Getting a PhD Takes Too Long

3 October 2007 at 1:33 pm Peter G. Klein 4 comments

| Peter Klein |

So says the (US and Canadian) Council of Graduate Schools, studying ways to shorten the process, as reported in today’s NY Times. Some startling figures:

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. 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.

In economics, this problem has been alleviated, to some degree, by the rise of the three-essays dissertation, now the dominant model at the major research universities. In many economics departments, at least one essay is mostly finished by the end of the second year (written as a required second-year econometrics paper). Sociology, despite having become — like economics and strategy — a discipline that communicates mostly through articles, not books, seems to have stuck with the “grand treatise” model for the dissertation.

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Education, Institutions.

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4 Comments Add your own

1. REW | 3 October 2007 at 3:14 pm

I agree with your assessment, Peter, though I can’t tell whether you count strategy as inside or outside the 3-paper tent. I have been told by some strategy scholars that the tradeoff to having three papers (including 1-2 published) at the end of the shortened doctorate is that one hasn’t built “the valuable dataset” that is the source of subsequent publications. I exercise my biases on the side of “pubs in the hand”.

There seem to be several sects within the managemnet academy that continue a strong preference for the grand treatise. I see significant variance as a department head that reviews candidate CVs from OB,OT, OR/OM, strategy, and marketing. The latter field is moving to a two-paper norm — Science Lite!
2. Peter Klein | 3 October 2007 at 3:29 pm

Most of the strategy candidates I’ve seen lately have gone the three-papers route, though there does seem to be more variety there. At the very least, everybody in strategy is expected to produce a self-contained, article-length “job-market paper.” I recently talked to a new PhD in OB (from Stanford) who had written a job-market paper _and_ a separate grand treatise. That doesn’t seem very efficient to me.
3. brayden | 4 October 2007 at 12:02 am

Your assessment of sociology isn’t quite accurate. Many departments now offer their students a choice of doing the grand treatise or of doing the 3-paper route. Perhaps a few of the old stodgy departments have stuck with the grand treatise only model, but I imagine in a few years even they will be persuaded to be more flexible.
4. simon | 21 October 2007 at 7:46 pm

I do not believe that it takes too long to earn a PhD. The time required appears in my experience to be directly correlated with time required to make a material contribution to the field. I earned my PhD from top 5 institution in four years. Given the vast quantities of research that does not materially advance disciplines it does not appear that we have a problem with quantity of researchers.

One observation, I see that sociology and the economic strategy discipline have not done a very good job at mapping their theoretical ruminations with reality. The impetus of firm action is lacking from many of the models. Economists employing Williamson, Hart, or RBV have difficulty framing the firm’s entrepreneurial nature. They do an admirable job characterizing how to think about an existing relationship or exchange could be structured. I am more bullish on some of the work that Roth is conducting. Sociologists as you have noted Peter get caught up models that grant little freedom to businesses.