| Graduate schools have faced attrition rates of approximately 50% for at least the last 40 years. This theoretically grounded study explores the causes of graduate student attrition, and, in the process, explains why such a high rate of attrition has persisted for so long. Theory is developed, and explanations are provided, at the institutional, interdepartmental, intradepartmental, and individual levels. The study involved surveying individuals who entered doctoral programs in 1982-1984 (i.e., both completers and noncompleters). The sample was drawn from two universities which are among the top Ph.D-granting universities in the United States and, within each university, from nine departments. Thirty noncompleters, approximately two from each department from each university, participated in an hour-long telephone interview in order to explore issues that could not be addressed adequately by the survey instrument. Half-hour long telephone interviews were conducted with the Directors of Graduate Study in each department in order to gain background information on the departments' formal and informal structures and processes for educating graduate students. In addition, site visits were made to each university and two faculty members from each of the nine participating departments--one who had produced many Ph.Ds and one who produced few--participated in half-hour long, face-to-face interviews in order to discern systematic differences in attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of those most responsible for training graduate students. The high and persistent rate of attrition was found to lie in the attribution process and the lack of the appropriate feedback: All members of the university community, including the departing student, blame the student for the student's attrition, consequently, the departing student leaves without giving voice to his/her discontents. Differences in departments' attrition rates were found to lie in the different structures and opportunities they provide students for integration into the departments' academic and social systems and for cognitive map development. Differences between completers and noncompleters, and even completers who seriously considered leaving without completing (at-risk completers) and those who never considered leaving (pure completers), were found to lie in the differential distribution of structures and opportunities for integration and cognitive map development within departments. |
