NATIONAL ATTRITION RATES
The national attrition rate for Master's Thesis and Doctoral Dissertation students across disciplines has averaged around 50 percent. Some departments’ attrition rates are even higher. Barbara Lovitts (2001) in her study of 816 graduate students at two distinguished research universities, one a private institution in a large urban center, the other a public university in a rural setting, identified a 33% attrition rate at the rural university and a 68% attrition rate at the urban university. Lovitts’ study included students from nine different departments and concluded that “attrition is not discipline specific”.
Some research deals with where in the process students are more likely
to drop
out. According to Whitney Beckett, two-thirds of attrition
occurs in the second or third year of a Ph.D. program. Another 20%
of students depart after the sixth year, leaving only minimal attrition
in year one and between years three and six.
Some interesting facts have emerged in the research and include the following:
- The number of Americans earning PhD’s compared to foreign students has dropped more than 8% in the last 5 years.
- Women drop out at a higher rate than men.
- Minority students leave at a higher rate than white students.
- Students with less than a 3.0 GPA were just as likely to drop out as those with a higher GPA.
- Students in the humanities and social sciences programs drop out at a higher rate than those in the sciences.