Supporting First-Year Doctoral Students

Doctoral attrition rates are notoriously high—they’ve held steady over recent years at around 35 to 50 percent, depending on the discipline. Why are those rates so high, and why don’t we hear more discussion about attrition at the graduate level, particularly among doctoral students?

Matthew Jerome Schneider and Bailey B. Smolarek have addressed these issues, and when recounting their experiences navigating higher education not only as first-year doctoral students but first-generation ones, they have described similar challenges. Until now, much of the conversation has focused on first-generation undergraduate students—how to eliminate barriers and help students gain cultural capital of their institution—not those at the graduate level. Yet while it’s true that fewer graduate students typically attend any given university than undergraduates, it is actually more likely that a graduate student will be first generation. Only about 2 percent of the U.S. population has a doctoral degree, so the chances are high that a first-year doctoral student will also be the first in their family or social circle to pursue their Ph.D. That’s all the more reason to invest time, energy and resources in support of first-year doctoral students.

While doctoral students bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise from their field to the classroom, they also have distinct needs and face barriers that can greatly impact their retention and success. Programs that build holistic support into the curriculum can set their students up for success as soon as they enter their doctoral program. And if you are helping administer such a program, you can ensure that it is holistic and effective for students by providing intentional academic and social-emotional learning supports. Based on our experience, the three of us—a current doctoral student and two seasoned professors who are also program directors working with doctoral students—would like to share three best practices to help remove some of the major barriers that doctoral students confront.

1. Supporting scholarly writing development. One of the biggest academic challenges doctoral students must grapple with is developing their dissertation. Traditional curriculum models take a siloed approach by front-loading coursework in the beginning of a doctoral program and leaving all dissertation work for the remaining years. Following those traditional models, institutions have also seen the highest dropouts rates occur after the coursework completion and during the infamous ABD—all but dissertation—phase. But at Widener University, we immediately begin introducing the dissertation process in the first course of the doctoral program sequence, or what we call the proseminar.

The proseminar serves as a foundational course that breaks the dissertation into various pieces. We ask students to start with what eventually becomes the first chapter of a dissertation: developing a research topic, articulating a research question and learning the vital importance of a literature review. By the end of the semester, the students are to write a paper that includes those pieces of the first chapter, or the pre-proposal.

Widener’s program has many students seeking Ph.D.s. who are returning to college after a long hiatus and may not remember the process for scholarly writing. Thus, we begin meeting our students where they are by not assuming they have knowledge of the writing and research process. Rather, we scaffold the learning along the way by homing the weekly readings and assignments in on each subsection of the pre-proposal for their dissertation.

Social-emotional learning is, in many ways, as important as academic support for first-year doctoral students to succeed. Thus, we also recommend building in-class time to review useful campus resources that Ph.D. students may not otherwise know exist. Ironically, the higher a student moves up the academic ladder in terms of the degree they pursue, the more disconnected they can become from campus life outside their particular academic program. Faculty members should remain cognizant of that disconnect as they build their curriculum.

In addition, Widener’s program is fully remote, which means some of our students have literally never stepped foot on our campus. So we invite campus partners, including those in library services, to our synchronous online classes as guest speakers to talk about scholarly research and how to navigate the library’s database. Connecting students directly with the campus resources, rather than simply mentioning those resources and hoping students find them on their own, is one way to help students confidently gain cultural capital in the academy. Bringing service providers and support groups to the students via class time allows for resource sharing, knowledge dissemination and opportunities for community building.

2. Facilitating community building. Institutions can also help student build the self-confidence that they can complete their degree by encouraging a sense of community among them. As Schneider has noted, success in graduate school shouldn’t be based on “luckily stumbling into the right social network.” First-year Ph.D. students may not have a support group for their coursework outside the program, so baking social opportunities into it helps them acclimate to the institution, establish networks and feel much less like an outsider than when they started their doctorate.

Creating intentional opportunities for peers to collaborate and bond helps first-year doctoral students overcome feelings of isolation and the impostor syndrome that are all too common in graduate school and higher education in general. In the proseminar course, we build in class time for small-group peer review and discussion. Grouping students in the same track or concentration encourages social interactions and allows organic cohorts to form.

It is also vital to help doctoral students get to know every faculty member in the department so they can eventually form their dissertation committee. As part of the curriculum for first-year Ph.D. students, we introduce them to the faculty as early as possible in a formal, structured way. Whether it be through a meet-and-greet event or during an early course’s class time, face-to-face interaction is key for students to get to know their future committee members and mentors

3. Setting short- and long-term goals. Faculty members can also help students develop a detailed, personalized plan of how to get through the program through goal setting. Many students, especially those who have been out of academia for a while, can feel overwhelmed upon returning to the classroom and lack the confidence that they’ll be able to obtain their degree over the long haul. All the students in our program at Widener are full-time working professionals pursuing their degrees part-time, so it goes without saying that they must balance demanding careers with busy personal lives. Juggling it all can be a challenge, and goal setting can help students cope better with their packed schedules.

Time management and work-life balance are teachable skills, so another major learning objective of our proseminar is setting short- and long-term goals for each student. We recommend an exercise in which each first-year student visualizes their life many years from today and then develops SMART goals to bridge the gap between now and then. One of the most powerful classes of the proseminar course is when students share their goals with their classmates. In doing so, they find inspiration from their peers as they spark new ideas. What’s more, they also realize they may have common interests and aspirations and can support each other along the way.

In the course, we also invite recent alumni and doctoral candidates farther along in the program to speak on an in-class panel to our first-year students. It is a humanizing opportunity for students to hear from others farther along in their journeys through the doctoral program.

Finally, many Ph.D. candidates experience major life milestones throughout their doctoral program—engagements, weddings, pregnancy, parenthood—as well as hardships and adversity, grief and loss. Given that, it is important for faculty members to approach assessment, advising, grading and general interactions with students with empathy, care and authenticity.

A Call to Action

We hope that the practices we’ve identified through our proseminar can be useful to you in supporting first-year and first-generation doctoral student—or, in fact, any graduate student. When building out your programming, remember to never assume or take for granted that students know how to succeed in the academy. Instead, collect as much feedback from your Ph.D. students as possible. Asking, listening and then acting upon the feedback can ensure they remain and thrive at the institution.

Among other benefits, we have found that our new curriculum has helped new doctoral students complete their dissertation in just three years. Through it, students understand early on the expectations and the commitment needed to complete their degree on time. And they receive access to tools and resources to support them so that they can persist, thrive and, ultimately, be called “Doctor” one day.