Volume 30, Number 3 (Summer) 1995
Ehrenberg, Ronald G., and Panagiotis G. Mavros. 1995. "Do Doctoral Students' Financial Support Patterns Affect Their Times-To-Degree and Completion Probabilities?" Journal of Human Resources 30(3):581-609.
Our paper uses data on all graduate students who entered PhD programs in our four fields during a 25-year period at a single major doctorate producing university to estimate how graduate student financial support patterns influence their completion rates and times-to-degree. Competing risk "duration" or "hazard function" models are estimated. We find that completion rates, and the mean durations of their times-to-completion and to dropout are all sensitive to the types of financial support the students received. Other things held constant (including measured student ability), students who receive fellowships or research assistantships have higher completion rates and shorter times-to-degree than students who receive teaching assistantships or tuition waivers, or who are totally self-supporting. A major finding is that the impact of financial support patterns on the fraction of students who complete programs is much larger than its impact on mean durations of times-to-degree or to dropout.
Ronald G. Ehrenberg is the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and labor Relations and Economics at Cornell University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Panagiotis G. Mavros is an assistant professor of economics at Wayne State University. They are grateful to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and to Cornell University for financial support of their research and to to numerous colleagues at Cornell, the National Bureau of Economic Research Higher Education Working Group, and the University of Rochester, especially Mark An, Elizabeth Cunningham, George Jakubson, Nick Kiefer, Gary Solon and Martin Wells, for their comments. They are also grateful to William G. Bowen, Graham Lord, and two referees for detailed comments on earlier drafts, and to Alison Casarett, former Dean of the Cornell University Graduate School, for granting access to the data used in the paper. However, the views expressed here are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any of the above-mentioned institutions or individuals.
Dean Casarett granted the authors access to the data under the condition that they be kept confidential and hence they unfortunately cannot be shared with other researchers.
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US ISSN 0022-166X