No, doctoral programs that require original research (produced in one’s thesis) generally result in Ph.D’s. We call them Ph.D even if you don’t study philosophy, it could be history or adult education or whatever. You can also get other doctoral degrees, Ed.D. (Doctor of Education) or D.F.A. (Doctor of Fine Arts), D.L.S. (Doctor of Library Science), Juris Doctor (Law), etc. But generally the level of educational degree after a master’s is a Ph.D.
I suspect it dates back to when science was natural philosophy, and pretty much all you ever studied was medicine, law, theology and philosophy. My PhD is in computer science, engineering doctorates are PhDs, as are those in English, physics, biology, and just about everything else. I’d guess those getting PhDs in philosophy are a tiny portion (< 1%?) of all PhDs.
The J.D. degree, however, does not follow a master’s degree (or even the equivalent thereof). It’s a bit of a misnomer, really.
Oh, and you forgot Sc.D. and D.V.M. 
There are lots of hurdles for lots of adults when it comes to college. The biggest might be the money.
But there’s also the intense silliness of some of the requirements. Take Notre Dame, for example. My alma mater. When I started there in 1989, it was a requirement that every student had to know how to swim.
(I consider it a point of pride that I graduated and still can’t swim worth a damn.)
That’s pretty common, and has been for years. I had no problem when I was in college (it was a rare good day), but a friend, who is eight times more athletic than I, took forever to pass the swimming test. My MIL, in about 1936, passed hers only because the coach stuck a pole in her bathing suit and pulled her from one side of the pool to the other.
Another possibility is that students are driven off not by the workload being too heavy and difficult, but just by it being a different type of work. For instance, computer classes in high school usually only involve short coding assignments where the majority of work time gets spent on figuring out how a problem should be approached. Once you get to college computer science classes, you’re suddenly spending much more time on the terribly minute details of ridiculously long coding assignments, and it gets very repetitive and frankly a lot less fun, at least for some people. I imagine a similar process is at work in some other fields.
People often don’t understand what is core to the majors they have chosen. They fail because the don’t realize where their skills lie, and so they pick majors which are inappropriate to them.
I am a good example of this idea. As a freshman I majored in English. I soon realized it was not good for me. I can’t spell anything longer than 4 letters ( and only certain 4 letter word reliably) and I hate memorizing language rules. I found something else to study which I was better at.
Some people have the idea that they are getting a bach degree to make big bucks. Therefore they need a pre med degree, or a CIS/CS degree or something to get them into law school. Often these people fail miserably because they can’t change their major to something which suits their skills but doesn’t obviously pay as much (with FG student often percieved start pay rates seem to be unrealistic). They perform miserably in the same type courses again and again until they quit.
I believe that career/job education for people headed to college would help college drop out rates. On the other hand when I was 16 they wanted to make me an air condition tech.
I think a lot of people who shouldn’t be going to college are going to college. The administrators of my school district took great pride in the number of graduates who went on to college. I wonder if they ever cared about how many actually acquired a degree. Not everybody should go to college and high school administrators need to realize this fact.
Marc
Its true that not everyone should be there. But you don’t want to have a system that keeps people out who should be.
Also you don’t want a system which shuts out poor people or minorities. It gets to be a kind of difficult problem
I’m sure we can find a happy medium between trying to fit all the square pegs into round holes and making sure the round pegs go into the round holes.
Marc
I think this really varies with the school and the program. I went to Cornell in physics and I believe that our graduation rate for the PhD program was about 75% (although this is admittedly an estimate). But, I remember that when I was applying for grad schools, there was a variation – Cornell had a reputation of keeping you once they accepted you whereas Berkeley had the reputation of taking a lot of people (because they needed the T.A. staff) and then subsequently weeding people out. (Cornell physics actually failed out very few people, although they did have a way of “strongly encouraging” some people to leave with a Master’s.)
I should also note that there is a lot of variation with undergraduate schools. I went to a small liberal arts school, Haverford College, and I think there the graduation rate was also quite high…although I’m not exactly sure what it was. My guess is that the reasons for the high rate were that it was a fairly self-selected bunch who certainly were under no illusions that it would be a party school and also that it was a small enough school that it was a fairly nuturing environment and you got much more individualized attention than you would at a bigger school.
Hey, no kidding - so did my dad :). He originally was supposed to be in Robert Richardson’s lab ( I think that’s the one - the guy who recently won the nobel ), but ended up down the hall with some new guy who needed grad students ( though he did end up doing his doctoral dissertation on some aspect of superfluidity of liquid helium, though ).
Err…that’s all - pretty much a pure hijack/twinkie post ;).
Aldebaran: Just to add/possibly clarify the above posts, a handy wikipedia link:
In short the term as used in the U.S. today is purely a honorific dating to the 19th century and has nothing to do with the modern field of philosophy.
- Tamerlane
Umm - real life is long coding assignments. Might be good for them to get a taste of it. And it sounds like the high schools are teaching exactly the right thing. Could you define ridiculously long? Since my undergrad assignments had to deal with card decks and one-a-day runs, I don’t have much sympathy. But I get the point - sometimes dabbling at something seems like a lot of fun. The real test is if you still consider it fun when you get to the real work. I always did, which is why I never switched majors.
Thank you for the explanation on my Ph.D confusion… I think I shall hold on to my doctorate
Reading the Wikipedia, I see some inaccuracy in the (short) entry about Belgium, stating “most students don’t attend university” for having a Licentiate.
They also give the impression you can have obtain a Licentiate in 4 years, while that is not at all the case in every studyfield.
There is a clear distinction between the academic value of a licentiate obtained at a Belgian university and which can ask four to seven years of study (for example Basic Law = 5, General Medicine = 7) and one obtained at an institution for Higher Education Outside the University, this last system also divided in what is called the “short” type (3 years, leading to the diplome of graduate) and what is named "higher education outside the unversity of the long type (4 years, giving a Licentiate).
The university education is leading directly to an academic diplome, also called Licentiate, and is more popular among students who at least have some thoughts about wanting an academic career, since university education creates also the occasion for entering a doctoral study.
Higher education outside the university prepares more directly for getting a job outside the academic field. You can however use such a diplome to obtain (an additional) university diplome by entering a shortened program in your field (or a close related one), which mostly comes down at 3 additional years of university for receiving an academic Licentiate.
If you have for example the diplome translator/interpreter Modern Standard Arabic/French/Dutch = 4 years study outside the univ = long type, and you want to have the university diplome Licentiate in Arabic and Islamic studies you can do that in 3 years instead of 4.
The Wikipaedia information about the intensity of the study in the Belgian system, be it higher education inside our outside the university is however correct. (I’m alrea They give an average of 30 hours of courses to follow a week, but up to 38 hours of courses a week would be even more correct in certain fields of study (and certainly at the university) + you have to put a lot of time and effort in self-study and research (in my case for example that implied also study on additional languages besides the four I had in my curriculum.)
You people have only 15 course hours a week and can spread all the stuff over more years? Why oh why didn’t I want to go to the USA? You are on a long vacation there
With the Bologna treatment the Belgian situation on the higher education level can only become more confusing for outsiders (and already has become since Bologna counts starting this academic year with first BA year while still going on with gradually finishing the old programs for the students who are busy doing them).
It seems they have the intention to split up the diplomes in to “technical” and “academic” BA/MA and only the academic ones can give you entrance to doctoral study.
I have a niece in Belgium who is already feeling a victim of the new system. She is finishing the “old” university licentiate and now she has no clue if yes or no her diplome, which shall receive both the title Licentiate and Masters, shall keep the same value as the future Masters obtained under the Bologna system.
Her curriculum has right now a higher value then the new ones under the BA/MA, but it is still a programming in full evolution so it depends on how the situation developpes.
As for dropping out of the higher school system, my experience in the Belgian situation is that many students under-estimate the transition from school to university or other higher education institution.
They underestimate the intensity of the program and the pressure to organize yourself between attending the required courses and the required self-study afterwords and in between, which is an absolute necessity fro the very beginning. Most drop-outs fall in the course of the first semester or after finishing the exams of the first year.
At the university many however switch from university to the higher education outside the university and among them there are quite a few who choose then the 3 year program leading to graduate which gives already a good prospect on getting a decent job.
The good thing about that is that after finishing this study (short or long type), you can always go back to the univsity university for doing the shorter program leading to your academic diplome.
A doctoral candidate is typically educated by a thesis advisor, or supervisor, who chairs a thesis committee which supervises the doctoral candidate. In the US, doctoral programs typically require a series of required and optional courses at the beginning of the program, but education in the latter portion of the program tends to consist of informal discussions with the thesis advisor and individual research by the student. Many universities separate the program into two portions with a required doctoral examination before allowing a student to be formally admitted to a doctoral program. The funding of students varies from field to field, and many graduate students in the sciences and engineering work as teaching assistants or research assistants while they are a doctoral student.
I know that doesn’t sound like a lot but that doesn’t include lab time or the time required outside of class to study. If you’re taking 15 hours of classes in the United States you’re working more then 15 hours a week.
Marc
The rule of thumb where I go to school is to spend 2 hours studying a week per credit hour. So if you are taking 15 credits, studying 30 hours or more is necessary. Hard to do and work a 30 hour a week job as well, some people are even crazier and work 40+ hours on top of the schooling.
Sorry for the quotes out of the Wikipedia article. Once again I did somthing to enter my post before finishing.
Probably because I was trembling again when thinking back at my years in Belgium, trying to survive the cruel univ. (and Catholic. As if the horror was not enough as it was without this.)
Regarding the situation in the Arab world, there are a lot of factors that influence both enrollment and eventual drop out later. However, the acessibility to education in gneral, even when it comes to poor and rural environments is still going upwarts (discussion about the quality of all of this is an other matter). So are the enrollments in universities. A certain amount of students nevertheless see it as having some additional worht to go study at Western univs (I’m not informed about any studyfield not touching my own, so I can’t argue about the “real” value of that or the differences between programs and level of education quality).
Being completely myself I did the opposite: First in the EU and then in my region. That is logical by the nature of my studyfield when you start with this in a Western nation being Westerner, yet not logical in my case. However I don’t regret my stubborn wish to start with it first of all where my mother was born and at her Alma Mater ( I had not at all my curretn studyfield in mind when I first enrolled there.)
I was overthere a few weeks ago and noticed my dearest professors still busy recovering from my mini-invasion and trying to hide their grey hair. The buildings however survive unscarred as they since many centuries sruvive all these outsider’s attacks. Imagine what would have happened if I had come to the US…
Salaam. A
Yes, I always felt sorry for the students at my univ who had to do lab.time as well. They are the poor ones who must count on 38 hours a week and then you don’t even get near their course documents, which could be a ratio of 150 pages seen in one single hour of class. Some of them were located near whre I lived, so I witnessed their misery from very close.
The poor souls. Every time I looked at their pale faces and saw a page full of mysterious formula’s and weird life-forms, I praised myself lucky I escaped out of Medical study after the first semester.
Whenever I was floored with headaches (largely thanks to twinbrother Dyslex) and struggling with my languages I only had to look at one of my surviving former courses to feel already much better.
Salaam. A
I agree that not all of the requirements make sense to everyone, but how much of a hurdle do you think this really is? Do you think a PE requirement or swimming requirement, for example, plays a big role in attrition or transfer? I could see it being the straw that broke the camels back for a person already soured on the experience, but I would be surprised if this sort of thing is what really holds people back.
The university I work for is currently reviewing “retention”–a nicer term, I think, than “avoiding dropouts”. The problems that Student Life, the department assigned with the task of improving our retention rate (or, to put it another way, stopping students from dropping out) are several. Some are rather unique to our university, but most are universal. I’ll list them here, followed by “solution(s)” suggested by Student Life.
[ul]
[li]Academic problems. Already mentioned and debated here. Solution(s): Improve access to academic tutors. Identify students with potential academic problems (such as deficiencies in math, science, etc.) before they come to the university. More one-on-one teaching.[/li][li]Financial problems. Not as much a problem as you’d think, even though we are a private university. Financial aid programs supply an average of 48% of the “full-pay tuition” for each student here. Solution(s): Get students (and parents) to get a Plan B in place if scholarships or financial aid isn’t forthcoming. (The other option, “tap fundraising for more scholarship dollars,” is up to my department.)[/li][li]Homesickness. Less a problem than it was, because we have fewer out-of-area students than in years past. Solution(s): Encourage first-year students to join social activities. Have counseling services develop programs to help homesick students.[/li][li]Social boredom. A big problem for us. We are in a relatively isolated location, and it is impossible to go to bars, restaurants or clubs without a car. Solution(s): Organize group trips to off-campus activities, with transportation.[/li][li]Dissatisfaction with coursework and/or major. We’re not a big university, so if a student decides they’d be better off studying, say, engineering, they have to transfer elsewhere to take it. Solution(s): More student input on coursework loads and classes.[/li][/ul]
In the final reckoning, there’s no way to stop every student from staying on. Some reasons for dropping out are insurmountable: health reasons, family emergencies, mental health issues, legal problems.