Does it take too long to earn a doctorate?

The New York Times has pub­lished an arti­cle on doc­toral edu­ca­tion, with a long dis­cus­sion on short­en­ing the process:

The aver­age stu­dent takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; 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…

It took me 48 months to com­plete my Ph.D. at the Uni­ver­sity of Geor­gia as a full-time stu­dent. I earned my MBA at Rollins Col­lege in 21 months as a full-time stu­dent. An MBA was not a require­ment in UGA’s busi­ness admin­is­tra­tion pro­gram, but I couldn’t have done my doc­toral course­work with­out some solid MBA experience.

Is doc­toral edu­ca­tion sup­posed to be a career?

Four years was an aver­age time to com­ple­tion for busi­ness doc­tor­ates, as I recall. I spent almost 3 years tak­ing doc­toral courses and sem­i­nars. I pro­posed, wrote and defended my dis­ser­ta­tion dur­ing my final year.

While I was clas­si­fied as a full-time stu­dent at UGA, I also had a job. I taught at least one under­grad­u­ate man­age­ment course for the man­age­ment depart­ment each quar­ter. The col­lege used doc­toral teach­ing assis­tants as instruc­tors, so I designed and taught my man­age­ment courses, based on the college’s model syl­labi and required textboks. The pro­fes­sors gave the doc­toral stu­dents a great deal of flex­i­bil­ity, as long as we taught all our classes, and pro­duced rea­son­able stu­dent eval­u­a­tions and aver­age grades.

It seems like a dif­fer­ent world back then. We weren’t really on the Inter­net at the Terry Col­lege of Busi­ness. We used a ser­vice called BITNET to send emails within the col­lege. BITNET used a store-and-forward approach to move emails and files aong the network.

I knew a few stu­dents who did their dis­ser­ta­tions from a dis­tance. Theirs was a dif­fi­cult road. Man­u­scripts had to be mailed in paper form or on diskettes. Phone calls replaced conferences.

I have a box of paper notes in my office that I con­sult every now and then. Sev­eral stu­dents and I cob­bled these together from our own files, as well as files donated to us by pre­vi­ous stu­dents. One of these days I should spend an after­noon and scan them into my dig­i­tal archives.

Tagged as: education, Georgia, graduate, management, teaching, undergaduate, university, USA