Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Study: Women, minorities earn doctorates more slowly
By Alex Gong
Daily Californian, UC-Berkeley
September 11, 2008

Women and minorities tend to take longer to complete doctoral programs than other demographic groups, while international students stand out as the fastest doctoral matriculants, according to a study released by the Council of Graduate Schools on Tuesday.

The report, "PhD Completion and Attrition: Analysis of Baseline Demographic Data From the PhD Completion Project," analyzes how the gender, citizenship, race and ethnicity of doctoral students influence their degree completion rates for several different disciplines. However, some UC Berkeley officials said the study does not present the issue in a comprehensive way.

According to the study, which draws data from more than 19,000 students from 24 major research universities across the U.S. and Canada, the completion rates for whites and international students are higher than those of minority groups and domestic students.

The project also revealed that women generally finish later than men in doctoral programs. Of the women surveyed, 25 percent took at least seven years to complete their doctorates, compared with 18 percent of men.

Overall, however, the majority of the women and men surveyed completed their doctorates within 10 years.

A higher percentage of men tend to complete their doctorates in the life sciences, engineering and mathematics, while a higher percentage of women tend to complete their doctorates in the humanities and social sciences, the study found.

However, Andrew Szeri, the dean of the Graduate Division at UC Berkeley, said those statistics indicating that women and minority groups progress slower are not entirely accurate.

"Because male students are over-represented in the sciences and engineering where time-to-degree is shorter, they appear to complete faster when averaged over the whole campus," he said in an e-mail. "The differences essentially disappear when one examines the data by broad field."

Szeri said the National Research Council Survey of Research Doctoral Programs, slated to be released in October, will provide a more comprehensive report, which will make comparisons across disciplines and institutions.

Sixty-seven percent of total international students surveyed completed their doctoral programs, in comparison with 54 percent of domestic students.

"I know several people who came from overseas to get their doctorate," senior Albert Chun said of his friends who are graduate students. "They are more oriented toward academics as sojourners. They're less distracted and on a mission to finish."

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