Improving PhD Completion Rates
Initiatives to Help Doctoral Students Submit and Graduate on Time
Graduate students invest heavily in their studies. Many fail to complete their PhDs. In the UK and US, initiatives to help them submit and graduate on time are in hand.
Low Completion Rates for Doctoral Students
PhD students are increasingly in demand in today’s knowledge society. Governments are particularly keen to see the numbers of doctoral graduates expand, especially in the so-called SEM (science, engineering, and mathematics) or STEM (science, technology engineering, and mathematics and medicine) subjects. However, the completion rates for PhD research students have always been relatively low and, increasingly, the extent to which doctoral candidates successfully complete their postgraduate research degrees is a matter of major concern on both sides of the Atlantic.
The existing, relatively limited, research shows that a number of factors are related to completion rates (both in the UK and US). These factors are:
1. Selection, admission and induction
2. Supervision and mentoring
3. Access to financial support
4. The research environment within which doctoral study takes place
6. Mode of study (whether full- or part-time)
7. Institutional processes & procedures
In the UK, timeous completion rates are highest for full-time, funded students in the natural sciences, with international students having the highest rates of on-time completion.
The Council for Graduate Schools (CGS) says that, in the US, ‘completion rates are higher in the physical and life sciences than in the social sciences and humanities; higher for men than for women; higher for majority than for minority students; and higher in smaller than in larger doctoral programs.’
Initiatives to Assist Timely Completion
In the UK, the higher education funding councils and the research councils have been pursuing the issue with the higher education sector and individual universities for a number of years.
In Britain, the approach has been two-fold. On the one had the financial relationship between the funding councils and the universities has been used to encourage change, and on the other, a strengthened Code of Practice on postgraduate research degrees was introduced in 2004 by the QAA (Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education). This Code of Practice contains guidance which, whilst not mandatory, no sensible university would fail to align itself with.
In the US, the CGS is taking a different tack and is part-way through a seven year project ( the 'Ph.D. Completion Project') to try to find ways of improving completion rates. This initiative has involved 29 major US and Canadian research universities and 15 partner institutions which have developed a variety of intervention strategies and pilot projects. The interventions and pilots are being evaluated to try to show what works and why. It is hoped that this will lead to the identification of ‘best practice’ in the area of PhD completion.
Concluding Comment
Doctoral students invest significant amounts of time, money and emotional resources into their studies. Anything which helps to ensure that, once started on a PhD, they successfully complete is to be welcomed.
