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Indicator II-15
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Time Spent in Graduate School
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Updated (4/2/2010) with data from 2007.
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Obtaining a doctoral degree in any field involves a significant investment of time,
energy, and forgone earnings. But as data from the
Survey of Earned Doctorates
(SED) shows, for students of the humanities, the road to the Ph.D. has traditionally
been an especially long one: from 1977 to 2007, the median number of years from
the start of graduate school to a doctorate award was consistently greater in this
field than in the sciences and engineering (Figure II-15).
What the humanities did share with other fields was a retreat from the particularly
lengthy completion times recorded in the late 1980s and early 1990s for most fields
(the exception being engineering). In 1977, the median number of years to completion
of a humanities doctorate was 8.9 years. By 1987, the duration had increased by
1.6 years. But by 2007, after several years of incremental decline, the average
time to completion was down to 9.3 years.
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