Grant to help address doctoral completion rates

Updated 10:45 AM June 15, 2007

Grant to help address doctoral completion rates

By Joel Seguine
Office of the Vice President for Communications

Completing a doctoral program is a major challenge, requiring a long-term commitment to intensive research and writing. The national completion rate for doctoral programs is just over 50 percent.

The Council on Graduate Schools (CGS) has announced a second round of grants in a program to improve that number, and the University is among 22 research partners to receive a grant.

The Rackham School of Graduate Studies will receive a $50,000 second-round grant. When CGS launched the Ph.D. Completion Project in 2004 U-M received an $85,000 grant as one of the original research partners.

According to a CGS press release, the three-year grants for the second phase of the Ph.D. Completion Project provide first-time funding for eight universities and continuing support for 14 institutions.

"This continuation project will permit the graduate education community to better address critical issues in doctoral completion precisely at the time when global competition for highly trained talent is growing," says CGS President Debra Stewart.

"We have applied the grant funds primarily to data collection that helps us define more clearly what influences completion rates at Michigan," says Janet Weiss, dean of the Rackham School of Graduate Studies. "However, the real value of the CGS grant is not the money, but that we are part of a larger effort to address this national problem."

Weiss says that although U-M has a much better doctoral program completion rate than the national average—better than 60 percent of all students who begin a doctoral program eventually receive a Ph.D.—the University can do better.

"This is a high priority issue for us. We have some programs on our campus in which over 75 percent of their students complete their degrees. We're working to make all of our programs that successful," Weiss says.

A major factor influencing the Ph.D. completion rate is the extraordinary commitment of resources and time. "It takes an average of six to seven years to earn a doctorate and in some fields of study, students take even longer. During that length of time life situations can intervene. Finding enough funding to carry through a program can be a problem," Weiss says.

The quality of faculty advising and the limited job opportunities in some fields also are factors affecting completion rates, Weiss says. "And there will always be a percentage of Ph.D. students who get to a certain point and discover they don't like what they're doing and drop out. In recruiting, we try to give applicants a good chance to see if Michigan is a good fit, hoping to limit dropping out for that reason," she says.

Among the specific Rackham programs that may help to improve doctoral degree completion rates at U-M is GradTools, which the original CGS grant helped to support. Similar to CTools, it is a Web-based program that helps candidates track progress and manage the process with set requirements and deadlines (See gradtools.umich.edu/).

Weiss says another effective tool is an evolving partnership between Rackham Graduate School and the Sweetland Writing Center to run a summer Dissertation Writing Institute that helps candidates who are stalled in the completion of their dissertations.

To seek out specific barriers to completion in the many doctoral programs offered at the University, Weiss has introduced a more intensive review process that occurs on a four-year cycle. "As part of the review, we talk with faculty and survey students. Through the survey results and the review process we are learning a lot we can share with faculty, which spurs them on to think about best practices and ways of collaboration that can improve Ph.D. completion rates across campus," Weiss says.

Grant to help address doctoral completion rates

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