The Chronic

Anyone who has worked in a campus post office is familiar with the Chronicle of Higher Education, the massive newspaper that deals with all things related to academia. The arrival of the Chronic, as we lovingly referred to it, would add what seemed to be several hundred pounds to the amount of mail to be delivered around campus. Honestly, though, I never really minded the Chronic because there were quite a few interesting articles in it, and I enjoyed leafing through it in the post office.

I've been giving serious thought to bonking on my PhD studies recently, and I've been reading through a lot of information on the attrition rate of doctoral studies. Yikes. A recent NYT article said that the average length of time to finish a PhD is almost 9 years, and the dropout rate is about 50%. And this article in the Chronic puts the social sciences flop rate at over 60%. Sweet! Apparently what is puzzling to people is that there is no discernible, significant difference in the academic profiles of people who finish PhD programs and those who don't; the GRE and GPA numbers are essentially the same between those who finish and those who don't. What caught my eye was this passage, because it sort of sums up what has been in my head the last few weeks:

Yet the pot of gold at the end of the Ph.D. rainbow may not be there for every candidate. For many of them, despite their love of the subject and their dreams of reveling in the life of the mind, the most logical decision may be to leave.

After a year in a Ph.D. program in history at City University of New York, Nicole Kalian left to take a job as a publicist with a book publisher. Hers was the sort of early attrition that almost everyone agrees is the best kind.

"I didn't see any prospects for when I graduated," says Ms. Kalian, who was shocked to read an article about new Ph.D.'s who couldn't find jobs as adjuncts on enough campuses to earn at least $25,000 a year. "It was frightening, and I could never really shake that thought from my head."

Yup, that is about the size of it for me too. What I found bizarre, though, and rather alien to me, was this part:

The most important reason to care about attrition, most researchers agree, is the effect it has on students' lives. "This is tremendously painful," says Barbara E. Lovitts, who left two doctoral programs before finishing a third one, in sociology, at the University of Maryland at College Park in 1996.

Now a research scientist at Maryland, she is the author of Leaving the Ivory Tower: The Causes and Consequences of Departure From Doctoral Study (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). She saw several people who had not completed their degrees cry during interviews about their grad-school experiences and the effect it had on their lives -- no matter what their reasons for leaving.

"There is a tremendous opportunity cost," Ms. Lovitts says. "These are people who have never failed before in their lives. They were summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. And for the first time in their lives they've experienced failure. It takes people a lot of years to get over it."

Thankfully, I've become intimate with failure in my life, so dropping out of a PhD program and seeing my entire plan for my life crumble into dust in less than 6 weeks is hardly the worst thing I've gone through. I guess I have never really known that many people like this in my life, or at least known them that well, these fortunate souls who have never had to brush up against abject failure or complete and devastating heartache. I wonder what that is like, to live a life so devoid of trauma...