Ra'ed,

A couple of references to follow up on Chris Nippert-Eng's
explanation of why it might take more than three years to get a PhD
in the US...

A group of then-PhD-candidates from Illinois Institute of Technology
conducted an informal survey of doctoral students for the Conference
on Doctoral Education in Design held in Ohio in 1998. There is some
info on duration of courses in that paper (and on students'
expectations for how long their programs would take to complete). The
paper (entitled "So, you're going to be...a doctor of design?") is
published in the 1998 proceedings from that conference or you can get
it online from the archives of this list:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/files/PHD-DESIGN/ (file name =
"melican.rtf").

Here's the relevant paragraph from our paper:

"The majority of survey respondents expected to complete their
degrees in three (48%) or four (23%) years. (See fig. 2.) The only
two respondents who had already completed their doctoral studies,
however, had each taken five years to do so. According to a recent
study of doctorate recipients from United States universities, the
average time to obtain a Ph.D. -- including time to earn a master's
degree -- was, for the physical sciences 6.4 years, for engineering
6.7 years, for the social sciences 7.4 years, for professional fields
7.5 years, while in the humanities it was 8.3 years. In relation to
these other disciplines (and accounting for an average time of two
years to earn a master's degree in design), expectations of
completing a Ph.D. in design in five to six years are at least
optimistic."

The authoritative source for the info that you're looking for is the
Summary Report of the Survey of Earned Doctorates. That's the
National Science Foundation study that Chris referred to. Everybody
who earns a PhD in the US is supposed to participate in this ongoing
survey. We were using data gathered up to 1996 when we wrote the
paper for the Ohio conference. Now you can get data through 1998:
http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/srs00410/start.htm

Of course, that report does not specifically mention Design PhDs. If
you're looking for an average program-duration for US PhD students
specifically in DESIGN, then we haven't got much of a population for
you to base it on. Of the five graduates from US programs whom I
know, I would guess that their average time-to-completion is about
five years. (I was six years.)

Hope that helps.




Jay Melican, PhD

Senior Research Associate
Institute of Design
Illinois Institute of Technology
350 N LaSalle Street
Chicago, IL 60610-4726
USA
tel: 312 595 4930
fax: 312 595 4901

e-mail: [log in to unmask]
url: http://www.id.iit.edu/~jaym



>I'm looking for journal articles or conference papers that discuss the
>average graduation period PhD students at US universities take.