Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study of Ph.D. completion rates by discipline. The original data are available as PowerPoint files that I haven’t looked at, but IHE provides a summary in tabular form. Because everything looks more scientific as a graph, I cranked them into Excel and after the requisite ten minutes spent undoing all of Excel’s horrid default graph options, ended up with this:
There’s really not a whole lot surprising here: Scientists and engineers finish their degrees faster (in a bit more than six years), and humanists take much longer (just under 50% have finished in ten years). Humanities students are also more likely to end up with sizeable grad school debt– 38% have more than $35,000 in loans, compared to 20% for math and physical science, 18% for life sciences, and only 12% for engineering. Moral: don’t go to grad school in the humanities.
One thing that was interesting to me is that the science and engineering curves show a clear saturation– after about eight years, they don’t increase much. A bit over 60% of the people entering engineering or life science Ph.D.’s finish in ten years, while it’s about 55% for math and physical science students. It’s not clear from the story whether those people ever finish– I’m betting that very few of them are on the Brian May thirty-year plan. Most of those people are probably leaving with terminal Master’s degrees.
35-45% attrition may seem like a lot, but then, it’s not actually that much different from overall college graduation rates, which are at about 57% in six years. I suspect the higher numbers for engineers reflect the fact that they’re more likely to work for a few years before going for the doctorate (similarly, the lower debt numbers probably reflect the fact that engineers are more likely to have accumulated savings, or employers who will sponsor them through the degree program).
Anyway, as I said, there’s not much new here, but it’s nice to see the conventional wisdom confirmed.