Date: Mon, 08 Dec 1997 19:19:08 -0500
From: tombrown@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu (Thomas F Brown)
Subject: Re: five years
To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
Message-id: <199712090019.TAA05430@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu>

>Or, or....  There are other factors here that influence whether or 
>not someone has it on the ball.  Has anyone here considered that 
>things like family background, race, class, and oh, maybe, gender 
>have something to do with how easily and quickly one gets through 
>graduate school.  I take it neither of you are trying to raise 
>children?  That neither of you ever encounter any sort of stumbling 
>blocks:  ill parents and relatives, family crises, out-of-work 
>relatives who might need your help, etc.

Sure, there are all sorts of extraneous reasons why folks might
not finish on time. But the question is whether scarce funding
resources should be diverted to supporting students whose
long residence is unrelated to the requirements of their
research.

Given enough time and money, anyone of average intelligence
and ambition could struggle through a sociology phd. But
since there is not all that much money available, and since
there any number of deserving uses for that money, it seems
reasonable to me to expect folks to finish in a timely
fashion.

OTOH, if I were free to reorganize academia, I would open
it up to anyone who wanted to come, free of tuition charge.
Anyone who could keep up could get any degree they wanted
wherever they wanted. As long as they could support themselves,
they would have as much time as they wished.

The main drawback with this plan (and versions of it exist in 
various european countries) is that students need to be much more 
entrepreneurial and self-starting since professors cannot possibly 
hand-hold everyone through the process. 

So the strong survive and the weak drop out--which is not 
all that different from what we have here, except that
since entry is universal, gender, race, and class privileges
play a slightly smaller role.