Back to some of the original points people raised… @cosmicfish brought up some reasonable points.
To me, the same things that suck about grad school also extend the time it takes to graduate. These same things represent the content of about 60% of PhD comics. These include:
- Funding problems
- Bad advice from your advisor
- Little to no advice from your advisor
- TAs
- General time wasting activities you're assigned to do (e.g. anything from editing your advisor wiki page to filling out multiple forms to be reimbursed for a 5 dollar charge at a conference)
- Problems from your dissertation committee members
- Quals
- Being assigned to projects destined to fail.
An interesting point was raised…
quote this isn’t a symptom of other problems decreasing budgets in the humanities putting stresses on faculty and students to graduate or reject them faster!
[/quote]
I actually do agree that in the past 5 to 10 years, these policies have been implemented across the board in almost all fields.
My sincere question is whether people think the decrease in time to graduate over the past decade are primarily due to these policies or an overall improvement in the system (i.e. improving on the 8 or so items I listed that make a PhD suck). I personally think the decrease in time to graduate is due to an improvement in the things make a PhD suck. I’d be happy to hear other points of view.