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Chapter 6. The Influence of Doctoral Program Designs
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C H A P T E R 6 The Influence of Doctoral Program Designs Expectations for the dissertation are extremely high—it’s treated less as a learning document than the first draft of a book—one that should revolutionize one’s field, no less!—and for me this has been somewhat paralyzing. It does seem something that could be remedied to some extent with some sort of post-proposal workshop or minicourse . I find it all too easy to lose track of the horizon and purpose of this project. —Student in English who entered in 1993 and left the program in 2004 THE ANALYSES we presented in the previous two chapters estimated the impact of the Graduate Education Initiative (GEI) on doctoral students’ attrition probabilities, completion probabilities, and time-to-degree (TTD). Although we discussed the important influence of financial support methods on these outcomes in Chapter 5, all other aspects of doctoral education in the humanities were treated as a black box. In this chapter, we use the Graduate Education Survey (GES) to go inside that black box to understand how the characteristics of doctoral programs, including the expectations that doctoral students confronted, were influenced by the GEI and how these changes in turn affected doctoral students’ attrition and completion probabilities.1 In the process, we demonstrate the general relationship between doctoral program characteristics and doctoral student outcomes, and we suggest that our findings may have important implications beyond the evaluation of the GEI.2 1 The material presented in this chapter draws heavily on Ronald G. Ehrenberg, George H. Jakubson, Jeffrey A. Groen, Eric So, and Joseph Price, “Inside the Black Box of Doctoral Education: What Program Characteristics Influence Doctoral Students’ Attrition and Graduation Probabilities?” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 29 (June 2007): 134–50. We are grateful to our co-authors for permitting us to include this chapter in the book. Readers interested in the technical details of our analyses should refer to that paper. 2 The 44 treatment and 41 control departments whose data are included in our analyses in this chapter are the ones listed in Table 4.1. I N F L U E N C E O F D O C T O R A L P R O G R A M D E S I G N S 141 At the outset of the discussion, it is important to note two things. First, departments often have little incentive to engage in systematic reform of their doctoral programs. The benefit to any given faculty member of investing time to reform a department’s doctoral program is likely to be very small. Absent pressure from outside forces, such as an external review or the provision of financial incentives to undertake reform, such as that which the GEI provided, it is unlikely that reforms will occur. Second, as we have noted in earlier chapters, departments reported to the Mellon Foundation annually the program changes that they first planned and then made, and how well they perceived these changes were working. However, the departments may have engaged in purely symbolic reform, restructuring programs in a way that was consistent with the goals of the Foundation, but then not putting much effort into implementing that reform. Our analyses in this chapter—which make use of data collected from students in both treatment and control departments about their perceptions of the characteristics of their doctoral programs—allow us to evaluate whether the reforms that departments reported they had implemented were actually perceived by the students to have occurred. The next section outlines our approach to measuring characteristics of graduate programs and defines the characteristics used in our analysis. Later sections present estimates of the impact that the GEI had on each of these characteristics and of the impact of these characteristics on student outcomes. We then discuss the implications of these findings. Our focus is on evaluating the effects of the GEI, yet the methodological approach we use could be profitably employed in a wide range of programevaluation studies. This chapter is necessarily somewhat more technical than the rest of the book; but the results of the analysis should be clear even to readers without technical backgrounds. MEASURING CHARACTERISTICS OF GRADUATE PROGRAMS Coupled with the data previously reported to the Mellon Foundation by the departments, the GES data provide an opportunity to analyze how the GEI affected selected characteristics of doctoral programs and how these characteristics in turn influenced students’ probabilities of attrition from, and completion...