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Doctor, doctor, quick, quick
4 December 2008
Pressures to complete PhDs rapidly are forcing the sector to ask if the process should aim to build generic research skills or expand the frontiers of knowledge. Matthew Reisz reports
There is nothing like acquiring the title of "doctor" to impress elderly relatives. And PhDs remain a rite of passage for many academic careers. Although it is widely agreed that they have changed significantly over the past decade or so, it is far less clear what this means.
There is little doubt that the process of doing a PhD is much more disciplined than it once was. This is all to the good, of course, but it leaves unasked some even more fundamental questions. Have British PhDs changed in terms of content, scope or level of intellectual demand? Have they retained their value, particularly for those seeking work in the international marketplace? And, quite simply, do we still know what a PhD is for?
Janet Metcalfe, chair and head of the organisation Vitae (see box, below right), takes a positive view of what has been happening. Yet even she admits: "There are big issues about what a PhD is for - I personally see them as generic rather than vocational. A finite timescale means you need an achievable project - a piece of research that demonstrates you are a competent researcher."
This, argues Metcalfe, fits in well with the conclusions of the final Bologna doctoral conference, which took place in 2006 and stressed "the uniqueness of the doctoral cycle that provides training by and for research and is focused on the advancement of knowledge".
The combination of "training for research" and "the advancement of knowledge" is reflected in the Quality Assurance Agency's "doctoral-level descriptors". These state that "doctorates are awarded to students who have demonstrated", among other things, "a detailed understanding of applicable techniques for research and advanced academic inquiry", and "the creation and interpretation of new knowledge ... of a quality to satisfy peer review, extend the forefront of the discipline and merit publication".
Is there perhaps a certain tension embodied in these diverse aims? If PhDs are about both "training for research" and carrying out a particular important research project, one might still ask how the balance should be struck.
A woman receiving her doctorate was once sent a congratulatory card by a friend that read: "One small step for mankind, but a big one for you." PhDs can certainly provide individuals with the keys to a career in a university or elsewhere.
These can be the specific requirements - laboratory techniques or a publication record - that they will need in academia. Or they may be the intellectual training and generic competencies they will later apply to work in industry, finance or consultancy.
But, beyond imparting specific and more general skills, how many PhDs genuinely contribute to the sum of human knowledge? Many go completely unread. There is a story about someone who put a $100 bill inside his thesis in the university library - and found it, still there, 20 years later.
A related issue was vividly set out by Aberystwyth University academic Peter Barry in his article in last week's Times Higher Education. Particularly in the humanities, there are genuinely different philosophies of the purpose of postgraduate work - reflected in the mission statements of different funding bodies. Barry playfully calls them the Ivory Tower and Shopping Mall models.
The former is promoted by the research assessment exercise (and its successor, the research excellence framework) and stresses "pure academic excellence", as judged by peers, and the ideal of producing "a contribution of which every researcher in the field ought to be aware".
For the Arts and Humanities Research Council, by contrast, the ideal is research that is "widely disseminated" and researchers who are committed to "interaction with other audiences". Both these goals are valuable, but they clearly put different pressures on PhDs and other research projects.
All this may sound somewhat theoretical, but it leads to a question that has urgent practical implications for individual researchers, universities and even the nation's intellectual capital: how have the changes in the processes affected the contents, international "value" and "fitness for purpose" of British PhDs?
When Sir Gareth Roberts was examining the research assessment exercise, he made a point of urging "the research councils to remember that all evaluation mechanisms distort the processes they purport to evaluate". There was a risk, he noted, that as institutions' "understanding of the system becomes more sophisticated, games-playing will undermine the exercise".
Few would dispute that the RAE has helped stamp out abuses such as "researchers" who never quite got around to publishing any research. But there has been fierce debate on how it has influenced the kind of research that is carried out.
Similar issues apply to PhDs. There is little doubt that there were cases in the past of people putting forward ridiculously vague proposals for doctorates or being hopelessly dilatory about completion dates. So it was obviously desirable to introduce a bit more discipline and rigour into the process. But how far can this be achieved without introducing "distortions" and "games-playing" or eliciting the even more emotive charge of "dumbing down"?
Take the perceptions of Peter Lake, professor of history at Vanderbilt University, who has been based in America for 16 years but who comes back to Britain every summer. Although he stresses that his experience is confined to the humanities and elite American universities, his views remain pretty damning.
"The constraints put on the British PhD," he argues, "make it harder to do really significant work than it used to be, or (than it) is now in the States." When he started his career in the 1970s, Lake admits, the system was "absurdly lax": he embarked on a PhD at the University of Cambridge knowing and saying only that it was going to be about 17th-century religious history.
However, although a more focused approach was required and completion rates are obviously important, today's excessive stress on these points can be at the expense of "producing work that others will want to read", says Lake.
"The more that you insist on tight completion rates and give grants only to people who have a precise sense of what they are going to work on (and often what they are going to find), the more you bias the system towards very predictable outcomes and away from work that makes a significant contribution to the subject.
"The current pressures on the English PhD are not positive. It is misguided to see success largely in terms of completion rates. We need to think more about purpose.
"The best-funded American programmes offer five years' full funding for PhDs, although they often take six or seven years (including two initial years of coursework). People have more leeway in deciding what to work on and projects define themselves as they go along. It is more difficult to change direction in mid-course in Britain."
Lake continues: "There is no line in the sand in America. A really good seven-year thesis is acclaimed; whereas in England a boring thesis completed on time is regarded as a success."
The most immediate result of this can be put in terms of intellectual capital. "I suspect the English stuff is on average less fully realised, less further along, than the American. It is harder, although not impossible, to do really important work in English PhDs than in American ones, though when I started my assumption was rather the reverse."
In his own field, Lake suspects that this has had a general impact. Since English history is "no longer seen as constitutive of American identity" (and Americans are understandably interested in many other parts of the world), one might expect the subject to be increasingly dominated by researchers working in these islands.
Yet Lake continues to see strong American competition and he suspects "it is probably easier to do a significant PhD on English history on the right American programmes than in the UK".
This has two implications. Lake says he would no longer automatically advise American graduate students, as he might have done in the past, to go to Britain, even if their field is English history. This deprives UK universities of some of the talented people who might continue to research and teach here.
And it also means that the relative value of a British PhD on the international market may be in decline. Although exceptional individuals will always stand out, this could clearly affect British job prospects in the US, continental Europe and elsewhere.
Margot Finn, director of the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick, notes that her institute "has identified early-career scholarship as a phase of the academic life cycle that deserves special attention and investment".
One worrying issue, at least in "monograph disciplines", is "the reluctance of even university presses to publish scholars' first books", which used to allow them to build a career on the basis of their PhD research. Certain initiatives such as the Studies in History series (published by Boydell & Brewer for the Royal Historical Society) are specifically designed to address this challenge.
More generally, says Finn, "the pressure on students to complete (PhDs) within three years does create real problems, for example, for students working in languages other than English and for students working across disciplines ... For fields that require use of non-English-language sources, there are clear advantages to US and continental systems: it's very difficult indeed for students to pick up requisite languages within the UK funding framework, and this ultimately can limit the kinds of projects that are undertaken."
One possible solution is to extend the length of PhDs. From 2004, PhDs in economics at Finn's own University of Warwick, for example, have taken four years, including a year's coursework that students are examined on. This brings the institution closer into line with some other British and most American providers, thereby making it more competitive to the largely overseas client base. It also provides a bit more flexibility as initial thesis ideas get modified in the early stages.
The problem, however, is that the Economic and Social Research Council provides funding for only three years, leaving students out on a limb in the fourth (although they are not charged fees during the writing-up process). Those without support from family or governments tend to make ends meet by doing teaching or research - often for more senior academics - which are useful experience and look good on CVs.
Nonetheless, says Fiona Brown, research administrator in Warwick's economics department, "funding councils need to address issues of funding over three years".
A final view of the downside of the more streamlined system that now applies to PhDs comes from Kevin Sharpe, professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary, University of London. When he examines PhDs today, he says, he "feels a palpable change in quality and depth of work - an average product looks a very different thing from a decade ago".
He puts this down to two main factors: "undergraduate degrees being much dumbed down" and "the draconian requirement (whereby) departments are penalised if people don't finish on time". Although PhDs were always funded for only three years, the completion time at the University of Oxford until well into the 1980s averaged five years. If people start from a lower base and are forced to finish faster, quality inevitably suffers.
The crucial comparison is with the US. In the UK, people generally take one year for a masters and three more for a PhD. In America, the doctoral qualification usually extends over six years - two years of classwork and then four more for the dissertation itself.
Even voluntary classwork can be problematic here. A woman currently working on a PhD reports that, although she is theoretically allowed to sit in on MA classes, it is considered strange and not encouraged.
And, whatever may have been true in the past, according to Sharpe, Britons "no longer start from a more sophisticated base than Americans".
"An obsession with completion rates skews everything. Their paymasters force universities to pressurise students to finish. An insidious completion culture hits you as soon as you pick a topic.
"Supervisors discourage ambitious projects. Only very intelligent people manage to find a way around the system and avoid the lowest common denominator. The rubric for examiners asks if a PhD is 'a reasonable output for three years'. It is hard for young scholars to work on, say, Spanish history because of the need to improve their language skills and work in a foreign archive - so the field of candidates for jobs outside British history is very poor. Given a very tight timetable, anything that aids fast completion is favoured."
The result is both disastrous and largely invisible. "It's a bit like sterling - it doesn't have a huge effect on you here if it drops or rises, but abroad people have a sense of what the currency is worth - and I think it's shifting," says Sharpe.
"People hiring in this country have come up through the English system and won't notice that British PhDs are weaker than before - but (those with) British PhDs will find it hard to get jobs in the US and elsewhere," he adds.
Since the trend in America is to look for people who can study British history within a broader European or global context, which tends to demand wide linguistic expertise, this can create an additional gulf between supply and demand.
Sharpe is well aware that his critique can be attacked as nostalgia for a non-existent golden age. But it also focuses attention on the crucial - and still very contentious - issue of just what PhDs should be for.
VITAL STEPS TO SUPPORT DOCTORAL RESEARCH
The process of studying for a PhD has undoubtedly been streamlined, most recently with the launch of both the revised Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers and the organisation Vitae in July this year. Vitae, which is funded by Research Councils UK, describes its central aim as "enhancing the quality and output of the research base ... through supporting the training and development of the next generation of world-class researchers".
So what made such initiatives necessary? What has changed for those doing PhDs - and perhaps made the transition to early-career academic more difficult? Janet Metcalfe, chair and head of Vitae, says: "I'm not sure the transition is any more difficult than before, but now the agenda is out in the open, whereas doctoral researchers were previously a hidden cohort within universities."
Metcalfe stresses that it is by no means easy to get an accurate picture of what is happening in the job market for postdoctorals. The number of people starting PhDs has not changed greatly over the past decade or so (although there has been a notable increase in international students). And about half of them stay on in higher education in various roles, whether research-based, administrative or academic.
But we have little detailed information about their subsequent career paths: it is only now that research by the Higher Education Statistics Agency is beginning to track exactly what has happened to doctorals three years after they graduate.
Yet a number of factors have had a big impact on what it is like to do a PhD. From the early 1990s, the Economic and Social Research Council and other research councils began to put pressure on completion rates (and to take sanctions, where necessary, against supervisors whose students persistently failed to finish).
In the past, people could continue working on a PhD for far too long. The changes introduced by the research councils, suggests Dr Metcalfe, "act as a counterweight to the natural tendency of researchers and their supervisors to feel like 'we're doing great research here. Let's just keep going'. It led to a huge increase in completion rates. Most institutions require an annual progress report. The process is now much more robust".
Equally important were the results of Sir Gareth Roberts' review, SET for Success, published in 2002. This, says Metcalfe, "highlighted the need for doctoral students to prepare for the transition to careers inside and outside academia. Initiatives, such as the UK GRAD Programme, supported by government funding for institutions, helped make them more aware of the competencies they had developed during their research - and better able to express them in terms employers might understand. But it also helped them become better researchers by improving their time- and project-management skills."
One result of the Roberts review was the creation of the RCUK Academic Fellowships Scheme to "provide (some of) the UK's best researchers with a pathway to a permanent academic position".
In the event, this precipitated a culture change and led a number of universities to "create their own schemes analogous to the Academic Fellowships model". Since such alternative provision is now available, RCUK has no plans to award any new fellowships of its own.
"We have a fantastic model for the UK PhD," concludes Metcalfe. "The personal support for researchers has been transformed over the past ten years. This kind of support was lacking when I was doing my PhD. Now people don't need to struggle alone."
Readers' comments
A few years back I was checking out a job while at a conference in America, and the first thing I was asked was whether my PhD was American or UK. I said "American" and asked why the interviewer (a senior academic from a large state university) was concerned. He answered that their experience hiring new lecturers was that UK PhDs were no better than a strong masters and they didn't want to get bitten again. The difference, of course, is that an American PhD involves two years of PhD-level coursework and usually teaching experience, which better prepares the candidate for teaching duties.
At the end of the day the employer wants to know if I can deliver and the PhD is a passport but not the end of the journey, it is only the begining. Further, a PhD in Business Management requires evidence that one is good in handling professional business situations. This is where my professional accountancy and marketing qualifications from Australia and UK come in handy. Employers are savy but not academically inclined and it will be embaressing to admit that one is a terrible business person with a PhD in Business.
Perhaps with the exception of Phds from Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College, and a few others, UK Phds really don't have much value in terms of recognition in the US job market. The Phd training in the UK lack breadth, many without courses, focusing instead on a narrow topic, as well as trying to finish within a short period of time. Of course there are exceptions, but let's look at the norm - that's what counts.
The pressures to perform in many arenas have grown - in the first couple of years of an academic career today one is expected to produce RAE-able research AND get to grips with teaching - including taking a postgraduate certificate. In previous generations new lecturers might still be working on their PhD, and might even have shelved it for a few years while they focused on teaching. They might then re-emerge 5 years down the line, better placed to do really interesting research, and having had the time to develop real teaching skills. <p>We expect too much, in my opinion very early on, and some individuals drop out or burn out. Others hang on grimly, losing all pleasure in their work. Too many are strategic and focus on their research only, leaving students poorly taught. <p>We need to address all these issues together. Skills training may, and undoubtedly does, provide valuable support during a PhD, but it can also downplay serious research needs that students have which can't be easily boxed up and dealt with in a two hour session. To do good research in many humanities areas, as others have pointed out here, may require acquiring languages, reading widely,time abroad, and so on. A time management workshop does not take away this problem!
There are some important issues here - not least the problem of mastering languages within Research Council time-limits, though that, I would argue, is ultimately related to the secondary role languages play in the UK education system. <p>But what's the alternative? If time limits are removed then that would have serious financial implications, as no sane grant-giving body would fund a doctoral candidate year after year until the thesis is finished: that's a system ripe for abuse. Effectively, removing time limits would enable fewer people to undertake PhDs, as each candidate would require more funds to complete. And with the academic job market so tough they'd have an incentive to take their time: better to be paid to do a PhD than to finish and be unemployed. Furthermore, with fewer funding opportunites, PhDs would become the preserve of people with private income - something to while away the trust fund for a few years. <p>The U.S. system sustains longer PhD programmes partly because academic careers are more structured. For all its faults, the tenure system does provide a clear pathway into academia, which might be an acceptable trade-off for a seven year research degree. No such system exists in the UK: there is no real desire and method for universities to encourage and recruit young lecturers and researchers with a view to investing in the future. Instead, universities generally value 'experience' or merely 'age'; often they requiring not only a PhD, but also a few years teaching experience and a stack of publications even for a first-rung lectureship. When it already takes people who aren't forced to give up for financial or personal reasons about a decade to reach this position, it is unrealistic to insist that PhDs should be longer still, increasing one's time in 'preparation' yet further. <p>Three year PhDs are in themselves not the problem: talented and dedicated people will always be able to produce worthwhile work in that time. What academia really needs is a way to retain and encourage its best young talent, rather than saying (as this article does) 'a few more years in the antechamber and we'll let you into the members' room'.
One needs to put these claims about doctoral theses in the U.K. and the U.S.A. in context. It is correct to say that doctoral theses in this country are more carefully overseen than happened twenty, thirty or forty years ago and that a higher proportion are now completed. The number of such theses being undertaken and completed is, moreover, much higher than in the past. More scholars with doctorates are thus appearing on the jobs market without any comparable expansion in the number of available posts. Naturally enough, English-speaking holders of doctorates will look for jobs in the U.S.A., Canada and elsewhere. It may indeed be the case that the quality of American doctorates has risen. But there has been no noticeable fall in the quality of doctoral theses in early modern history at either Cambridge or Oxford universities, the two great centres for sixteenth and seventeenth century studies in the British Isles, let alone at London University. I do not share the pessimism of Professors Lake and Sharpe and look forward to a steady flow of first-class studies from their academic homes on the banks of the Isis and the Cam.
There seem to be various issues here. On the one hand, there seems to be an implicit assumption that a PhD written over six years will be better than one written over three, and the candidate will possess more skills. This is doubtless true in many circumstances, but there must surely be examples where people effectively abuse the system and take six years to complete work that could have been done in three if it were properly managed? <p>Another issue seems to be the possible lack of skills, e.g. languages. Obviously this is important, but does it say more about institutional changes that need to take place? If, say, somebody wants to study for a PhD on Spanish history, are there departments out there that would accept them if they have no Spanish language skills? Surely this is what a Masters degree should be for, especially in the Humanties?
"there must surely be examples where people effectively abuse the system and take six years to complete work that could have been done in three if it were properly managed" <p>I don't understand, Neil. What is this abuse of the system of which you speak? I don't really see the advantage to the candidate who deliberately extends PhD study beyond the 3-4 years funded by a research grant in order to have to fit in writing up around working full time in retail for minimum wage. Surely it would be to the student's advantage to complete the thesis as early as it is possible to do without sacrificing quality. <p>Or are you referring to the student who delays in order to take up a lecturing post which subsequently gets in the way of completing the thesis? If the latter, then one must presume it is the hiring policy of the employing institution that is open to question, not the integrity of the PhD candidate.
Let's focus on science and engineering. The fact that PhDs in the US take longer time to complete is the fact that the students are admitted to be trained to become thinkers and leaders in their fields. And that makes US a world leader in science and technology while the UK is still living on past glory. The world needs to move forward, and that starts with adequate training of your PhD students.
But what about all those American PhDs who never get a permanent job, some of whom never publish a book? Three years looks a lot better from their perspective. <p>German academic careers require a second dissertation, called a "Habilitation." That could supplement a narrower Ph.D. However, it is not a substitute for narrower background training, which I have also observed (like some in this article) as a deficit in British Ph.D. training, insofar as these people are supposed to understand how their work fits in with a broader historiography (not just field specific), and then to teach undergrads.
Coursework can be either invaluable or a complete waste of everybody's time depending on what it is actually about. My personal experience of US PhD coursework (Physics) was that it was a deluge of solving arcane, contrived problems from textbooks and rigid 'teaching to the test' that had little bearing on any current research, real systems or applications - experimental techniques and ongoing research were not discussed, as they were not in the syllabus; there was far more discussion of these issues in my (British) BSc courses! I wonder how many creative people are put off by rigid requirements that, in my experience at least, seem to serve no purpose other than making a PhD longer and more difficult without actually making it any better, and certainly without fostering creativity or critical thinking. <p>On the other hand, there seems to be a tendency in the UK to treat PhD students as cheap labour, with all the responsibilities of getting results but little independence.
very gooooooood best carry on inshallah i will also become a DOCTOR INSHALLAH
Makes you want to rest your case, doesn't it?
Agreeing with the writer of the article, being a UK PhD student I also feel the pressure of completing my PhD within three years and this pressure doesn't let me to get into the details of the subject I am working on.
Humaira, if three years isn't sufficient to complete your PhD project to satisfaction, could it be that you've chosen the wrong project? You probably feel pressure to complete in three years because it is meant to be a three year qualification. Obviously, there will be times when a PhD needs longer, especially if the initial project has transformed into something different altogether. However, your PhD proposal should have been a project that you felt was able to be completed in the three years permitted.
Neil, don't be absurd. A Ph.D. is funded for three years. Funding is based on a financial costing (three years' maintenance being a reasonable outlay), not a fixed time limit on the allocation of the candidate's labour power and intellectual resources, which continues even after the funding runs out. I don't know what you mean by the three years "permitted". I've not heard of any university not permitting its Ph.D. candidates to go over three years. If success in doctoral study were contingent upon submission within three years it would be a very risky undertaking for the student, indeed it would be quite a gamble. The point of Ph.D. funding is to obviate the necessity of the student undertaking paid work, so they can get a volume of research accomplished they would be unable to otherwise. Just because a Ph.D. is funded for three years doesn't mean three years is a realistic length of time in which to get it done in its entirety. I presume your PhD only took three years. Well, that's great for you, and you must have scored major brownie points for being 'good' and not getting all precious about Ph.D. research being an intellectual endeavour as opposed to routine data collection and analysis. The priorities you identify are managerial, not academic ones. Why do you emphasize the constraints so much, even when they are detrimental to the depth and scope of the undertaking? Since you conjecture that Humaira Asad may be attempting more than is appropriate for a Ph.D. study, when else do you propose this work might be accomplished? Is this work to be done upon the Ph.D.'s completion when Asad has secured a tenured research post, which many successful Ph.D. candidates do not? Or should Asad's envisaged project just never be done because it is outside what you imagine to be the scope of Ph.D. research? By all means adopt a self-congratulatory tone for having got your Ph.D. done in three years, but let everyone get on with worrying about how long theirs takes. Frankly I think your comments to Humaira Asad are rather rude. If you've been following this debate you'll know that Chris Park, director of Lancaster University's Graduate School was quoted in Times Higher Education last December as saying that "implementing the spirit of the Bologna Agreement would make PhDs four years instead of three and students would no longer be allowed to move straight from an undergraduate degree to a PhD without doing a masters first." So three year PhDs becoming the norm in the UK would be something of an anomaly in a globalized market for higher education.
David, how nice to see your friendly responses! I certainly meant no insult or rudeness towards Humaira. I know nothing of her situation or even what field she is studying. My point was simply that a PhD is generally expected to be a three year project, and I think that in many cases candidates do not always pick projects that are able to be completed in three years. This is not, of course, necessarily the fault of the students. You're absolutely right that part of my issue is managerial, not academic. And why shouldn't it be? Many PhD's do not enter into academia but rather work professionally elsewhere. Shouldn't a PhD also teach skills to be helpful here too? And on that note, a PhD is a pretty big project in itself- surely some kind of project management skills are necessary? Whether you agree or not, I think that my point was sensible. I am not being 'absurd' by suggesting that since PhD's are generally conceived of as a three year project, they should take three years to complete. And in the same way that I know nothing of Humaira's situation, you know nothing of mine. Please don't descend to insults and playground comments, such as congratulating me on my brownie points for doing a PhD in three years and for 'being good'. As for me not being 'precious about a PhD being intellectual endeavour as opposed to routine date collection and analysis', comments such as those aren't becoming. If you disagree with me, great, let's have a discussion. But let's not be puerile.
Catching up on this lively debate, which has covered many interesting issues and opinions, I must say I agree with Neil. As far as I am concerned (and certainly as far as my supervisor is concerned), a PhD is a three year project. Many of the people in my department only begin writing in their fourth year, and I do not consider any of them to be in any better position for having done an extra year of research. In response to Dr (well done!) David Knight's implicit suggestion that Neil must have not been "all precious about Ph.D. research being an intellectual endeavour as opposed to routine data collection and analysis", I find this more absurd than anything Neil is supposed to have said! My PhD will be completed within three years but that does not mean that it is somehow lacking in intellectual endeavour. Far from it. Indeed, I might counter that longer PhD periods are more susceptible to routine data collection and analysis than are shorter ones. We can all spend years collecting material, but the challenge is to make something of it. Why completing in three years suggests that you cannot have achieved this is beyond me. I wonder how long it took Dr. Knight (who evidently did pass his viva), and what discipline he was/is in. Neil is right to flag up issues of project management for the wider workplace. My PhD was intended to be three years (as is, however flexible the reality might be, the ideal and most usual term). I planned accordingly. If I cannot include everything I want to research and write about (let's hope not, since I hope my academic career will have more than 100,000 words to contribute!), then the challenge is to manage the project accordingly. If I only begin to write up in my fourth year, my original project will have failed. Yes, circumstances change, but adaptability is another key asset. I have lost two chapters from my original PhD plan because they were somewhat tangential. I will research them one day. But my thesis would have been worse (less focussed, less disciplined) if I had kept them in. I am late to this discussion so many of these issues may have already been discussed above (I'm not sure if the entries here are all, or just the latest ones), however it seems to me perfectly acceptable to insist on (or at the very least, strongly encourage) a three year PhD project (research gathering, analysis, output and submission). What strikes me as absurd is to question the work ethic of someone who manages to complete 'on time' in this way, as though their project must be inherently less worthy than a project that spends more years in development. I can only really comment when I have submitted. But, thanks to careful planning, management and meeting the expectations set by my Institution and my own initial research project, that will be this year. If everyone is different and it is perfectly acceptable to go over three years, then it is just as acceptable to complete it in three. Why Dr. Knight felt Neil deserved a sarcastic 'pat on the back' is beyond me. Please, Dr. Knight, tell us the circumstances of your own PhD so that we can judge you (positive or negative) as you seem willing to judge others.
I haven't got time to right now to respond fully to your message, Dave, but mine took a couple of months past 5 years. Once you get past the first 3 funded years, the work starts to take longer as it has to be balanced with paid employment to cover the rent. My Ph.D. study was ethnographic in nature, dealing with a diffuse and largely hidden population, hence it took longer than anticipated to find sufficient interviewees to test claims made in the literature. If this undertaking were just about getting a Ph.D. I would probably have been well advised to tackle something easier and less dependent on the cooperation of respondents. However, the point of the study was to correct academic misconceptions about a sector of the housing market in order to make a serious contribution to my discipline. In Ph.D. research I don't think generating new knowledge should be subordinated to the aim of merely gaining a qualification. Therefore I feel justified in pursuing an end that ultimately could not be accomplished in under 3 years, much as I might wish it to have been, and indeed I had planned it to be, having no way of knowing how difficult it would be to track down my target population in sufficient numbers. I see no way in which the scope of the research could have been adjusted along the way except to have based my conclusions on fewer cases, thus undermining the reliability of the findings.