the system at the present time? This major study seeks to answer fundamental questions of this kind. It is based on an exhaustive analysis of an unparalleled data set consisting of the experiences in graduate school of more than 35,000 students who entered programs in English, history, political science, economics, mathematics, and physics at ten leading universities between 1962 and 1986. In addition, new information has been obtained on the graduate student careers of more than 13,000 winners of prestigious national fellowships such as the Woodrow Wilson and the Danforth. It is the combination of these original data sets with other sources of national data that permits fresh insights into the processes and outcomes of graduate education. The authors conclude that opportunities to achieve significant improvements in the organization and functioning of graduate programs exist--especially in the humanities and related social sciences--and the final part of the book contains their policy recommendations. This will be the standard reference on graduate education for years to come, and it should be read and studied by everyone concerned with the future of graduate education in the United States.Originally published in 1992.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

List of Figures
List of Tables

Preface

Ch. 1 Introduction and Principal Findings 1

Part One: Trends in Graduate Education

Ch. 2 Recipients of Doctorates 19

Ch. 3 The BA-PhD Nexus 41

Ch. 4 Graduate Programs: The Dual Questions of Quality and Scale 56

Ch. 5 The Evolution of Selected Tier I Programs in the EHP Fields 80

Pt. 2 Factors Affecting Outcomes

Ch. 6 Completion Rates and Time-to-Degree: Concepts and General Patterns 105

Ch. 7 Fields of Study 123

Ch. 8 Scale of Graduate Program 142

Ch. 9 Student-Year Cost and Its Components 163

Pt. 3 Policies and Program Design

Ch. 10 Financial Support for Graduate Students 177

Ch. 11 National Fellowship Programs 196

Ch. 12 Requirements and Program Content 229

Ch. 13 Program Design, Oversight, and "Culture" 250

Ch. 14 Recommendations 268

Appendixes

Appendix The Ten-University Data Set 290

Appendix B The National Fellowship Data Set 308

Appendix C Survey of Mellon Fellows in the Humanities 322

Appendix D Measuring Time to the Doctorate 347

Appendix E Time-to-Degree and Faculty Promotion 360

Appendix F Theory and Its Reverberations 368

Appendix G Additional Tables 378

Definitions of Frequently Used Terms 426

References Cited 428

Index 437