Many universities have started efforts to reduce the time it takes to earn a humanities Ph.D. Here are a few examples:
Setting goals. The University of Texas system requires new doctoral students to sign what’s called a Milestones Agreement Form, which explicitly states when a student expects to hit key steps, such as completion of coursework and of the dissertation. Each student’s adviser and department chair also sign the agreements, to make everyone accountable for meeting the goals.
Allowing alternative dissertations. More universities allow students to submit alternatives to the traditional monographic dissertation. In the University of Washington’s division of Spanish and Portuguese studies, for example, a dissertation can be a digital publication, an exhibition of scholarly work, or a collection of essays. Those approaches often take less time to produce than does the standard book-length dissertation.
Offering fellowships. Rutgers University at New Brunswick’s School of Arts and Sciences recently changed some assistantships to fellowships that pay less and offer fewer health benefits but that free up students from teaching responsibilities so they have more time for their dissertations.
Moving timelines. Some institutions are moving up timelines for comprehensive examinations so students start researching and writing their dissertations earlier. The department of English at Vanderbilt University, for example, moved up the deadline for the final dissertation proposal by four and a half months and the timeline for the written component of exams by two months. Officials there say that more students are completing in five years and that dissertations are “more developed.”
Reducing isolation. To help Ph.D. students in the humanities feel less isolated from their peers and professors during their research, the University of Alberta’s department of English and film studies offers support in lab-like settings. The support includes providing mentors who offer guidance on teaching, a Ph.D. colloquium in which students discuss their dissertations with one another, and an optional workshop on how to write thesis proposals.
Limiting financial support. At the University of Texas at Austin, the liberal-arts college plans to cut off financial support, including stipends and a tuition-reduction benefit, after a graduate student’s sixth year. Administrators say they want to increase stipend amounts for students, and a way to do that is to pay them for a shorter amount of time. Some graduate students have protested the policy, saying it will lead to hastily written dissertations as students rush to finish before the money runs out.
Restructuring exams. The English department at Indiana University at Bloomington restructured the comprehensive exam into two parts: an oral exam followed by a semester-long dissertation-prospectus workshop, and then a second oral exam, in which students defend their prospectus. The workshop walks the student through the dissertation process. The department reports that preliminary data show the new process has reduced time-to-degree by eight months.
