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Reducing time to degree in grad programs?

A reader brought my attention today to a post at the Blog of the APA entitled, "Reducing Time to Degree in Philosophy Doctoral Programs." The authors, Martin Willard and Gina Helfrich, write:

In today’s dismal market for permanent academic positions, a median TTD of seven years, together with the refusal of many doctoral programs to disclose median TTDs to prospective students, represents a moral failure. Doctoral program faculty generally accept their obligation to assist graduates in obtaining academic positions (although increasingly these positions are not tenure-track). What should be just as obvious is their obligation not to take seven or eight of their matriculants’ critical career development years with academic programs that do not, for most students, lead to permanent employment.

…

Five-year doctoral program TTD medians are both desirable and achievable. Shorter TTD is desirable for the simple but under-appreciated reason that more than 70 percent of doctoral program matriculants will not obtain permanent (tenure track or similar) academic employment, and current trends away from university instruction in the humanities will only make this situation worse. Philosophy Ph.D. programs with long TTD medians therefore hamper the majority of their students’ career trajectories as well as their lifetime salary potential. Shorter TTD is not only desirable, it is achievable: it has already been achieved outside the U.S., and in the U.S. the doctoral programs at UNC, MIT, Princeton, and Yale have achieved a median TTD of six years or less for many of their graduating cohorts. In light of the limited job prospects for philosophy Ph.D.s in the US and Canada, sustained efforts to reduce the TTD for doctoral programs from the current 6.9 year median are, we believe, a moral imperative.

As someone who barely made it through grad school myself, and who grappled hard with the stress of worrying that I'd spent 7+ years in grad school with few career prospects to show for it, I'm definitely sympathetic to this argument. 

What do you all think?

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10 responses to “Reducing time to degree in grad programs?”

  1. ABD

    I would definitely like to second this argument. There has been a bit of a push in the department that I am currently finishing up my PhD thesis in to consider ways to do this, though the amount of resistance that it is receiving is also instructive.
    My PhD program has four comprehensive exams which ended up taking me 3+ years to complete. The exams are composed of reading lists that are usually about double the size of the reading list for a graduate level seminar, but some of them are approaching triple or quadruple the size. Some of them are in areas where the department itself has little expertise and can offer little help if, for example, one gets bogged down in the middle of Hume’s Treatise (one of the many text’s required for the Early Modern Comp). Each of these comps are completed when you finish the reading list and then write a 48-72 hour take home exam. None of the exams are targeted at the PhD student’s dissertation area, so when they finish the comps, they have not put any designated work into reading for the dissertation yet. The department seems to think that each of these exams can be completed in about the length of a semester (3-4 months), so they think, at worst, that the comps should take a little over a year to complete. I don’t know anyone who has completed them in less than three years.
    Recently, an outside review of the department rather forcefully determined that the comp structure needed to change and that the comps were hindering the success of the program. And yet, there is a lot of resistance to change. Many of the professors have the rather strange view that the success of their PhD graduates on the job market has to do with the comps (I suspect that the number of teaching opportunities within the program are a more likely candidate). The general view of the room seems to be that the problem is with the graduate students who can’t get things done in what they take to be a reasonable amount of time or do independent work instead of the comp structure itself. In some ways I think they might be right, but it has less to do with a lack of self-discipline and more to do with the number of responsibilities on a contemporary PhD student’s plate. Everyone in the program has some funding, but after tuition is taken out of it there isn’t enough to live off of. So, I worked two, sometimes three or four, part time jobs at a time throughout my entire degree. It also seems nearly impossible to get a job these days coming from a non-Leiter ranked program without publications, so I have also prioritized publishing. This means that there is a lot more demands on my time than when most of my professors were getting their PhDs. So, the idea of reading the amount of two or three graduate seminars worth of material on topics I have no expertise in and am offered little support to help understand in sufficient detail to write a 72 hour exam in just 4 months is a bit ridiculous, even if I was the most self-disciplined person in the world.
    So, to circle back around to OP’s argument, I think both that the current demands of economic security and the academic job market make this particularly challenging, and that there is a fair amount of conservative resistance to change the things that might help, even when outside reviews have determined that something needs to change. So, while I agree with OP, I guess I am not particularly optimistic that much will change.

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  2. Michel

    From what I’ve seen/heard, it seems like the main drag on time to degree is timely supervisor feedback. I have known many perfectly good PhD students whose supervisors took a year or more to comment on drafts, and I’ve known many, many more whose supervisors took 5 months+. Many (most?) candidates seem perfectly capable of pushing out a solid end product on their own; it’s just that when you’re doing it alone, it takes months and months to get there. A supervisor’s timely comments save months of work at a time. It’s a huge shortcut.
    One thing worth noting (which the authors missed) is the number of undergraduate philosophy courses which PhD candidates have taken. From what I’ve seen, in the US it’s not uncommon for a ‘major’ to involve just ten in-discipline courses. By contrast, at my Canadian undergraduate program (which was/is not an outlier), ten courses was a minor, and a major required twenty. (I imagine the UK and Australia are more like this?) Add on Master’s coursework, plus PhD coursework, and… that’s a lot of coursework. A lot more than for someone entering a PhD program directly from a US undergrad.
    It’s certainly an open question whether all that coursework is desirable, and it’s also true that the MA helps to bridge the gap. But one worry is that breadth of philosophical education is lost both in the current US model, and in proposals to shorten requirements.
    Then again, it’s not like most PhD students are using the extra time-to-degree to take more courses. It’s just the time it takes to work through the degree. It’s possible that more foundational coursework might help to shorten that; on the other hand, I took seven years, and had 20 UG, 6 MA, and 33 PhD-level philosophy courses under my belt. I don’t think I needed to take seven years, but I’m glad I did. I was not at all prepared to fly on my own after four or five years.

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  3. ABD

    Another delay worth mentioning is that it seems fairly common for there to be a lot dawdling by supervisors and committee members as the dissertation reaches the final stages. I’ve always been told, including by my supervisor and committee members, that the best dissertation is a done dissertation (among the other platitudes of this nature). But it doesn’t seem like my supervisor/committee got this message, and this experience seems pretty common when talking to other PhD candidates. My supervisor recently said that he would be willing pass my dissertation as is, but then gave me weeks worth of revisions that I need to finish before I can pass the full draft along to the committee or even think about setting a defense date. I know of another candidate who when he started forcefully pressing for a defense date and threatening to go around his supervisor, his supervisor, despite continually sending him further revisions for the past year, told him that the thought the thesis was ready for defense a year ago.
    I’m not sure what the solution is here, but as a candidate, there is a disturbing lack of urgency to push candidates through the system. It would be nice if the candidate wasn’t the only one who seemed to realize that.

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  4. whatever

    I mean, sure, reduce TTD, but don’t have one of the reasons being the dismal job market while then turning around and citing as model programs MIT, Yale, Princeton, and UNC — aka places that are obviously placing these quick TTD students in cushy academic jobs. I

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  5. Derek Bowman

    “The general view of the room seems to be that the problem is with the graduate students who can’t get things done in what they take to be a reasonable amount of time or do independent work instead of the comp structure itself.”
    Explanandum: As a class, our students predictably and systematically take too long to finish our program requirements.
    Explanans: Clearly each of the members of that class have peculiar moral and/or cognitive failings, unrelated to the ways our program is structured or executed, which result in such aberrant behavior.

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  6. junior fac

    @ABD: my sympathies, that comp requirement sounds ridiculous. I had comps in my terminal MA program (3 in total). In my Ph.D. program, we had a paper requirement which (along with coursework) had to be completed to advance to candidacy. Having done both comps and a paper requirement, I found the paper requirement to be much more beneficial. Comps are just an exercise in cramming; they don’t foster depth of understanding, and you forget most of the stuff after passing the damn thing anyway. You can get the desired breadth through adequate coursework. The transition to candidacy should be about doing independent research, not about reading everything under the sun and understanding very little of it. Shame on your faculty for being so stubborn and not seeing this.

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  7. I love comps

    ABD and Junior.
    I completed a PhD program with comps – four of them. I know many students hated them, and some failed them. They were great – especially for setting you to be able to teach a vast range of courses (which I had to). In fact, of my cohort (+ or – 3 years), I am one of the three who has enviable careers in philosophy. They are NOT for everyone, but nor is a career in philosophy.

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  8. Recent PhD

    I’m surprised nobody has yet mentioned teaching load. I received my PhD from a well-ranked state school. We were expected to TA two sections per quarter, which regularly had between 30-35 students each. That meant we were grading anywhere between 200-280 papers per 11-week quarter, in addition to leading two sections a week, with only one year of teaching relief after reaching ABD to actually write the dissertation. I suspect the situation is similar in other state schools.
    With all the additional professionalization activities now expected of graduate students to even stand a chance on the job market (top publications, service, developing attractive AOCs, extra teaching as primary instructor to gain pedagogical experience search committees will actually care about), it is frankly not surprising to me TTD has increased. And yet it is difficult to blame this on individual departments–it was the university that determined the conditions of graduate support.

    Reply
  9. Junior fac

    @I love comps: depends on what kind of career in philosophy you’re talking about. If it’s a teaching-focused career where lots of different classes need to be taught, then comps might be helpful. However, in my experience (as someone who also has an enviable career in philosophy) coursework helped foster breadth of understanding in the discipline much more than my comps. When it comes to the Ph.D., and for securing careers that require at least some research, I think a substantial research project makes way more sense as a hurdle to clear before advancing to candidacy.

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  10. anon

    ABD, you also have my sympathies. Comps need to go.
    About getting your dissertation defended faster: perhaps you’ve done this already, but if you haven’t, it’s worth trying on the supervisor: “Given that you’re willing to pass the dissertation as is, how about I shelve these revisions and think about them when I’m revising the dissertation for publication? Then we can get on with the defense.”

    Reply

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