We face a starkly pressing demand for Ph.D.'s on all sorts of fronts--for college teachers, scientists, government experts, business consultants, and for no end of other purposes. What are we in the graduate schools going to do about tightening up our programs and requirements for this critical degree, which now seems to offer nearly as many services as the A.B. itself? Current pressure forces us to examine our myth-enveloped Ph.D. with candor. What we see makes us look away with shock: for compare our Ph.D. programs with the professional programs in law, medicine, or business. We must ruefully conclude that the Ph.D. is tortuously slow and riddled with needless uncertainties; that it is frequently inefficient and traumatically disagreeable to the bewildered and frustrated candidate. The basic flaw is: we have never cleanly defined this protean degree.

The Uncertainties

When a college graduate considers going to law school or business school, or even to medical school, he at least knows beforehand how long a time such training will take if he does decent work. Not so at all for a Ph.D. One may say, in reply, that law and business and medicine are professional programs and thus can be easily defined, but that the Ph.D. is essentially an individual matter between student and master; that it is therefore filled with unpredictable elements, and that, in short, it is non-professional and therefore cannot be laid out so neatly in terms of years.

We agree. The Ph.D. is not a professional degree.No degree could be called professional which sets out to nurture individual discovery and which exalts newness in knowledge. Nor would we know at all clearly for what profession we were training our candidates for the Ph.D. For teaching? Or business? Or the Foreign Service? Or a consultant for Life Magazine?

The Ph.D. is bound to defy exact definition in terms of time. But yet need the time-factor be so very imprecise? Generally the Ph.D. takes at least four years to get; more often it takes six or seven, and not infrequently ten to fifteen.

Financial need, to be sure, often comes into the picture. But all the same we know that too many programs have taken too many years simply because faculty members and the graduate office have failed to give hard-headed advice at the right time, have shied away from making their students work hard enough, and have generally thought a well-bred air of amateurishness more gentlemanly and becoming than down-to-earth efficiency. If we put our heads to the matter, certainly we ought to be able to say to a good student: "With a leeway of not more than one year, it will take you so and so long to take the Ph.D."

Uncertainly about the time required leads in turn to another kind of uncertainty--financial uncertainty. Doubt and confusion on this score have a host of disastrous effects. Many superior men, facing unknowns here, abandon thoughts about working for a Ph.D. and realistically go off to law or the like. In the light of our pressing need for college teachers, nothing could be more underisable.

Other men, bolder or more sanguine, enter a graduate school of arts and sciences but are finally compelled for financial reasons to leave before taking their degree. Now that something like forty per cent of our men are married, this is becoming increasingly more common. They leave with good and serious intentions of returning when they have the money. One good reason gives way to another to prevent the man's ever finishing his work, and all too often the files of the dean's office become a last repository for uncompleted thesis projects.

The End-Product

Then consider the uncertainties about what might be called the enduse of the product. In the world of the Ph.D. there is no licensing, no state examinations, and often no fairly sure concept of what a man is to do with the degree or any fairly precise expectation of this or that salary. This, of course, is a realm in which the universities can do little directly. Yet it involves important matters--fundamentally related to the application of the training--about which we should be militantly aware.

Suppose that a superior man is sufficiently fired and sufficiently determined to try for a Ph.D. despite his uncertainty about time and money and final outcome. What surety does he have about the kind of training he will meet? What kind of program is usually mapped out for him, and how wisely and thoughtfully has this been designed to suit his individual needs, talents and aspirations?

Here too much is obscure and too often the assignment of routine courses replaces careful faculty consideration. Too much is mechanical; too little is personal. It is easier to tell a man to take the traditional courses--unexciting, shallow, and often repetitions survey courses--than to conclude that this particular man could well be allowed to do much of this work on his own--reading and listening and talking where he can profit most. The frequent result is depressing indeed, for we see many a man less mature, less selfpoised, and less confident after two years in a graduate school than he was as an inspirited college senior!

Our achievement far too frequently turns out to be the very reverse of what we wanted: the second-year man under our system of traditional courses, examinations and grades emerges a puzzled fellow indeed, rapidly losing any feeling of his own progress or coming to mistrust the yardstick by which progress is measured.

When at the middle or end of his second year the student looks ahead, all is equally dark. What are the general examinations like, what are they meant to cover, and what do they aim at? How long should he try to prepare for these ill-defined and sprawling areas? And once that Scylla is somehow desperately skirted, what of the Charybdis of the thesis? So many questions arise here that it is no wonder that only one solution seems at all sure; make the thesis a long one, cram it with learned footnotes and keep your own feelings and taste out of it.

Poor Results