Changing Dissertation Advising: CHE article

[Sun_Worshiper]

CHE has two new articles on the topic:
How to Save the Humanities Ph.D.? Kill the Doctoral Seminar
Are Graduate Programs Pressing Pause — or Pulling the Plug?

First article provides some clues why humanities PhDs are taking so long:
- "Most doctoral programs require two to three years of coursework. " with PhD students expected to take multiple semesters of "Doctoral Seminars" (apparently a distinct thing from masters-level offerings).
- the article suggests to "Offer two years of well-designed, coherent, master's level coursework, and then give students three years to do research and produce an original dissertation project." to improve situation.

From my perspective even two years of pure course-taking are hardly justified. I know people who finished their course requirements within a semester of starting. While I personally opted for a more leisurely pace, I finished within two semesters (I also took one-off courses way later  to diversify my skillset). All people I know from grad school started their phd research within one semester of enrolling.

Second article acknowledges bad market for graduates and resource limitations, but still complains about need "to cut off the chance for a new generation to enter graduate studies in English, comparative literature, foreign languages and literatures, anthropology, sociology". I.e. author knowingly wants to steer their students towards likely underfunded path with great opportunity costs.

I'm not in the humanities, so not an expert in the PhD for these degrees, but isn't learning the literature in a seminar setting necessary for really understanding how to dissect and analyze it? If the purpose is to get a master's level understanding, then why not just do a masters?

[marshwiggle]

Another epic quote from the second article:

We don't want an exclusively STEM college experience.

God forbid!!!

(I'm pretty sure an "exclusively humnanities college experience" would be absolutely fine, though.)

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

The seminars were also invaluable in learning how to critique and understand other people's work. That's really fundamental to humanities disciplines. I think there's a better case to be made for eliminating coursework, rather than seminars. I went to a program where we only did seminars and it worked well.

I'm not in the humanities, so not an expert in the PhD for these degrees, but isn't learning the literature in a seminar setting necessary for really understanding how to dissect and analyze it? If the purpose is to get a master's level understanding, then why not just do a masters?

Neither am I. I am not questioning the need for seminar per.
My questions are
- whether one needs distinct doctoral level in the first place. For me "doctoral level understanding" comes not being taught it, but from  one's own research (and from conversation with peers one's research)
- how many semesters of such seminars are actually needed. Based on the article it looks like people are spending 2-3 years on coursework explaining why their total times to graduation are so long. If such amount of coursework is indeed needed, then, one should offer guaranteed funding for 6+ years (probably, by reducing enrollment).

[mamselle]

Are you by chance comparing US and European models (just based on your moniker)?

I knew of people taking 6, 10, 11, 12 years in an interdisciplinary humanities program.

M.

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

Are you by chance comparing US and European models (just based on your moniker)?

Not particularly in this case.
In my field, indeed, [number of courses in a PhD program in the Land of Letter] > [number of courses in a PhD program in the Land of A4]
However, "two to three years of coursework" referenced in the article is way above any program I am aware of anywhere in the world.

I knew of people taking 6, 10, 11, 12 years in an interdisciplinary humanities program.

Were they informed beforehand that it may take this long?
And how were they funded?

[marshwiggle]

Are you by chance comparing US and European models (just based on your moniker)?

I knew of people taking 6, 10, 11, 12 years in an interdisciplinary humanities program.

M.

I think this should be Dante's 10th circle of Hell; eternal tedium.

[mamselle]

Are you by chance comparing US and European models (just based on your moniker)?

Not particularly in this case.
In my field, indeed, [number of courses in a PhD program in the Land of Letter] > [number of courses in a PhD program in the Land of A4]
However, "two to three years of coursework" referenced in the article is way above any program I am aware of anywhere in the world.

I knew of people taking 6, 10, 11, 12 years in an interdisciplinary humanities program.

Were they informed beforehand that it may take this long?
And how were they funded?

Well, let's see...

6 years: Individual was also a journalist and was allowed to use global interviews as research in a comprehensive work on leadership, political policy, and international warfare. Owing to the need for travel, as well as writing up the thesis, several literature studies and international policy seminars were set up as independent study courses, which took longer to complete, be graded, and counted towards the coursework requirements. The journalistic employer covered travel and other expenses, the school offered the usual two years of coverage for tuition, housing, food, and books; I believe a grant or two from an agency doing journalism and public policy covered the four years in between.

Few foresaw the revolution in the country they were covering, so I doubt anyone warned them their work might take longer or cost more, so, no.

10 years: Individual was doing a fine-tooth-comb edition of a known poet's work with a contract to publish already in hand (it took so long it may have been rescinded, but a publisher's advance may have covered a few years' work in addition to the school's two-year standard and a TA-ship that later lapsed). The preparatory classwork, partly standard grad-level English poetry courses and partly independent studies funded by travel grants to UK libraries housing the originals, took longer. The work outliving all funding sources, the student was evicted and sleeping in their car a month before graduation. The degree was awarded and an extra year allowed for revisions, finally made three years later, and the dissertation filed; lost to follow-up.

11 years: Individual made a strong start but advisors were either inattentive--causing the need for an extra year of coursework because of errors in weighting credit for independent studies--or directly hostile to the work, causing five chair transfers in search of an advisor who was not unsympathetic to the proposed study area and understood its premises. The untrained department secretary in charge of financial advisement refused to fill out financial aid forms for four years after the original three of coursework support; the student was working at large and applying for grants while researching and writing. After several years of attenuated progress, loans were correctly secured by another office; a thesis was finished three years later.

Due to politicized scheduling issues (the fifth chair, friend of the assistant provost, didn't respect the two most knowledgeable committee members' work, and booked the defense while one was out of the country and the other at a parent's funeral--both previously noted). Those two could not attend the defense, which barely had a quorum; absent support for correct answers to queries, the thesis was declined; the appeal lost on the same political grounds. None of that was predictable; other problems within the department arose in the course of the program and led to its closing a year later.

12 years: I doubt if anyone could have warned this person in advance that the dissertation chair would die after a second proposal defense (the candidate was working between psychology and theater; the first lit review was deemed too light on the psych side) or the new chair (who had sat on the committee up to that point) would then turn around and say they had disagreed with everything the chair had required on personality theory, feminism, and theater, and expected the student to start over from their (weird, several decades out-of-date) parameters.

The student tried for a year, couldn't satisfy the new chair, and left the department with a second M.A., starting over at another school (fortunately in the same town), including all coursework, because the new school only transferred three credits (not courses) against the requirements. Funding in both instances was given in the form of a residence hall assistance-ship (RA), which required a lot of Friday- and Saturday-night oversight of drunk undergraduates and a fair bit of time in student court--hard to get work done on the weekends. An additional stipend literally allowed for $2/meal per day.

The second program was successfully passed in six years, the dissertation published, and the person has since been tenured (twice) after moving from a smaller school that was about to fail (and I believe recently did) to a stronger one with more resources and support (but also on tenterhooks at present).

Mixed bag, all the same school, all humanities; none were predictable, and all were only funded for coursework (except the RA- and TA-ships): students had a variety of outcomes, as you can see, but all saw it through.

M.

[Caracal]

The seminars were also invaluable in learning how to critique and understand other people's work. That's really fundamental to humanities disciplines. I think there's a better case to be made for eliminating coursework, rather than seminars. I went to a program where we only did seminars and it worked well.

I'm not in the humanities, so not an expert in the PhD for these degrees, but isn't learning the literature in a seminar setting necessary for really understanding how to dissect and analyze it? If the purpose is to get a master's level understanding, then why not just do a masters?

Neither am I. I am not questioning the need for seminar per.
My questions are
- whether one needs distinct doctoral level in the first place. For me "doctoral level understanding" comes not being taught it, but from  one's own research (and from conversation with peers one's research)
- how many semesters of such seminars are actually needed. Based on the article it looks like people are spending 2-3 years on coursework explaining why their total times to graduation are so long. If such amount of coursework is indeed needed, then, one should offer guaranteed funding for 6+ years (probably, by reducing enrollment).

I tend to agree that three years is probably too much. I think there's a better case for eliminating coursework than seminars-but that might come out of my own weird doctoral training. I think it would be hard for most students to start working on a dissertation after only one year in the program. In my program, the first two years was a combination of practical experience in researching and writing doctoral level work, learning how to critique the work of others and reading a big pile of stuff for comps.

None of it was wasted time and I don't think I would have finished my dissertation any quicker if it was somehow shrunk to one year. I just would have read less, not had as much experience researching and writing, and not have figured out how to situate my work within the field when I started my dissertation.

If you're trying to figure out how to reduce the time people take to complete doctorates, I don't understand focusing on the first couple of years. Sure, if you have a three year period of coursework, it might make sense to see if you really need that third year. However, far more people get bogged down at the end.

The bad job market in many fields plays a big role in this. Most of the people I know who finished in six years or under received a job offer or postdoc contingent on finishing. They then finished because they had to, or they'd lose the position. However, it is getting more and more difficult for people to get jobs while ABD. Postdocs can pick up some of the slack, but not all. Often when people are on the market while working on the dissertation and don't get any offers, the incentives to finish just don't exist. Once you run out of the guaranteed funding, there are usually other funding sources you can tap into-usually teaching of various sorts at the University. If you finish without a job you don't have access to those sources of funding. Finishing a dissertation is always a painful thing-the four months before I finished were the hardest I've ever worked in my life. It would be really hard to get yourself to do that if the reward is that you have no job and no clear source of income.

If schools really wanted to improve their numbers, the simplest solution would be to offer year long postdocs to students whose advisors said they would be able to finish before the start of the next school year. That would get a lot of people to finish a year or even two earlier than they would otherwise.

[apl68]

In the history program where I had my graduate experience, anybody who came in with only an undergrad degree had to start with three years of course work to get to the MA point.  Those three years were spent doing the titanic amounts of reading (Hundreds of pages a day for months on end) considered necessary to get a handle on the existing literature in the field.  After that students were required to participate in a "dissertation seminar," where we shared and critiqued each others' chapters-in-progress.  I spent three years trying to write a dissertation before I became so hopelessly deadlocked with my committee chair that I gave up.  Later I went back and tried to complete, only to give up again forever some months later and enroll in library school.

I went in on a four-year graduate fellowship that waived tuition and included a stipend for TA work.  I naively supposed that the four years was meant to see a student through to completion of the PhD.  Apparently in an earlier generation that had been the case, but by the time I got there getting done in four years was unheard of unless you came in with an MA in hand from elsewhere.  How you funded yourself after your four-year fellowship was your problem.  There were a couple of fifth-year funding opportunities available that involved working with other departments.  I was essentially told not to even bother applying for these, since others were more competitive.  With hindsight, that should have been my signal to give up right there.

If you weren't one of the anointed recipients of the fifth-year funding opportunities, you could do some grading work for a few cents over minimum wage.  By the time you had done all the necessary uncompensated prep work, you were making less than minimum wage.  Since it was impossible to live on that, you had to find other work as well.  In my case, I worked for the library as a student assistant, not knowing at the time that it would become my Plan B career.  All of us grad students in the department worked very long hours.  I recall a fellow student talking enviously about how much time her husband had.  He was a med student....

Six or seven years of living like this was not an unusual experience for those in the program who finished their degrees.  I know of several who never found work in their fields.  After my time, the department seems to have worked on funding students better than our cohort was funded.  I was told by one of my old profs that they had done this after seeing experiences like mine and deciding that it wasn't right to let that happen.

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

If you're trying to figure out how to reduce the time people take to complete doctorates, I don't understand focusing on the first couple of years. Sure, if you have a three year period of coursework, it might make sense to see if you really need that third year. However, far more people get bogged down at the end.

It is logical that people lose focus over time. So, cutting time to degree may help.
Also, multiple people getting bogged down at the end suggests that the program is poorly-structured.
It is at the best interest of all parties to redistribute attrition towards the beginning.

The bad job market in many fields plays a big role in this. Most of the people I know who finished in six years or under received a job offer or postdoc contingent on finishing. They then finished because they had to, or they'd lose the position. However, it is getting more and more difficult for people to get jobs while ABD. Postdocs can pick up some of the slack, but not all.

This only proves that the main point of a doctoral degree in humanities is an academic career. So, it is a responsibility of the current faculty to be as pro-active and open as possible in communicating the job market state to prospective and current students.

[jerseyjay]

The description of the PhD program in English at ASU reminds me of my first doctoral program, in history, on the East Coast.

I came directly from a BA at a good public university, and probably was somewhat naive about graduate study. I took 34 credits (two years) of PhD coursework. The courses were all on whatever the professors' interests were, and had no inherent connection to the departmental comprehensive exams. Sometimes the readings for a class were on the comp reading lists, but not always. After two years of this, I realized that I was no closer to getting a  PhD than I was when I started. So I dropped out and moved to Britain, where I finished my dissertation and got a PhD in three years.

I could have been more savvy about how the PhD program worked, and I could have had better advising. The two years' of course work has actually helped me as a professor, because I feel better grounded in the literature of my field. But few of my cohort ever finished the degree, and the endless coursework was one reason. (I think the program has since modified its requirements.)

On the other hand, I think that many of my cohort never earned the PhD because they realized there were no jobs out there and decided to do something else with their life. Many (but not all) of my cohort at the British school do have good jobs, but I think that is in part because the school is higher ranking.

My biggest irritation is not that I took 34 credits, but that after I dropped out, the school wouldn't give me a master's degree, because I had not taken the comprehensive exams.

[Parasaurolophus]

From what I can tell based on my own experience and those of people I know in my field, one major key to reducing the time-to-doctorate would be to have more responsive supervisors. There are so, so, so many people I know whose supervisors took 6 months to one year or more to get back to them on drafts of their work. For a few people, this got better once they hit time limitation and were about to be kicked out of the program. At that point, their supervisors got very fast with the feedback.

But the thing is, 6-7 years in is not the right time to be getting good with feedback. That feedback is much more valuable (not to mention more useful!) earlier in the doctoral career.

[Caracal]

The bad job market in many fields plays a big role in this. Most of the people I know who finished in six years or under received a job offer or postdoc contingent on finishing. They then finished because they had to, or they'd lose the position. However, it is getting more and more difficult for people to get jobs while ABD. Postdocs can pick up some of the slack, but not all.

This only proves that the main point of a doctoral degree in humanities is an academic career. So, it is a responsibility of the current faculty to be as pro-active and open as possible in communicating the job market state to prospective and current students.

No disagreement on that. However, the other part of adjusting to the realities of the job market is for schools to admit fewer students and give them more support. I'd argue that giving students post docs actually would be more helpful in helping students transition into alternate careers than career advice from their graduate advisors. A grad student with a dissection in hand and some sort of university post doc could use that year to both apply for academic jobs, but also to figure out other career possibilities. Much better than a system where the incentives can encourage people to remain in a state of limbo.

[Hibush]

From what I can tell based on my own experience and those of people I know in my field, one major key to reducing the time-to-doctorate would be to have more responsive supervisors. There are so, so, so many people I know whose supervisors took 6 months to one year or more to get back to them on drafts of their work. For a few people, this got better once they hit time limitation and were about to be kicked out of the program. At that point, their supervisors got very fast with the feedback.

But the thing is, 6-7 years in is not the right time to be getting good with feedback. That feedback is much more valuable (not to mention more useful!) earlier in the doctoral career.

Would the time-to-degree be more reasonable, and the number of students trained more balanced, if advisors were expected to meet and provide feedback to each student weekly?

That time commitment applies in my field, and it has both effects.

[Parasaurolophus]

From what I can tell based on my own experience and those of people I know in my field, one major key to reducing the time-to-doctorate would be to have more responsive supervisors. There are so, so, so many people I know whose supervisors took 6 months to one year or more to get back to them on drafts of their work. For a few people, this got better once they hit time limitation and were about to be kicked out of the program. At that point, their supervisors got very fast with the feedback.

But the thing is, 6-7 years in is not the right time to be getting good with feedback. That feedback is much more valuable (not to mention more useful!) earlier in the doctoral career.

Would the time-to-degree be more reasonable, and the number of students trained more balanced, if advisors were expected to meet and provide feedback to each student weekly?

That time commitment applies in my field, and it has both effects.

Weekly would probably be overkill for us, but monthly or bi-monthly seems like a good target.

I doubt you'd manage to cut time-to-degree down to four years, given all the hoops one has to jump through (classes, language acquisition, logic proficiency, etc.), but you could easily cut it to 5-6, with the occasional 4.