2CUL, a partnership between the libraries at Cornell University and Columbia University, has announced a study to discover if the library can help ameliorate high attrition and low completion rates for doctoral students in the humanities.
The goal of the project is to listen to graduate students’ concerns and determine whether the library can develop strategies that will help directly with their research and contribute to their success. Grants from the Council on Library and Information Resources and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation will support the user needs assessment to determine what academic libraries can do to help humanities doctoral students complete their degrees.
Cornell’s Graduate School and Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences are providing additional support. Support from Cornell's Graduate School comes from a grant from the Council of Graduate Schools for its CGS Ph.D. Completion Project.
The pilot project will involve focus groups with Cornell and Columbia’s humanities students in all stages of their PhD work, as well as recent graduates. Interviewers will then develop a questionnaire based on information from the focus groups and administer it to 20-25 students in 3-4 departments at each institution.
After the analysis period, the institutions will recommend a course of action to address the findings. Possible steps forward would include partnerships with the graduate schools, writing centres and other campus entities at both institutions. Assessment will be completed by March 2011.
Humanities students have longer mean times to complete their PhDs than students in any other discipline and, according to a recent National Science Foundation study, those times are increasing. In 2003, the average humanities student took nine years to graduate, up from 7.5 years in 1978. Another study shows that humanities students’ 49-percent completion rate within a 10-year period is considerably lower than the rates of their peers in mathematics and physical sciences (55 percent), social sciences (56 percent), life sciences (63 percent) and engineering (64 percent).
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