Does employment during doctoral training reduce the PhD completion rate?

ABSTRACT

This paper examines relations between doctoral students’ employment and graduation outcomes at a research-intensive university in Russia. Since most doctoral students lack financial support, they find employment and work full-time. This study addresses two questions: first, how the employment status is related to graduation outcomes (defending a thesis) and, second, how characteristics of student employment decrease the chances of defence of a thesis. The research is based on a longitudinal dataset of doctoral students that were enrolled in doctoral programmes between 2008 and 2017. The dataset combines survey data collected during the doctoral training and administrative data about the students’ graduation outcomes gathered in 2018. The results show that on-campus employment increases the chances to defend the thesis and off-campus employment is negatively associated with the completion. The findings may help define the groups of students that are at risk of attrition and should be provided with appropriate support.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctoral education
• retention
• employment
• graduation outcomes
• Russia

Acknowledgement

Support from the Basic Research Program of the National Research University Higher School of Economics is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 http://www.gks.ru/wps/wcm/connect/rosstat_main/rosstat/ru/statistics/population/education/#.

2 https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-technology/oecd-science-technology-and-innovation-outlook-2016_sti_in_outlook-2016-en#page149.

3 http://moscow.gks.ru/wps/wcm/connect/rosstat_ts/moscow/ru/statistics/standards_of_life/.

4 PhD training is also provided by academic institutions affiliated with the Russian Academy of Science, but the share of these PhD students is low (approximately 10% of all doctoral students).

5 A specialist degree is an academic degree conferred by a college or university that was widespread in Russia before joining the Bologna process.

6 There are not many differences between groups 3 and 4, but there is a difference in opportunities to return to the doctoral training. Students from the third category do not have this chance, and in the case they want to do so, they will pay for every component of the training themselves. Students from fourth category can come back and occupy a state-funded spot. It is a typical practice to voluntarily withdraw from the programme for those students who see that they will not cope with the requirement on time.

7 Official statistics provide information only about those who defended their theses within the expected period (3 or 4 years). It is the primary criteria for state assessment of the doctoral program’s effectiveness (the state is a primary financial source for doctoral programs and, hence, the principal inspector), and unlike most countries, we do not have data about time to degree – the time that it takes to earn a PhD.