I've been meeting with students who are entering their 5th year in the program over the past month or so. One purpose of these meeting is to keep JCBO informed about student progress so as to avoid surprises at the annual August review. I hope these meetings will also give the students an opportunity to discuss anything else that may be on their minds as they begin to think about what comes after graduate school.
I won't presume to speak for the rest of the Committee, but I think we need to keep an eye on the time to degree for a number of reasons. First, the longer a student stays in the program, the more likely significant life events are to occur: students get married, have children, have to deal with "two-body problems", etc., just like faculty do. These are, of course, all good things---but they do make earning a Ph.D. a bit more difficult.
Second, the longer that a student takes to complete the degree the more likely they are to require financial support from WHOI. This means less support for other education programs (e.g. Postdoctoral Fellows) and less money that can be used to admit new students.
Finally, time-to-degree is a statistic that prospective students care about. (I had one prospective JP student ask me about it just today.) They now also have access to the data. Check out the website PhDs.org, for example. Students can get data on all kinds of statistics, including time-to-degree, to help them rank graduate programs in the ocean sciences (and many other fields). There they will find that students in the Joint Program (all disciplines) take 5.7 years to finish, as compared to their colleagues at Florida State (5.2 y), Scripps (6.2 y), URI (6.2 y), Oregon State (6.7 y), or U. of Washington (6.7 y).
Posts
