Mooney, Joseph D. 1968. "Attrition Among Ph.D. Candidates: An Analysis of a Cohort of Recent Woodrow Wilson Fellows." Journal of Human Resources 3(1):47-62.

Knowledge of the educational, social, and economic factors associated with attrition among graduate students has been very limited to date. This paper attempts to isolate systematically the quantitative importance of a number of explanatory variables for the problem of attrition of doctoral candidates. Sex, field of graduate study, size of graduate school, and academic achievement (but not socioeconomic status of the parents) all seem to have a significant impact on the "success" or "failure" of the graduate students in this sample. For the purposes of this article, "failure" was defined as attendance in graduate school up to six to eight years without acquiring a Ph.D.

Mr. Mooney concludes by noting that attempts to expand the number of Ph.D.'s simply by providing more fellowship money will be hampered by certain barriers, social and educational in nature. Since the size of the graduate school bears an inverse relation to the percentage of graduate students acquiring a Ph.D., he argues that existing graduate schools should make a more intensive effort to see to it that more of their present graduate students acquire a Ph.D. rather than simply expanding their enrollments in an attempt to satisfy the demand for more Ph.D.'s.

Mr. Mooney, presently a Senior Economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisers, is Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University. William G. Bowen, John Folger, Lindsay Harmon, and Charles P. Kindleberger made several helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I would like to thank Mrs. Faith Holland and Mrs. Janet Mitchell for their able research assistance. Mrs. Millicent Taplow provided invaluable computer programming assistance. A special thanks is owed to Dr. Hans Rosenhaupt, National Director of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, for his help in all phases of this study. This work made the use of computer facilities supported in part by the National Science Foundation Grant NSF-GP579.

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