Purpose: Higher education, as a field of study, is one of the few programmatic areas that offer two doctoral degrees: The Doctor of Education (EdD) and the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). In the United States, the two degrees are often conflated. Conversations, to this point, have done more to contribute to the theoretical debate than to operationally…

Doctoral education is an expensive and difficult endeavor. Program faculty are interested in finding students who will be successful in completing their courses and obtaining employment. The Graduate Record Examination (GRE) is often used to assess a student's readiness for the rigors of graduate education. A student's readiness for doctoral…

There is interest in admission criteria that predict future success in biomedical graduate school programs, but identifying predictors of PhD attainment is inherently complex. In particular, high noncompletion rates of PhD programs have long been recognized as a major crisis. Here, we present a quantitative analysis of the PhD students enrolled in…

The growing concern of doctoral student persistence has increased exponentially in higher education over the past decade. The body of research presented in this dissertation examines the complex phenomenon of persistence and possible pathways to addressing the dilemma of deteriorating academic persistence for doctoral students. It explores and…

An analysis of 1955 physics graduate students from 19 Ph.D. programs shows that undergraduate grade point average predicts graduate grades and Ph.D. completion more effectively than GRE scores. Students' undergraduate GPA (UGPA) and GRE Physics (GRE-P) scores are small but statistically significant predictors of graduate course grades, while GRE…