US: Matches and mismatches in producing PhDs

In theory, these days, everyone agrees that attrition in PhD programmes is a real problem, writes Scott Jaschik for Inside Higher Ed. Graduate students don't want to spend years in programmes from which they will never graduate, and universities don't want to support those who won't complete their programmes. Also in theory these days, most academics agree that it's crucial to expand the diversity of the PhD pipeline so that the candidates for faculty positions represent a broader demographic than the current professoriate. Research presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association challenged higher education a bit on both of these supposed consensuses.

One study - comparing the attitudes of students and faculty members at the same university about why some graduate students leave - suggested quite a gap in views, and a gap that exposes that many professors feel they don't need to worry about graduate student attrition. Another study examined why some undergraduate institutions have uncommon levels of success in sending minority students on to doctoral programmes - suggesting that there are approaches that could be used by many other institutions.
Full report on the Inside Higher Ed site