Leaving the Ivory Tower

By Barbara E. Lovitts. 2001

1,002 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Graduate schools have faced attrition rates of approximately 50 percent for the past 40 years. They have tried to address the problem by focusing on student characteristics and by assuming that if they could make better, more informed admissions decisions, attrition rates would drop. Yet high attrition rates persist and may in fact be increasing. Leaving the Ivory Tower thus turns the issue around and asks what is wrong with the structure and process of graduate education. Based on hard evidence drawn from a survey of 816 completers and noncompleters and on interviews with noncompleters, high- and low-Ph.D productive faculty and Directors of Graduate study, this book locates the root cause of attrition in the social structure and cultural organization of graduate education.

Subfields: Education, General Health Professions, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/418fd3da15a6f85db5fdd6f9174cd6bbd468558c

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Citations in the corpus

Exploring the Fit between Doctoral Students' and Supervisors' Perceptions of Resources and Challenges vis-à-vis the Doctoral Journey (2012, background): “Supervisors, for instance, may emphasize student characteristics as core determinants of successful studying whereas students emphasize the scholarly community (Lovitts, 2001).”
Motivation for PhD studies : scale development and validation (2015, background): “Students who dropout find fewer employment opportunities, and their selfesteem can be negatively affected (Lovitts, 2001; Statistics Canada and HRSDC, 2003).”
“I Heard it through the Grapevine”: Doctoral Student Socialization in Chemistry and History (2007, background): “Support: faculty and peer Cited often in the literature (Abedi & Benkin, 1987; Grant-Vallone & Ensher, 2000; Lovitts, 2001) as an important factor for graduate student success and satisfaction is the concept of support.”
Promoting doctoral students' research self-efficacy: combining academic guidance with autonomy support (2011, background): “Students perceive that ambiguous guidelines hinder their success (Gardner, 2007), and students who do not complete their degrees report random and infrequent meetings, a lack of active guidance, and poor quality relationships with their supervisor (Frischer & Larrson, 2000; Lovitts, 2001).”
Being a good course‐taker is not enough: a theoretical perspective on the transition to independent research (2005, background): “In the graduate school context, the most important environmental contexts are the department or, for students in experimental disciplines, the laboratory, and the interactions with peers, other faculty, and one’s advisor that take place within it (Pearson, 1996; Kam, 1997; Linden, 1999; Deem & Breho”
Understanding Race in Doctoral Student Socialization (2014, neutral): “(Austin & McDaniels, 2006; Baird, 1990; Gardner, 2010; Gardner & Barnes 2007; Golde, 1998; Lovitts, 2001; Nettles & Millett, 2006; Taylor & Antony, 2000; Walker, Golde, Jones, Bueschel, & Hutchings, 2008; Weidman & Stein, 2003; Weidman, Twale & Stein, 2001).”
A Mixed Research Investigation of Factors Related to Time to the Doctorate in Education (2011, background): “Although we give more weight to the qualitative findings that favor personal factors, it disagrees with Lovitts’s (2001) finding that institutional factors exert more influence on persistence than do student characteristics.”
Becoming Mathematicians: Women and Students of Color Choosing and Leaving Doctoral Mathematics (2004, background): “For example, students supported as research assistants have greater opportunities to learn the norms of the department and, hence, to become integrated (Girves & Wemmerus, 1988; Lovitts, 2001; National Science Foundation, 1998; Tinto, 1993).”
Coping with loneliness: A netnographic study of doctoral students (2014, positive): “This should be of concern to institutions keen on improving their doctoral completion rates, as feelings of loneliness have been shown to affect academic performance as well as life satisfaction (cf. Lovitts 2001; Ali and Kohun 2009).”
‘Slaughtering this beautiful math’: graduate women choosing and leaving mathematics (2004, background): “…and practices of the department and discipline (Gerholm, 1990; Etzkowitz et al., 1992; Cooper, 2000), and help them become integrated within the communities of the department, which is an important predictor of degree progress (Girves & Wemmerus, 1988; Tinto, 1993; Lovitts, 2001; Herzig, 2002).”
Graduate Student Involvement: Socialization for the Professional Role (2007, background): “…and the larger institution (Tinto, 1993), attrition at the doctoral level can be thought of more as the connection between the student and the student’s discipline and department, rather than the institution as a whole (Berelson, 1960; Golde, 2005; Lovitts, 2001; Nerad & Miller, 1996; Tinto).”
Fitting the Mold of Graduate School: A Qualitative Study of Socialization in Doctoral Education (2008, methodology): “This basic understanding of the socialization process is supplemented by the more context-specific work on graduate student socialization by Lovitts (2001), Golde (1998), and Weidman et al. (2001).”
Doctoral Student Attrition in the Stem Fields: An Exploratory Event History Analysis (2009, background): “One explanation may be that these students are not receiving the necessary anticipatory socialization to allow their successful transition and integration into the graduate school environment (Golde, 1998; Lovitts, 2001; Tinto, 1993).”
Clutch-Starting Stalled Research Students (2003, background): “It is possible that more than one domain will hold the cause of the block because many factors of student procrastination are interrelated (Becher, Henkel, & Kogan, 1994; Lovitts, 2001; McNab, 1993; OECD, 1987).”
Student and faculty attributions of attrition in high and low-completing doctoral programs in the United States (2009, methodology): “First, almost universally, the faculty interviewed discussed the issue of attrition or what many of them deemed ‘‘unsuccessful students’’ in the abstract with only a few faculty members explicitly mentioning individual situations or people, a finding confirmed by Lovitts (2001).”
Using Mentoring Enactment Theory to Explore the Doctoral Student–Advisor Mentoring Relationship (2012, background): “These relational characteristics are imperative for the continuation of any interpersonal relationship (Stafford, 2003), including academic mentoring relationships (Cronan-Hillix et al., 1986; Golde, 2005; Lovitts, 2001; Luna & Cullen, 1998).”
An Exemplar for Combining the Collection, Analysis, and Interpretations of Verbal and Nonverbal Data in Qualitative Research (2014, background): “In fact, depending on the field of study, attrition rates of doctoral students in the United States range between 30% to 50% (Bowen & Rudenstine, 1992; Lovitts, 2001) and the average time from baccalaureate to doctoral degree has risen to 19.4 years (Hoffer et al., 2001).”
Understanding the Doctoral Experience of Asian International Students in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Fields: An Exploration of One Institutional Context (2010, background): “Factors such as time to degree (Bowen & Rudenstine, 1992; Nettles & Millett, 2006), lack of financial stability (Abedi & Benkin, 1987; Bowen & Rudenstine, 1992; Nettles & Millett, 2006), and dissatisfaction with the degree program (Hartnett & Katz, 1977; Lovitts, 2001) are often listed as reasons fo”