The Three Magic Letters: Getting to PhD

Who Makes It Through?

Reviewed by Barbara E. Lovitts

Michael T. Nettles and Catherine M. Millett.
Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006

The Three Magic Letters: Getting to PhD is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of major studies on doctoral education. The researchers administered a twenty-eight page survey to currently enrolled doctoral students in their second year and beyond in eleven disciplines at twenty-one major doctorate-granting institutions in 1997. The study had a 70 percent response rate, resulting in one of the largest samples of doctoral students (9,036) in American universities. Michael Nettles and Catherine Millett tracked their sample’s degree completion through 2001, and they intend to conduct a follow-up study.

The book focuses on seven “main areas of interest”: demographics, preparation and screening, financing, socialization, research productivity, satisfaction, and rate of progress and degree completion. For each of these areas, which reflect the primary chapter structure of the results part of the book, Nettles and Millett provide descriptive statistics for five broad fields of study (education, engineering, humanities, science and mathematics, and social sciences), for five groups of students (African American, Asian American, Hispanic, white, and international) and for men and women. They also provide relational analyses that are designed to predict and explain many of the field, racial and ethnic, and sex differences found in earlier chapters.

The results are presented in the form of a technical report. Each section of each chapter starts with a scrupulous review of the literature. Then Nettles and Millett present their findings for that topic for each gender, racial and ethnic group, and field of study, noting similarities and differences with previous studies. Where relevant, they try to explain their findings and make policy recommendations.

In general, the authors’ results confirm much of what is already in the literature, although they break new ground in a number of areas. Most noteworthy are their findings on advisers as distinct from mentors; research productivity; stop-out rates, or the rates of students who have temporarily withdrawn from study but who are expected to return; and rate of progress, for which they developed a new measure to examine students’ elapsed time in their programs in relation to eight stages of progress.

The most important data in the book, which are distributed across sections and chapters, are about African American graduate students —particularly those in engineering, science, and mathematics—and their relative disadvantage compared with students from other groups. African American graduate students are less likely to have received their bachelor’s degrees from the nation’s most competitive colleges and universities. They have the lowest GRE scores, which affects initial assistantship offers and, in turn, access to the most productive faculty advisers and mentors. Because there is a high demand for African American graduate students, these students are more likely to be offered fellowships, which also contributes to their decreased likelihood of receiving assistantships at the time of admission and during their doctoral programs. African American graduate students work a larger number of hours at jobs not related to their academic programs and report the lowest graduate grade point averages in all fields except the humanities, though their average grade point average across fields is higher than 3.5.

African American graduate students in engineering, science, and mathematics report the lowest level of social and academic interaction with faculty members and perceive the quality of their interaction with faculty members to be lower than that of other groups. They are less likely to have a mentor and are less satisfied with their programs. These students also exhibit lower research productivity, which may affect their ability to secure a prestigious postdoctoral or academic position. Among engineering, science, and mathematics students who had completed their degrees by 2001, African Americans had lower completion rates than either white students or international students.

While Nettles and Millett make an important contribution to our understanding of doctoral students and their progress to the degree, there are some caveats. First, Nettles and Millett sampled only currently enrolled graduate students. These students were part of much larger entering cohorts that included students who had dropped out, were stopped out at the time of the survey, transferred, left with a master’s degree, or even completed the degree before the time the survey was administered. These groups are not acknowledged. This puts the 62 percent completion rate for the 2001 sample in a different light. A complete and accurate picture of graduate students and their experiences in their doctoral programs cannot be drawn until the experiences of all students who entered doctoral programs are taken into account.

Second, even though Nettles and Millett remind their readers that they are dealing with the “hopes and dreams of real people,” they justify the elimination of students who were in their first year from their sample as “effectively clear[ing] the decks of those who were merely testing the waters.” Eliminating first-year students introduces bias for two reasons. Evidence suggests that students who leave their programs in their first year are less likely to have financial support and are more likely to be women and members of underrepresented groups—the main issue and main groups that Nettles and Millett care most about. In addition, research indicates that many students who leave in their first year do so because they are turned off by their experiences with their departments and faculty members.

Third, none of the data are presented by year or stage in program. Yet students can be expected to have varying experiences based on their year and stage. For example, the book states that the students’ average education debt was $19,343. What does this mean when some students are in the earlier stages of their graduate programs and have not yet finished accumulating debt? Similarly, should we be surprised that students who are still taking courses have not published journal articles?

Fourth, while Nettles and Millett are concerned about students “getting to PhD,” those who get there are not equal in important ways. Some students make good progress, while others do not. The authors’ sample starts with second-year students, but they do not provide information on students at the upper end of the distribution—who could have been enrolled for ten or more years. How do the experiences of outliers differ from average students? And what are the practical and policy implications for students and graduate schools?

Barbara Lovitts is a senior program officer at the National Academy of Engineering. She is the author of Leaving the Ivory Tower: The Causes and Consequences of Departure from Doctoral Study and the forthcoming book Making the Implicit Explicit: Creating Performance Expectations for Assessing the Dissertation.

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