Does it take too long? Once it's done, then what? Study says Humanities Ph.D. Candidates Should Drink More Coffee - Tenured Radical - The Chronicle of Higher Education
I don't think that one can answer the question without looking at the bigger issues and trends in higher education. My own view is that no PhD program should normally last more than four years. By normally I mean in terms of academic scheduling, understanding that sometimes "real life" gets in the way. One way to solve this problem is to get the US DOE involved. I would like to see loan criteria changed so that no student can borrow for more than ten years combined at all levels of education. Tosh. I'm sorry but this comment from the article is just nonsense. Graduate school in the USA is the exemplar of the old adage that work expands to fill the time available. More time in school means more money for the school. The greatest thing about this racket is that an American institution of higher education is just the middleman between the taxpayer and the student, whose only responsibility is to its own greed. As I tell every student who walks in my door, "The system is not designed to reward your investment in it. Plan accordingly."
If you're in a full time doctoral program at a U.S. university, and you don't have an assistantship, you're doing it wrong. And the duration estimate for the part timers who actually pay tuition is usually twice that of full timers, meaning enough years in this scenario that it wouldn't really change things. I agree that no one should need seven years of postgraduate school to be useful in their field, with the one possible exception of physicians.
I have one somewhat contradictory attitude about such learning/training. It is in regards to language requirements. In general I think it's unfortunate that the overwhelming majority of Americans speak only English. It's one of the fun parts of living in a multi-cultural community that there are different languages being spoken all around you. These days you have to be deliberately and determinably stubborn not to know at least a little Spanish. "Let's go for tapas, no?" Also, I can understand that theoretically it's a good thing to be multilingual in academic research, especially in the Humanities. But this is where my real-life questions begin. Universities force many doctoral students to learn at least one non-English language. Does the student really gain any real proficiency in that language or do they simply learn for the test? Most importantly, how much of this do they actually retain? Do they really continue to go back to the academic journals of that language in order to remain current? I'm guessing that the majority of doctoral students forget much of what they've learned within one year of that last final exam. To me that means it's wasted time, effort and money. What is more, the schools know this and they continue with this policy in the name of academic rigor or integrity or whatever.
I live in a decidedly bi-lingual (and bi-national) area so I hear and use at least some Spanish every day. I love that about my city. But it always floors me to hear someone on NPR, for example, who clearly has no Spanish at all. It happens all the time! NPR seems much more concerned with China than Mexico, too, something else I don't understand.
