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/2007/10/03/education/ ?em&ex=3D119181=
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October 3, 2007
On Education
Exploring Ways to Shorten the Ascent to a .
By JOSEPH BERGER
Correction Appended

PRINCETON, .

Many of us have known this scholar: The hair is well-streaked with
gray, the chin has begun to sag, but still our tortured friend slaves
away at a masterwork intended to change the course of civilization
that everyone else just hopes will finally get a career under way.

We even have a name for this sometimes pitied species - the . -
All But Dissertation. But in academia these days, that person is less
a subject of ridicule than of soul-searching about what can done to
shorten the time, sometimes much of a lifetime, it takes for so many
graduate students to, well, graduate. The Council of Graduate Schools,
representing 480 universities in the United States and Canada, is
halfway through a seven-year project to explore ways of speeding up
the ordeal.

For those who attempt it, the doctoral dissertation can loom on the
horizon like Everest, gleaming invitingly as a challenge but often
turning into a masochistic exercise once the ascent is begun. The
average student takes years to get a .; in education, that
figure surpasses 13 years. Fifty percent of students drop out along
the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block. At
commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33, an age when peers are
well along in their professions, and 12 percent of graduates are
saddled with more than $50,000 in debt.

These statistics, compiled by the National Science Foundation and
other government agencies by studying the 43,354 doctoral recipients
of 2005, were even worse a few years ago. Now, universities are
setting stricter timelines and demanding that faculty advisers meet
regularly with prot=E9g=E9s. Most science programs allow students to
submit three research papers rather than a single grand work. More
universities find ways to ease financial burdens, providing better
paid teaching assistantships as well as tuition waivers. And more
universities are setting up writing groups so that students feel less
alone cobbling together a thesis.

Fighting these trends, and stretching out the process, is the
increased competition for jobs and research grants; in fields like
English where faculty vacancies are scarce, students realize they must
come up with original, significant topics. Nevertheless, education
researchers like Barbara E. Lovitts, who has written a new book urging
professors to clarify what they expect in dissertations; for example,
to point out that professors "view the dissertation as a training
exercise" and that students should stop trying for "a degree of
perfection that's unnecessary and unobtainable."

There are probably few universities that nudge students out the door
as rapidly as Princeton, where a humanities student now averages
years compared with in 2003. That is largely because Princeton
guarantees financial support for its more than 2,000 scholars for five
years, including free tuition and stipends that range up to $30,000 a
year. That means students need teach no more than two courses during
their schooling and can focus on research.

"Princeton since the 1930s has felt that a . should be an
education, not a career, and has valued a tight program," said William
B=2E Russel, dean of the graduate school.

And students are grateful. "Every morning I wake up and remind myself
the university is paying me to do nothing but write the dissertation,"
said Kellam Conover, 26, a classicist who expects to complete his
course of study in five years next May when he finishes his
dissertation on bribery in Athens. "It's a tremendous advantage
compared to having to work during the day and complete the
dissertation part time."

But fewer than a dozen universities have endowments or sources of
financing large enough to afford five-year packages. The rest require
students to teach regularly. Compare Princetonians with Brian Gatten,
28, an English scholar at the University of Texas in Austin. He has
either been teaching or assisting in two courses every semester for
five years.

"Universities need us as cheap labor to teach their undergraduates,
and frankly we need to be needed because there isn't another way for
us to fund our education," he said.

That raises a question that state legislatures and trustees might
ponder: Would it be more cost effective to provide financing to speed
graduate students into careers rather than having them drag out their
apprenticeships?

But money is not the only reason Princeton does well. It has developed
a culture where professors keep after students. Students talk of
frequent meetings with advisers, not a semiannual review. For example,
Ning Wu, 30, a father of two, works in Dr. Russel's chemical
engineering lab and said Dr. Russel comes by every Friday to discuss
Mr. Wu's work on polymer films used in computer chips. He aims to get
his . next year, his fifth.

While Dr. Russel values "the critical thinking and independent digging
students have to do, either in their mind for an original concept or
in the archives," others question the necessity of book-length works.
Some universities have established what they call professional
doctorates for students who plan careers more as practitioners than
scholars. Since the 1970s, Yeshiva University has not only offered a
. in psychology but also a separate doctor of psychology degree,
or ., for those more interested in clinical work than research;
that program requires a more modest research paper.

OTHER institutions are reviving master's degree programs for, say,
aspiring scientists who plan careers in development of products rather
than research.

Those who insist on dissertations are aware that they must reduce the
loneliness that defeats so many scholars. Gregory Nicholson,
completing his sixth and final year at Michigan State, was able to
finish a 270-page dissertation on spatial environments in novels like
Kerouac's "On the Road" with relative efficiency because of a writing
group where he thrashed out his work with other thesis writers.

"It's easy, especially in our field, to feel isolated, and that tends
to slow people down," he said. "There's no sense of belonging to an
academic community."

Some common sense would also hasten the process. The dissertation is a
hurdle that must be cleared, not a magnum opus, the capstone of a
career. Princeton's Mr. Wu has made that calculation.

"You do not want to stay forever," Mr. Wu said. "It's a training
process."

Correction: October 4, 2007
The On Education column yesterday, about efforts to shorten the time
it takes to earn a ., misstated the number of graduate students at
Princeton University. There are more than 2,000 - not 330, the number
of degrees the university awarded last year.