Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    College Advising
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
The Graduate Adviser

Time to Degree Revisited: Back to the Future

Don’t punish job candidates who have earned 
their Ph.D.’s quickly without amassing publications

By Leonard Cassuto April 21, 2014
Pursuing PhD Illustration Careers
Brian Taylor

Once upon a time, there was an influential foundation whose new leadership believed that graduate students were taking too long to complete their Ph.D.’s in the humanities and social sciences. “How might we help these students?” the foundation’s leaders wondered.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

Once upon a time, there was an influential foundation whose new leadership believed that graduate students were taking too long to complete their Ph.D.’s in the humanities and social sciences. “How might we help these students?” the foundation’s leaders wondered.

A major study had recently called for extra financial support aimed at finishing the doctorate. The research supporting that conclusion was thorough and respected. The foundation followed the study’s broad recommendations.

So was born a major new program to shorten time spent earning a Ph.D. The foundation would provide money sufficient to cover multiple years of generous stipends. Universities would be given the flexibility to award the money as they saw fit. The cash would free graduate students of financial burdens. Relieved of the need to teach (or shelve books, or scoop ice cream) in order to make ends meet, the students would then motor through their dissertations.

The foundation made arrangements with 10 top universities to award this money to their best doctoral students. Eight more institutions were added a year later. Then the foundation leaders stepped back, rubbed their hands together, and awaited the results.

That’s a good story, right? It looked like a happy ending in the making.

The year was 1967. The foundation was the Ford Foundation, newly led by McGeorge Bundy, a veteran of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The foundation adapted a recommendation made in 1960 by Bernard Berelson (in the Carnegie-financed study Graduate Education in the United States) that students should receive additional financial support at the end stages of their doctoral studies.

The Ford Foundation Graduate Program lasted seven years, and it failed utterly. According to historian Roger Geiger, from whose 1993 account in Research and Relevant Knowledge (Oxford) I am borrowing here, the program yielded an outcome precisely the opposite of what was intended.

In other words, the added money drove time to degree up rather than down.

Let’s consider the background for that unexpected finding. The Ford program began at a time when professorial jobs were in abundance, but paradise did not exactly reign on academic earth. For one thing, the fountain of tenure-track employment dried up a few years after the fountain of money started flowing. As Geiger points out, federal support for research also began to decline. The Selective Service was trolling for young men to send to Vietnam, and graduate school provided an official refuge from the draft.

Even so, says Geiger, professional options proved the ultimate
determinants of time to degree. The students chose to use their extra money not to get out of graduate school faster, but rather to stay longer and do more while they were there. They chose “completion with distinction” over completion with alacrity.

ADVERTISEMENT

This little excursion down memory lane is occasioned by a similar effort now under way involving Brandeis University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Its goal? To reduce time to degree by awarding generous one-year fellowships to late-stage graduate students in order to help them complete their dissertations. The program is now in its fifth year, and the stipend has been raised to a remarkable $35,000.

If that effort sounds familiar, there is a salient difference from the Ford Foundation’s program of more than 40 years ago: Brandeis and Mellon require a written commitment from the Ph.D. candidates and their advisers that the students will indeed finish in the prescribed year.

They do, mostly. The numbers show that the added money and the signed commitment have evidently enabled students to complete their degrees faster. As reported in The Chronicle last summer, more than two-thirds of the fellowship recipients over the past four years have finished within the fellowship term. (Job-placement data for this group are not yet available.)

The behavior of Ford Foundation-aided graduate students in the 1960s and early 70s suggested, says Geiger, that “given a shortage of academic jobs, it seemed better to acquire stronger qualifications than to acquire them sooner.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Indeed, there’s a body of economic scholarship, dating from the 1960s, that argues against the idea that giving students extra grant money makes them finish faster. Economists like David W. Breneman, author of The Ph.D. Production Function, showed years ago that while a number of factors (such as clarity of personal goals) affect graduate students’ time to the Ph.D., increases in their student income make little difference. It appears that the Ford Foundation leaders didn’t do all of the reading, or else they didn’t believe what it was saying.

Has the situation changed? Not in any way that matters. If anything, the incentives to stay in graduate school and amass credentials are even greater now. Students at top research universities, like Brandeis, understand that if they want tenure-track jobs, they’ll have to publish. They need to go on the market with first-rate dissertations, yes, but also with major publications that meet the standards of their fields.

It follows that the Mellon completion fellowships have a serious possible side effect: The finish-in-a-year provision can drive students out into the job market before their CVs are market-ready.

That seems an unjust result, but it’s already happened. Not to everyone, certainly, but to enough students to constitute a genuine risk attached to taking the money. Jason M. Gaines, a Brandeis Ph.D. in near Eastern and Judaic studies, finished his degree this past spring with the aid of a Mellon fellowship grant. It took him just six years, well below the national average. “My adviser told me I was as strong a candidate that they could produce,” he says, but potential employers didn’t see it that way. He had no success on the academic job market last year.

ADVERTISEMENT

The problem, Gaines says, was his “time line.” Because he didn’t have his Ph.D. in hand at the time of the autumn job season, he believes that his applications may not have received full consideration. Nor had he published. “I was encouraged to focus on my dissertation,” he says, and to “publish after I had established my credentials.” Besides, he adds, if he had taken the time to publish, “I wouldn’t have a degree right now.”

Gaines’s adviser reached out to contacts and helped him secure a part-time teaching job for this year. He’s been working on articles and revising his dissertation into a book manuscript. “This year is the correct year for me to be on the job market,” he says. He has not secured a tenure-track position as of this writing.

Early finishers like Jason Gaines have credentials that do not necessarily sell themselves. The Brandeis-Mellon program creates an unusual supply of quickly minted Ph.D.’s whose talents have been endorsed by their universities. It doesn’t require a Ph.D. in economics to understand that supply does not create demand. If Brandeis and Mellon are going to generate a group of candidates who possess unusual credentials, then they must also stimulate demand for those candidates in every way possible. For example, Mellon-sponsored early finishers need special institutional support that will identify them to potential employers.

The rest of us, too, have a responsibility to support this effort, because everything about the Mellon fellowship program—from its generous payments to its well-intentioned goal of reducing time to degree—deserves our encouragement and help. We presumably want projects like Mellon’s to grow and proliferate. So what can we do?

ADVERTISEMENT

If we truly support the cause of reducing time to degree, then hiring talented early finishers is the only decisive way to confer that support. To hire early completers says, in effect, that we respect their achievements. It also says that we respect what their decision to accept the fellowship represents: that they have agreed to enter the job market early rather than hang back and amass further publications. They will publish, surely, but under the banner of the colleges and universities that hire them. And isn’t that a good thing?

Time to degree is too high in many fields, but it’s a travesty and a disgrace in the humanities, where it hovers above nine years. It’s easy for us on the inside to denounce that, but if we really want to do something about it, we have to reward the exceptional graduate students who are trying to lower the average. If we don’t, we’re just talking the talk.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
cassuto_leonard.jpg
About the Author
Leonard Cassuto
Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English at Fordham University who writes regularly for The Chronicle about graduate education. His newest book is Academic Writing as if Readers Matter, from Princeton University Press. He co-wrote, with Robert Weisbuch, The New Ph.D.: How to Build a Better Graduate Education. He welcomes comments and suggestions at cassuto@fordham.edu. Find him on X @LCassuto.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Vector illustration of large open scissors  with several workers in seats dangling by white lines
Iced Out
Duke Administrators Accused of Bypassing Shared-Governance Process in Offering Buyouts
Illustration showing money being funnelled into the top of a microscope.
'A New Era'
Higher-Ed Associations Pitch an Alternative to Trump’s Cap on Research Funding
Illustration showing classical columns of various heights, each turning into a stack of coins
Endowment funds
The Nation’s Wealthiest Small Colleges Just Won a Big Tax Exemption
WASHINGTON, DISTICT OF COLUMBIA, UNITED STATES - 2025/04/14: A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator holding a sign with Release Mahmud Khalil written on it, stands in front of the ICE building while joining in a protest. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators rally in front of the ICE building, demanding freedom for Mahmoud Khalil and all those targeted for speaking out against genocide in Palestine. Protesters demand an end to U.S. complicity and solidarity with the resistance in Gaza. (Photo by Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Campus Activism
An Anonymous Group’s List of Purported Critics of Israel Helped Steer a U.S. Crackdown on Student Activists

From The Review

John T. Scopes as he stood before the judges stand and was sentenced, July 2025.
The Review | Essay
100 Years Ago, the Scopes Monkey Trial Discovered Academic Freedom
By John K. Wilson
Vector illustration of a suited man with a pair of scissors for a tie and an American flag button on his lapel.
The Review | Opinion
A Damaging Endowment Tax Crosses the Finish Line
By Phillip Levine
University of Virginia President Jim Ryan keeps his emotions in check during a news conference, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022 in Charlottesville. Va. Authorities say three people have been killed and two others were wounded in a shooting at the University of Virginia and a student is in custody. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
The Review | Opinion
Jim Ryan’s Resignation Is a Warning
By Robert Zaretsky

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin