Second year of phd worse than your first?

When reading reviews of how PhDs are going in terms of learning online for people, I seemed to find a lot of reviews about how some universities are nice to you in the first year, but then drag out your dissertation semesters to keep getting money out of you and are very unresponsive and rude in the second year. I read this a lot on Capella, but other places as well. Anyone else feel this is the case that is doing a phd online?

 

I have not had that experience at Liberty. I have noticed that the classes got a lot harder when we moved from the initial 700 series classes into the 800 and 900 series. The professors are tougher on us and the material is much more difficult, but that's what you would expect to happen. Even now, administrators and professors alike respond quickly and do their best to help in any possible way.

 

I have a PhD from Capella and can tell you that I did not experience "the school" dragging out the dissertation. Every dissertation committee is different, no matter what school. You are literally at the mercy of the committee.

Shawn

 

I have a PhD in Professional Counseling from Capella and my committee, contrary to your experience, was very pro my finishing the dissertation - my committee chair would call me and ask about my progress if I did not check in on a regular basis. This was ten years ago, so the process may have changed.

 

I graduated from NCU and the school only made one mistake that slow down my dissertation process. I quickly submitted approval for a 30 day extension in the class, which is about what the delay was, and my request was that I not be charged for any extension. The school approved my request within 48 hours. I was fortunate enough to have a dissertation chair that turned around all my papers within 48 hours. I had one committee member that responded to all papers that were forwarded to him within 72 hours. But then I had one committee member that I think was alive but I really couldn't tell. The total of his responses where the following: he took my paper ran it through an APA format checking program and return the paper with the canned statements that the APA checker found. That was all. Looking back it actually worked out pretty well, there was never a disagreement between him and any of my other committee members!!!!!!!!!!

when you read any of these reviews online you have to realize that students don't often want to take responsibility and would never say that there paper was not approval delays happened because of their poor writing or because of lack of content or detail. It is human nature to try to place the blame on someone or someplace else. Whoever wants to fail and said it was their fault?

 

This is very true. It seems that almost every super negative review Ive read online is from a student who failed out and blamed it on something else. I just wasnt sure if that was standard practice or not, but seems that is not the case.

 

A friend once told me, "It is always the guy that failed med school that will tell you that you can not become a doctor"

 

The students who leave after the first year leave for a variety of reasons. Not all doctoral students who leave are poor students, and I do not believe that schools intentionally drive away doctoral students. The second year IS harder.

Paschal (2009) found that

"Many factors continue to impact the decision to leave a doctoral program before completion. These include such as age, job loss, mastering knowledge and skills needed for entry into the professional community, race, ethnicity, gender etc. In addition, a number of research studies indicated that social relationships with faculty and peers have significant influence on a doctoral candidate’s decision to stay or leave the program."

For myself, it was the faculty interaction that was missing, so I left at the ABD stage. I am at UFS now, and I get timely advice on how to proceed, since I am tweaking my field study. My eventual dissertation is related to social relationships with peers as contributing to the success of a distance learning doctorate in a low contact setting.

Anderson (2003) also proposed an Equivalency Theorem that stated:

"Deep and meaningful formal learning is supported as long as one of the three forms of interaction (student–teacher; student-student; student-content) is at a high level. The other two may be offered at minimal levels, or even eliminated, without degrading the educational experience.
High levels of more than one of these three modes will likely provide a more satisfying educational experience, though these experiences may not be as cost or time effective as less interactive learning sequences."

Anderson, T. (2003). Getting the mix right again: An updated and theoretical rationale for interaction. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 4(2). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/149/230"

Paschal, E.C. (2009). Factors influencing attrition in U.S. universities: Examining transitional cognitive dissonance in a new meta-model for analysis. (Doctoral dissertation). Available from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database. (UMI No. 3344447).

 

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