I’m a bit confused (I’m always puzzled by the US school system anyway): What difference do you make between what you call “doctorate” and “PhD”?
Salaam; A
My previous job was a retention program for first generation, low income or disabled college students at a large public 4 year school. Among other things I produced reports tracking drop out and graduation for about 500 current and prior participants.
Our student dropped out largely because of lack of family support. Many FG college students and almost all LI had families which were incapable of helping financially. Often their families would overtly sabotage their efforts to pass. These students frequently had children of their own. Because no one in their family understood college they did not know faculty expectations or how to deal with our large bureaucracy. They would quit because no one supported them at home or on campus.
I know fewer folks who are not FG or LI students quit but I bet they do so for similar reasons.
Ph. D stands for “Doctor of Philosophy” and I think it is the most common Doctorate that is given to the vast majority of Doctoral students. But there are other kinds of doctorate. The two I can think of off the top of my head are MD (Medical Doctor) and JD (Juris Doctor, or “Doctor of Law”).
Basically, “Doctorate” means “the highest level that can be attained in a given field” while Ph.D is a specific type of Doctorate.
I know of at least one college/university that routinely accepts far more students than they can possibly handle, expecting that half to 2/3 of them will drop out; up to 3/4 in some technical majors. This institution also does not do very much to help students having difficulties, and does even less for people returning to school despite having a program that sounds as if they do. They seem to do everything they can to maximize the payment of fees and minimize chances of one’s staying on past the first year. It’s basically sink or swim, nature red in tooth and claw, and academic Darwinism.
I am a former high school drop out and soon to be college drop out(I got my Good Enough Diploma),A lot of people drop out because they are too smart for school and have the wrong personality for it. sure there’s your run of the mill slacker drop out but then there were people like me who are smart enough for it but don’t like to put up with all the BS that goes along with school.
Thats why I left high school, and thats pretty much the reason I’m quitting college. Well that and money. If you are creative and smart enough you just kind of see through the whole educational system. I felt I could do a better job teaching myself than the schools could.
Fustration has a lot do do with dropping out as well. The school only tells you the one way to graduate. When I was behind on credits I asked my counselor about taking night school classes to catch up. She told me that I shouldn’t take the night classes, but I should stay in school for an extra year. She also failed to tell me about the program in which I could have recieved one credit a week if I tried. The schools don’t care if you graduate on time. The longer you stick around the more money the get. They don’t really help troubled youth get through school.
The counselor is pretty much the reason I decieded to drop out.
I just thought I would give you some info from a real drop out.
There is also a Psy.D (Doctor of Applied Clinical Psychology), Ed.D. (Doctor of Educational Science) and many more. They are all doctorates.
I always thought PHD was Pile Higher and Deeper or Post Hole Digger.
I find it interesting that first generation college students don’t have family support. This seems to be a change from the previous generation. My father was the first person in his family to attend college. My grandfather used to proudly tell strangers on the street that his son was going to college.
This varies all over the place. My mother’s father told all his children that if they thought they were going to college, they need never darken his door again. My mother would have liked to do so (and probably would not have minded never seeing him again), but could ill afford to do so. After she & my dad married, she did encourage him to go to college, and he was able to complete two years before needing to devote the time and money to their growing family. She also was adamant that they would do whatever they needed to in order to provide this opportunity to me and my sister.
My father’s parents weren’t too keen on the idea at first, either. They had a very strict old-world mentality that such things belonged to upper-class people only and that it would be inappropriate for ordinary working-class people to forget their “place.”
Just curious- are you talking about Princeton?
(I noticed you’re from Jersey).
Nope. Try a little farther northeast. (If I tell you the name, will I get sued?) It begins with an ‘R.’
You wouldn’t get in trouble, but I believe I know what you’re talking about. Thanks.
Thats sad, but 2/3 dropout isn’t much higher than the 50-60% that is the average.
Can you define “tons” better? How many are we talking, here? How many liberal arts graduates are underemployed? How many go into non-management retail job? Do they stay there? It sounds to me as though you’re taking a few anecdotes and some well-liked jokes about certain degrees, and are inflating them to make broad claims about a population. And I don’t know why this should be considered a challenge to census figures and other empirically-based studies about educational attainment and income.
As for your figures, are you mixing up average pay for recent college graduates with the median for all college graduates?
My Alma Mater! Land of the triple occupancy double! (This is 3 people sharing 2 desks and 2 dressers)
This is Rutgers University, by the way. No one will be sued. They openly admit to overenrollment and tell the freshmen stuck in said triple that the dropout rate has been factored in, and a double will open up by Christmas.
It was a raging controversy on campus the entire time I was there, constantly writen about in the school paper. Over-enrollment caused over crowded classes EVERY fall term. People sitting on floors in lecture halls, registration a nightmare even for upperclassmen, etc.
Rutgers College was the worst offender in this. They are also legendary for being unsupportive of struggling students. I’d imagine they knew they needed to thin their numbers before they exceeded the fire occupancy limit in the dining hall. I went to Douglass College, (which is the women’s college). They didn’t over enroll much, never over crowded housing and made a real effort to see each girl made it to graduation. This is support that I personally needed. I’d had medical problems my senior year, and one of the deans worked with me throughout the year so I wouldn’t have to drop out (or even lose the semester).
The School of Engineering remains and many science departments operate on the boot camp philosophy. The Biology department openly admits Bio 101 is designed to weed out people who can’t hack med/vet school. Which sucks if you happen to be a history major just trying to fill your science cores. Now they have a “Biology Lite” for liberal arts majors.
Lord, have you looked at Princeton’s freshman retention rate? Have you looked at its graduation rate? This is not a school whose freshmen bail out.
As for schools which “overenroll”–generally speaking, some schools have a core recruiting population that is going to have a higher dropout rate. They know that. Not everyone who starts college will finish. They’ll transfer, or drop out, or stop out, for a variety of reasons (not all of them tragic). The less selective the institution, the greater likelihood it’s going to be attracting students who will drop out. Naturally these schools are going to plan for (and enroll) a freshman cohort that will get smaller as time goes on.
Of course this doesn’t justify failing to provide needed services for those students while they are on campus. Students should have housing, and available classes, and the services required to up their chances of sticking around or, at the very least, getting something valuable out of their time at the institution. Shame on institutions which don’t provide that. But don’t think that a low graduation rate necessarily means a school is screwing its students.
I also don’t think it’s a matter of “sucking the fees out of” as many bodies as they can. You don’t make money off overenrolling, even if students drop out before they get expensive to educate.
Finally, it’s very hard to predict yield, so colleges guess every year how many students to admit to hit their target. They don’t always succeed. Michigan blew it by 600 students this year, a real goof.
If my scholarship were to stop for any reason, I would most likely have to drop out. Sure, the loans may cover tuition, but I’m on my own for living expenses because my brother is at a private college and at that point it would be a choice between getting my teaching certificate or having a home and food. Sometimes quite able and promising students just can’t afford to get through.
Having gone to the 7th largest university in the country for undergrad, and another big-ish state school for grad school, I’d say that there are a few causes that stood out for why people left
In undergraduate studies, it seemed like the vast majority of people who dropped out were people who for whatever reason, weren’t very motivated for school. Many of the ones I knew were just more concerned with smoking pot, partying, hanging out, playing in bands, etc… than actually getting a job. Hell, I have a buddy who actually graduated, but is still a slacker, has no real job, and probably makes 1/3 of what I make. If not for peer pressure, he’d have never stayed in school.
The next biggest killers of undergrads was academic difficulty. There were some folks who screwed themselves so badly their freshman year that they either failed straight out, or who never could dig themselves out of the hole they were in.
The third one was financial difficulty, but it was a close second to academic difficulty.
One thing to keep in mind is that the attrition is VERY high the first couple of semesters and tapers off dramatically after that. After your first year, it was pretty much financial difficulty or things like unplanned pregnancy, shotgun weddings or grievous injuries that caused people to quit.
Graduate school was different for me- we didn’t lose many people in my MBA or IT Management MS programs. The ones we did lose were due to things like having to switch cities for work in the middle of the program, or financial difficulties due to having a child, etc…
How can that be? Do you mean that the vast majotirty of the US students choose philosophy as major studyfield?
At my EU university, Western philosophy was a fixed part of the curriculum of the first year. This introduction course offered an overview of all Western philosophy starting with the time of the Myths and some in depth study on selected philosophers (that was largely depending the focus of the professor you had.)
Nobody I know of ever came to the idea to do a doctoral study on philosophy when his studyfield had nothing to do with that besides the introduction course that is autmtomatically part of the curriculum for everyone in every department.
Eventually I could have focussed on Islamic philosophy to do my thesis on, since Arabic and Islamic studies included Islam philosophy, yet even at my EU university I would not had come for one second to the idea to do a doctoral study on the Western philosophy.
I really don’t see why a student in the US suddenly would switch the focus of his atention and study to philosophy if he does not have that as his chosen field of study already. What good can it bring you to have a doctorate in something you don’t work with?
Salaam. A
Many do have support. They did not need our program.
Often these FG students would go to college because their parents really wanted them to. But their parents would make decisions for them or coerce them in to inappropriate majors. I can’t tell you how many pre med students failed out because they listened to their (parents who told them they need to go to college to become a doctor. It’s a nice idea but only a fantasy if you can’t pass organic chemistry.
Our students quit for a variety of reasons. Parental education level is just one thing which makes completion harder. We had plenty of rich kids with well educated parents in our program who we served because they had learning disabilities. They often dropped out simply for poor grades.
Often people who quit go on to complete their degree someplace else. Thus the high drop out rate does not mean people who quit don’t go on to finish a degree.
Now I need to go evaluate some transcripts.