50% Dropout Rate: The PhD Problem Nobody's Talking About

50% of doctoral students never finish their degrees, but it's often not for the reasons that you think. I'm Dr. Steve Tippins, Ph.D. I've been in academia for 35 years and served on over 300 dissertation committees and helped hundreds more graduate as a coach. I'm going to walk you through the 7 reasons that doctoral students don't finish their programs and how you can avoid them and not be permanently stuck at ABD. The first reason is money., and that can come in a number of ways. Has your institution lost funding so that they can't fund you for the scholarship or the work you've been doing? Or have you run out of student loan money? All of these factors can come into the money part of the equation. Or on the other side, look, you don't get to make a lot of money as a doctoral student, and perhaps you have needs that exceed the money, so some people leave just because of that. To avoid this, be aware of it ahead of time. It's not a decision to go in a doctoral program lightly, and you should be preparing and also preparing financially so that you can take hits if that goes away, if some portion of the funding goes away. So basically save before you get in so you can be prepared for that. Recently, we've seen more and more people who had funding for, let's say, 4 or 5 years locked up, But now they're at 4 years or 4 years and 6 months, and there is no more funding for whatever reasons institution is saying there's no more funding. Don't fall into the trap of saying, "Oh, I know I've got 5 years. I can make it that long." Plan for your program to be shorter because that way, if you're planning for 3.5 years and you now take 4.5 and your funding was 5, you're all set. One of the things that slows people down and can use up a lot of money is the quest for perfection. I've gotta write the perfect dissertation. This is gonna be the best dissertation that's ever written. Well, you don't get a gold star for writing the best dissertation that's ever written. You don't get anything other than graduate, which is the same as someone who wrote a document that's good enough gets. But perhaps good enough can get you done months earlier where financial issues can be avoided. So remember, your expectations have to be managed. And that's the second point I'm gonna bring up is expectations. What did you expect when you got into the program? Oh, I'm just gonna be an assistant. I'm gonna wear a cap and gown on campus every day and run through the quad and watch undergrads playing Frisbee or something like that. That's probably not realistic. It's, I've gotta go through coursework. I've gotta write my dissertation. I've gotta understand what's coming ahead. So I need to have my expectations match the reality of the program. And when they match the reality of the program, you're prepared to move forward much more quickly. Also, you have a lot fewer shocks that cause, you know, trauma and might make people leave programs. And it's those unreasonable or un— or expectations that just don't match up with reality that can cause people to just say, forget it, I'm outta here. A third thing is there can be institutional changes. I've talked to a couple people recently who've said, "My school is ending this program in a year. My school is ending it in a certain amount of time." And they have the prerogative to do it, and you can't control that. What you can control is what you're doing and moving along quickly. You don't want them to come to you and say, "Hey, program's over in a year and you haven't even finished your coursework yet." and you've got 3 more courses, and then you've gotta write everything in your dissertation, it's not gonna be reasonable to finish. So you need to understand, tying back in with expectations, what's going on in your program so that any institutional shocks you can handle. So if you know what's coming in your program, if you know what steps have to be completed instead of waiting to be told, you're gonna be well ahead of where your faculty think someone might be. You're going to be well ahead of other students in your program who are just waiting to be told what to do. So if you've gotten ahead, if you've understood the requirements of the program, you've understood due dates, understood how it— what it takes to do graduation, understand that there's a template, understand all the steps that are coming in front of you, read the student handbook, you're going to be prepared to be moving forward from the beginning. And that's what gets people through fast. Institutional changes can happen, but I can control me, and I can control me working ahead of time. The fourth thing that can cause people to not finish is life changes. You might get pregnant. You might have a child, fall in love with the child, and say, I never want to leave the child. I never want to do anything else again. And I've seen it, and that's okay. But just be aware that Changes like that can happen, or someone can get sick, or you can get married, or if someone gets sick outside of you, meaning another family member who needs care. Now, the ways to avoid that, well, first, you're a doctoral student, be aware that your life can change, but the more you are devoted to your program, the more you're working on it, the less external things are going to impact. You. Someone, if you get sick and you've been working along, I've seen this happen. I was talking to someone recently who has been working diligently, working on things, and then had a life-threatening illness and had to step away for 3 months. Well, first of all, their committee was very supportive because they had shown that they were deeply involved here and working on their material. So the committee is like, Fine, whatever you need will help you move forward. If you hadn't done anything or had just been slowly doing things, you don't get what I call the halo effect. You, you go in, you work hard at the beginning, and they believe you can do anything. So even if you do have to slow down for a while, they still remember the things you did well and early. So be working diligently all along, so if a life change happens, you can take the break and come back with the support of your committee and your school. The fifth reason I've seen people not make it through their program is what I'll just call committee dynamics. On your dissertation, you're going to have a committee of 2 through 5 people, probably faculty members at your school, maybe an outside member, but people who've completed their doctorate usually and are evaluating your work. You want to find your committee and set that up in a way that your committee is supportive, provides information in the areas you need it, and they like each other, or maybe they don't dislike each other. I've seen committees where two people have been selected because of their special expertise, but they don't like each other. So the individual's— and this has happened more than once— the individual's dissertation became the battleground for these people trying to prove to the rest of the world how dumb the other person is and how smart they are. And you just don't want to be in the middle of something like that because then they're going to, "Oh, you're choosing Dr. So-and-so's side, so therefore I'm not going to," or, "Oh, you're choosing Dr. Blah-blah-blah's side." And you get involved in egos and politics and things like that. And it can be frustrating. It can delay things a lot. And some people just say, I'm out of here. I can't deal with this anymore. Too stressful. So understand this before you set up your committee. Find people who are committed to getting doctoral students through. Find people who are supportive and also cordial, at least, with the other members of the committee. It's hard enough work writing a dissertation, but now if you have to write it that and knowing that 2 or more people are going to use your dissertation as a battlefield, that's daunting, and a number of people will walk away because of that. The 6th reason I've seen people not finish is program deadlines. Talking to someone the other day, they are 6 or 7 years into their program, and this one person in particular, it is now as I'm recording this, April, they got an email from somebody in the university saying, oh, we let you enroll this semester by mistake. You should have been done or out of the program in December. And they just said, well, we're going to refund your tuition money for this month or for this semester. You can reapply in the fall of 2027 to a different program if you would like. You want to understand when those deadlines are coming. They are now in the process of appealing things and retroactively saying, yes, but I took time off for this, and yes, I took time off for that. They happen to have a couple of family illnesses and an illness of their own, so they lost over a year of time. But when they lost that time, they never really went to the university and said, hey, I'm going to be taking a leave for this amount of time, I'm not going to be involved for this amount of time. So their clock kept running. And it's never good to look and say, oh, I've got 3 months or I'm kicked out and I've got to do XYZ, blah, blah, blah. You know, panic is not conducive to quality work typically. So being aware of what's coming, which is— I know I sound like a broken record, but understand the handbook, your student handbook. See what it says and read it, because if you know what's there, you can use the university policies to your advantage as opposed to waiting for them to happen to you. And please don't end up in the situation where this person is, where they're even retroactively kicked out of their program. I had not heard of that one. So being prepared ahead, much better. And the 7th reason I've seen people leave, and this is, you know, may not be a negative reason, I'm just going to broadly call it opportunity. I've seen people get deep into research or deep into a project and find out that there's an opportunity outside of academia to turn this into a career, big earnings, changing the world, whatever it is. And they start exploring that way, and pretty soon they're creating a company and they don't have any time, or they come up with a nonprofit that's doing all kinds of great work and they don't see the need anymore for the doctorate. So yeah, opportunities can come up. I hope you do get lots of opportunities. But also remember, you're the one who's creating this opportunity, so you may be able to create it either a little more slowly or 6 months later when you've got your degree too. Because it's kind of sad if you're looking back 10 years later saying, "Gosh, if I just waited 6 months, I could have been done with my dissertation." Anywhere along the way in your program, if you're looking for guidance, support, assistance, click the link below to join our free dissertation help community.