For Ph.D. students in the humanities, the median time to graduation is nine years. Worried that spending years and years in graduate school harms students’ pocketbooks and career prospects, Brandeis University is trying a new lever to move students through their programs: tying a coveted dissertation fellowship to a promise that the student will finish in a year.
Doctoral students at Brandeis who receive highly selective, dissertation-year fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will now be required to sign a “commitment agreement” with their departments, which carries several conditions.
The fellows, typically in their sixth year, are awarded the one-year grants, which this year will provide each student with $35,000, cover the full cost of tuition, and pay for health insurance. In return, the fellows must agree to work full time on their dissertations, abstain from outside employment, participate in regular seminar meetings, and submit progress reports.
The student’s adviser is also required to sign the form. Doing so ensures that professors who are crucial to helping students finish are aware of the specific terms to which the fellows have agreed.
This new agreement has raised questions for scholars at Brandeis and beyond: Might the lever strategy limit the scope of a fellow’s dissertation by requiring the student to finish it faster? If Mellon fellows are focused on their dissertations, to the exclusion of extra teaching experience or other publishing pursuits, could that harm them in the academic job market?
Brandeis is not alone in trying to cut the time students take to complete their Ph.D.'s. “Many institutions are taking a close look at time to degree in an effort to improve the quality of their programs,” says Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. While the average time to the Ph.D. has gone down in some fields over the last 20 years, she says, there is still plenty of room for improvement.
Since 2001, the median time to the doctorate in all fields has decreased slightly from just over eight years to about seven and a half, according to National Science Foundation data. But there is significant variance across disciplines. Doctoral students in the life and physical sciences and in engineering took a median of seven years to finish, while education graduate students needed 11 and a half years in 2011, down from nearly 14 years in 2001.
Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association, says the need for employment and structure during the dissertation process lengthens the time students need to complete their graduate degrees.
“We know,” she says, “that Ph.D. students do better when expectations are explicit, when regular dates are set for handing in materials, when students have regular meetings with their advisers in person, by phone, or Skype, and when more than just the adviser and the student are involved in the dissertation process.”
The bad market for tenure-track jobs in some fields is also prompting many students to stay longer in their programs, in an effort to build up their publication records and bolster their credentials. At the same time, graduate programs have been urging students to finish more quickly by mandating stricter timelines for completion, and by tinkering with the qualifying exams and dissertation requirements. Some programs are allowing students to write three or four publishable articles instead of one book-length text, while others are altering exams to make them directly relevant to students’ dissertations.
A few programs have told students that they will lose their financial support and university housing if they fail to finish within seven years. Some institutions have been shrinking the size of their programs so they can offer most of their students better assistantships in teaching and research, so they don’t have to take on outside work that can prolong their studies.
At Brandeis, Ph.D. students in the humanities take seven years, on average, to complete their degrees, but some take as long as 12. Malcolm Watson, dean of Brandeis’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, says providing Ph.D. students dissertation-year research grants and fellowships has the potential to reduce the time to graduation by increasing the time they can spend on their dissertations.
“They provide students the time, discipline, and ultimately the motivation they need,” he says, “to focus exclusively on researching, writing, and completing their dissertations.”
The university wanted to be sure, though, that students who receive aid use it to focus on their graduate work. Since Brandeis started awarding the Mellon dissertation grants, four years ago, students have been told that, as a condition of the award, they are supposed to abstain from outside employment and abide by the other rules. But administrators felt they needed to formalize the agreement because they weren’t certain that students were taking it seriously.
“We have heard that some of them did not,” Mr. Watson says.
Asking students to formally sign a commitment, the dean adds, also helped the university to signal to the Mellon foundation that Brandeis, too, is serious about reducing the time to degree. In 2012 the university applied to Mellon to renew the dissertation grants for four more years. In the application, Mr. Watson included the commitment agreement to demonstrate a tangible plan for following through with the goal.
A Limited Approach
Efforts to press Ph.D. students to wrap up their studies more quickly have drawn criticism among some scholars, who worry the time pressures will shortcut serious scholarship.
Leonard Cassuto, a professor of English at Fordham University who writes regularly about graduate education issues for The Chronicle, says that Brandeis’s plan is well-intentioned, but that accepting a dissertation-year grant can be a gamble for students.
“By taking the fellowship, students are giving up the opportunity to stay longer and publish. They will sometimes let the fellowship substitute for publications,” and that can hurt them in the job market, Mr. Cassuto says. “The only way to get students out sooner is if they can get jobs. Otherwise they are just being paid off to finish faster.”
Some previous Mellon fellows at Brandeis also voiced skepticism about the specific idea of requiring a signed commitment. It is a Band-Aid approach to the larger time-to-degree problem, some say, and does little to help with broad obstacles to completion, like the lack of proper financing for the vast majority of graduate students, who don’t get competitive fellowships.
William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College who writes about higher education for The Chronicle, says dissertation-year fellowships are helpful because they enable students to complete their research and writing without having to chase employment. But, he adds, they “don’t get to all the roots of the time-to-degree problem, which have to do with the transformation of academic employment from tenure track to part-time.”
Ms. Feal, though, says Brandeis’s new requirement holds promise because it is an example of how more graduate programs are beginning to attack the time-to-degree problem. “What we are seeing is a network of approaches so we can create situations where students are supported,” she says. “More and more departments are realizing that it is not a good thing to have people spend years and years dragging out a degree and being marginalized economically and socially.”
It is fine for graduate directors and professors to press Ph.D.'s to finish within a reasonable time and to encourage fellowship recipients not to take outside work if they are given enough money, some former Mellon fellows say. But sometimes, several former fellows added, financial pressures make it difficult to meet those goals.
Bendta M. Schroeder, a former fellow who earned her Ph.D. in English literature from Brandeis in 2011, says some of her peers who were fellows broke the rules, taking on outside work, out of economic necessity.
“Living expenses in Boston are insane, so some students took the grant money and still made other money,” she says. “They wanted to live in a safe neighborhood and eat dinner.”
But Michael Willrich, a professor of U.S. social and legal history at Brandeis, says it is good for students to not hold outside employment. “Earning a little bit of outside money can set them back in terms of their research,” he says.
The commitment agreement is also important because, by requiring students’ advisers to sign the form, it puts subtle pressure on them to help keep the students’ dissertation process moving.
Former fellows say that Brandeis faculty are generally responsive to students and provide timely feedback on their work, but advisers do sometimes contribute to delays in completing degrees. For example, those former fellows say, advisers or other dissertation-committee members who are out of touch because of busy schedules or sabbaticals can become obstacles. Or disagreements between faculty members sometimes reveal themselves in the dissertation process and derail a student.
Freedom of Time
Variations in students’ financial and family circumstances might limit the effectiveness of Brandeis’s approach, or require supplemental interventions to help students finish.
Jason Gaines, who earned his Ph.D. in Near Eastern and Judaic studies in May, was awarded a Mellon fellowship in the fall of 2012. Before that he held a number of odd jobs and teaching positions at multiple institutions.
“I was making a fairly good living doing all this. But it is certainly time-consuming,” he says. Mr. Gaines taught morning and weekend classes but found it difficult to make the transition to his research. “I couldn’t just switch over to research when I needed to.”
Both Ms. Schroeder and Mr. Gaines left their jobs once they received fellowships, even though the money was less than what they had been earning. Both had saved enough money to supplement their awards.
“The Mellon worked for me because I had amassed savings,” Mr. Gaines said. Otherwise “it would have been a very lean year indeed. I don’t have kids or a family. I can’t imagine the pressures I would have been under if I had.”
The Mellon dissertation-year fellowships have been successful at shortening the time to a Ph.D. and increasing overall graduation rates at Brandeis. In the 2010-11 and 2011-12 academic years, 13 of the 19 students with Mellon dissertation grants completed their Ph.D.'s within six years. Among other humanities students, five out of 21 had finished their degrees in the same time.
Some experts say that while it is good that Brandeis is finding ways to improve its record, the approach has limits. Mr. Pannapacker says fully financing all Ph.D. students from start to finish is the most effective way to produce graduates. And the best way for universities to really help students, he says, is for programs not to accept more students than they can afford to fully pay.
