Adequate funding, clear department expectations and regular counseling with advisers can go a long way in improving times-to-degree and attrition rates in doctoral programs in the humanities, reports a Cornell higher education expert and first author of a major new study.

And, finishing the degree in six or seven years rather than longer is positively associated with the chances that graduates will get tenure-track jobs and publish their research, says Cornell's Ronald G. Ehrenberg, who has authored a new book with three colleagues on their study that tracked a 10-year effort to improve Ph.D.-level humanities education.

The study and the book, "Educating Scholars: Doctoral Education in the Humanities" (Princeton University, December 2009), also found that single or married women -- with or without children at the time of entry to graduate school -- take no longer than single men to earn such doctorates.

Ehrenberg, Cornell's Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics and director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, and his team examined the Graduate Education Initiative of the Mellon Foundation. The foundation spent $85 million from 1991 to 2001 to enable 54 humanities departments at 10 universities -- including Cornell -- to improve the structure, organization and funding of their Ph.D. programs while maintaining or improving the quality of education they offered.

Funds supported planning, student support, endowments, challenge grants and data collection.

Among the findings:

• Multiyear financial-aid packages in the 1990s appear to have reduced attrition early in students' graduate careers. But this reduction was largely offset by increased attrition in the later years of doctoral study. There is a clear trade-off between "weeding out" unpromising students early and having them "languish" in graduate school for years, neither finishing nor leaving.
• About 25 percent of the graduates in the study took 10 years or longer to complete their degrees.
• Twelve percent of the students in the study were counted as having left their Ph.D. programs, but they ultimately received Ph.D. degrees in the same field at other institutions or in other fields. Another 18 percent earned professional degrees. Many of the students who left Ph.D. programs in the humanities were employed within three years in managerial and other professional positions.
• Students who completed their degrees in five or six years did no better in the job market than students who finished in seven years. However, the probability of getting a tenure-track position declined as degree times lengthened beyond seven years.
• On average, married and single women did as well as single men in times to degree, although married men had higher completion rates and shorter times to degree than single men.
• About 60 percent of graduates who were in nontenure-track positions right after graduation received tenure-track jobs within three years of graduation throughout the period.

Neither speedy completion (in three to five years) nor unhurried completion (in eight or more years) are as preferable as finishing the degree within the period between the two extremes, Ehrenberg said.

"Perhaps the most heartening lesson learned" from the study, Ehrenberg wrote recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "is that raising awareness of how much attrition there is and how long degrees actually take can stimulate thoughtful review of programs and sensible decisions to change them."

The book was co-authored by Harriet Zuckerman, senior vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and professor emerita of sociology at Columbia University; Jeffrey A. Groen, research economist at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; and Sharon M. Brucker, project coordinator at the Survey Research Center of Princeton University.

Mary Catt is a staff writer at the ILR School .