Why Do Graduate Students Drop Out?

Research into factors that may affect graduate school persistence.

When I was doing some research on motivation for an earlier blog, I came across an article called “A Latent Class Analysis Approach to the Identification of Doctoral Students at Risk of Attrition.” It’s by a group of six researchers from Columbia, Stanford, and Penn State Universities. The article is open source, so if you want to read it yourself, it’s easy to do so.

Graduate school attrition seemed like a topic that might be interesting to readers of this blog, so I set the article aside (in a digital sense – I put it in Zotero) to read later. Well, later has become now (or now is later?). Anyway, I read the article, and in this post, I’ll share a summary and a few thoughts.

How Common is Dropping Out of Graduate School?

It’s difficult to find clear data on graduate school attrition. The article says that close to 50 percent of Ph.D. students in STEM fields drop out, but that’s drawing on research from 2011. That 50 percent number pops up in other places, though, both for STEM and non-STEM fields. I could not find, however, a reliable overall number for graduate school persistence rates.

Apparently, I am not the only one looking. A 2018 recommendation to IPEDS, an organization that collects data on postsecondary education, noted that “Despite the interest in this particular type of outcome measure, there is also no on-going national effort that captures graduate degree completion rates more widely” (Okohana, 2018). When I searched IPEDS, it did not look like they had implemented this suggestion yet.

So, we don’t really know the numbers for graduate school attrition, but its probably too high.

What the Article Says about Grad School Attrition

First of all, this is a peer-reviewed report of academic research. One thing that means is that the authors (Stevens et al.) define a narrow scope for their study. They looked at Ph.D. students in STEM fields at three prestigious universities. Also, somewhat oddly, a group of non-STEM Ph.D. students at Penn State. Thus, while this is a good-sized sample (just over 1,000), it is maybe not representative of grad students as a whole. This fact the researchers carefully point out in their remarks about generalizability.

I, however, am not writing in a peer-reviewed academic journal here, so I have no such constraints. I’m going to make a leap and say that the findings probably do have application to students at other schools and other programs. This is because the results align well with common sense – with a few interesting insights. So, whether you are getting a master’s degree in music performance, a J.D., or a Ph.D. in psychology, you may see yourself in the research on graduate student persistence. (Though the authors would caution against over-generalization.)

Second, the authors were looking at psychological factors that might affect graduate school attrition. They point out that there are, of course, other reasons graduate students might leave, including financial difficulties or life events. But that’s not what’s being studied here.

With those disclaimers out of the way, let’s look at what they found.

The Groups: Which Students Are Most Likely to Leave?

What this research does is posit four groups of graduate students (again, they limit their results to their data, as they should, but I think we can make some broader application). These groups are called “latent classes,” which means that they are groups formed by analyzing participant’s responses to survey questions. It is similarities in the patterns of these responses that indicate to which group a participant belongs.

Stevens et al. formed their classes by having Ph.D. students respond to survey questions about academic background, identification with their grad program, confidence in their abilities, mental health, social support, and many more factors that might affect graduate school persistence. They were looking for levels of psychological “threat.” They define this as what happens when “a situation poses risks to one’s sense of global self-integrity” (2). Put in more plain language, I would say this is when someone feels like they don’t belong where they are. There can be many reasons for this, some of which come out in the discussion below.

The four groups the researchers created were:

Lowest Threat Class

These students were academically prepared for graduate school. They felt confident in their choice to pursue their degree and in their ability to complete it. They felt supported, and like they fit in with other students in their program.

Nonchalant Class

This was the middle group. They were quite well-prepared for graduate school. They were, however, less confident that pursuing a Ph.D. was going to be valuable to them. Therefore (that “therefore” is mine, not the researchers) they were somewhat less motivated to finish than those in the lowest threat group. One interesting thing about this group was that it had the highest percentage of students with master’s degrees (hence the preparation).

Highest Threat Class

These students, as one would expect, were the least academically prepared for graduate school. They felt the most worried about their ability to finish and also felt the most ambivalent about whether grad school was a good idea. As the group’s name implies, these students felt the most out-of-place in graduate school.

Engaged/Worried Class

Although Stevens et al. put this group after “Nonchalant,” I put it last, because I think it is the most interesting group. These students were well-prepared academically, but they did not feel as confident as similarly prepared students. They were highly motivated to finish their graduate studies. At the same time, though, they felt out of place and perhaps inadequate.  As the class name indicates, these students were engaged in the grad school project, but worried about their own abilities.

Thoughts on Graduate School Attrition

As one might expect, the authors postulate that students in the Lowest Threat and Nonchalant classes are more likely to persist in graduate school than those in the Engaged/Worried and Highest Threat groups. Because the research was done with first-year Ph.D. students, it will be a while before that hypothesis can be tested. It makes intuitive sense though, and it fits with research done on undergraduate student persistence (Tinto, 2017).

This is a cursory treatment of the original article, which I recommend you read if you are interested in the details. Even this quick overview, however, has some applications for graduate students.

Grad School is a Challenge

This article was about students in STEM at elite institutions. But being in graduate school at any university, in any program, puts you in something of an elite class. You have worked hard and been successful, or you would not be here.

Working hard and being successful, as Claude Steele’s stereotype threat theory tells us, can be a double-edged sword. While being good at and invested in something is the way to succeed, it can also lead to greater concern about failure. Stereotype Threat is the fear that your actions will confirm a negative stereotype that others have a group you identify with (e.g. women aren’t good at math). This fear can interfere with performance. Steele has found that stereotype threat is the most powerful for people who are very good at – and very invested in — what they do.

One takeaway is that nervousness about your ability to succeed in grad school is normal. Try not to let that nervousness push you to disengage.

Do you see yourself in any of the groups identified in the article? In the next post, I’ll suggest some specific ways to support graduate school persistence for each group.

More Information

The Well-Ordered Mind exists to support graduate school persistence. Success coaching can bring structure, peace, and progress to your grad school journey. Click the button below to set up a free consultation and find out more.

References

Okahana, H. (2018). Suggestions for improving the IPEDS collection of graduate students data. National Postsecondary Education Cooperative.

Stevens, S.M., Ruberton, P.M., Smyth, J.M., Cohen, G.L., Greenaway, V.P., and Cook, J.E. (2023). A latent class analysis approach to the identification of doctoral students at risk of attrition. PLoS ONE 17(1),1–27. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280325.

Tinto, V. (2017). Reflections on Student Persistence. Student Success, 8(2), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.5204/ssj.v8i2.376