What is the difference between someone finishing his/her Ph.D. and someone who gives up trying? A new comprehensive study of Ph.D. students across several academic disciplines tries to analyze what factors are most important. The results tend to highlight having a mentor and racial/ethnic and gender-related factors:

Three Magic Letters: Getting to Ph.D. (Johns Hopkins University Press) is the result of a decade-long project in which more than 9,000 graduate students, enrolled at 21 top research universities, provided detailed information about their experiences. Among the findings:

More than 30 percent of all graduate students never feel that they have a faculty mentor . . . Students rate their social interaction with faculty members as high in the engineering, sciences, mathematics and education -- and relatively low in the social sciences and humanities. In rating the quality of academic interactions, students in the humanities think highly of their professors while those in the social sciences and math and science are more critical.

Significant gaps exist in the experiences of minority and female graduate students -- from admissions to getting teaching or research assistant jobs to publishing research while still in graduate school. Generally, these gaps do not favor minority students.

As the article notes, this new study is likely to be a valuable source of data on what universities and departments can do to make sure that as many of their graduate students finish as much as possible (which would therefore, maximize the department’s “investment” in those students and contribute to their department’s national status as well).

However, the question becomes, will universities, departments, and large numbers of faculty actually listen and incorporate the findings into their programs? Or will they be too preoccupied with their own research projects and turn away from the hard work necessary to make meaningful changes? Let’s hope that it’s the latter, rather than the former.