Attrition among Ph.D. Candidates: An Analysis of a Cohort of Recent Woodrow Wilson Fellows

Knowledge of the educational, social, and economic factors associated with attrition among graduate students has been very limited to date. This paper attempts to isolate systematically the quantitative importance of a number of explanatory variables for the problem of attrition of doctoral candidates. Sex, field of graduate study, size of graduate school, and academic achievement (but not socioeconomic status of the parents) all seem to have a significant impact on the "success" or "failure" of the graduate students in this sample. For the purposes of this article, "failure" was defined as attendance in graduate school up to six to eight years without acquiring a Ph.D. Mr. Mooney concludes by noting that attempts to expand the number of Ph.D.'s simply by providing more fellowship money will be hampered by certain barriers, social and educational in nature. Since the size of the graduate school bears an inverse relation to the percentage of graduate students acquiring a Ph.D., he argues that existing graduate schools should make a more intensive effort to see to it that more of their present graduate students acquire a Ph.D. rather than simply expanding their enrollments in an attempt to satisfy the demand for more Ph.D.'s.