In Pursuit of the Ph.D.

• Author: Colander, David

"This is a long, detailed, and at times somewhat tedious book" [p. 8]. That description is the authors' own, and it is appropriate. The book is also an intellectual and marketing tour de force. It will become a standard reference for analyses of higher education for years to come.

The importance of this book should not be surprising, given its authors: Neil Rudenstine, the President of Harvard, and William Bowen, the former President of Princeton and now President of the Mellon Foundation. Both were distinguished researchers before they moved into administration. Combine such distinguished researchers with significant funding and support staff (it was underwritten by the Mellon Foundation, and the authors list four collaborators), and such a tour de force could easily have been predicted.

The book is divided into three parts, each of which provides a wealth of general and statistical information on graduate education. The first part, "Trends in Graduate Education," contains five chapters describing the broad contours of graduate education. In this section the authors discuss the forces that led to the recent expansion and contraction of graduate programs, and the continued growth in the total number of graduate programs. The second part, "Factors Affecting Outcomes," consists of four chapters. In this section the authors sift through and analyze mounds of original data, much of it derived from a ten university data set that the authors collected for this project. This section defines key measures of outcome, analyzes those measures, and ultimately reduces all the measures to a single "student year cost of a Ph.D." measure. Although, as the authors point out, their data set focuses on elite educational institutions, the development and analysis of this data set is a major step in filling in a number of voids that have existed in the analysis of graduate education. The third part, "Policies and Program Design," consists of five chapters that focus more on policy related issues, and concludes with a chapter of policy recommendations.

The actual informational findings of the study are not surprising. For example, the authors report that "time-to-degree" has increased, but not nearly as rapidly as governmental studies have suggested" [p. 11] and that "time-to-degree" varies directly with the size of the program. They further find that "the ways in which programs are defined, carried out and monitored make a great deal of difference" [p. 14]...