Are dissertations written by DL students inferior to those by B&M students?

I'd argue it's a shared blame because if the advisor was a ball buster it could only be because the balls to be busted were large, overly fuzzy and obnoxious.

Some students like operating in areas of history that have been not only traversed through but bulldozed through by thousands of people and there's a ton to do in lit review just to get to the point where you have something that is worthy of the dissertation.. then in order to advance knowledge you have to counter every conventional thought about what you're writing about (again lit review hell) and present your own findings (which may require using other people's dissertations as bases).. then you have to have your own source material (which might require hands on trips) document that material appropriately and then present your findings..

Findings which unless very well supported will destroy your chances of getting placed in history departments that have been flooded with the students and supporters of the conventional wisdom, some of whom you used in your lit review.

So if this person chose egyptology and focused on a subject that had been beaten to death.. AND his advisor allowed it as a humbling experience.. then I could see exactly why the dissertation was brutally long.

Moral of the story.. do something on the edge of everyone else's stuff, not knee deep in it. My own crap was on the expansion of the Roman Catholic Church and the indoctrination of pagan religions. At the time everyone was doing stuff on either the Church or the Pagan stuff but there was a smaller tighter knit group of people doing the integrations so I had something to build on. If I had been someone researching the Medici era (as an example) I'd have gotten killed.

 

One last thing. There is research out there to quantify the quality of Ph.D. degrees in the university system.

A Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States
And the data has been incorporated into the website phds.org but I don't think they include for-profit universities in the rankings (or even in the data). It's interesting reading though!

 

Typically, they run circa 300 pages.

 

I was a religion major and history minor (B&M liberal arts college), and I also completed a semester of grad school in history at a state university before my wife got pregnant and priorities changed. I've had decent exposure to history dissertations (as well as other dissertations in the humanities and education), as I was intending to pursue a PhD in history at one point.

History dissertations are definitely going to be longer than the average quantitative social science or hard science dissertation. Qualitative studies can be comparable in length, though.

IMO, a 2000+ page dissertation is just beyond the realm of ridiculous. If your thesis takes that many pages to prove, you are either trying to tackle too much or being far too verbose. I recognize that some topics require a more extensive treatment, but a dissertation 6X as long as many dissertations in the field is insane.