TY - JOUR AU - Groen,Jeffrey AU - Jakubson,George AU - Ehrenberg,Ronald G. AU - Condie,Scott AU - Liu,Albert Yung-Hsu TI - Program Design and Student Outcomes in Graduate Education JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 12064 PY - 2006 Y2 - March 2006 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12064 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12064.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Jeffrey Groen Bureau of Labor Statistics 2 Massachusetts Ave NE Suite 4945 Washington, DC 20212 Tel: 202-691-7392 E-Mail: Groen.Jeffrey@BLS.gov George Jakubson Cornell Higher Education Research Institute 257 Ives Hall Ithaca, NY 14853-3901 E-Mail: George.Jakubson@cornell.edu Ronald G. Ehrenberg Cornell Higher Education Research Institute 271 Ives Hall East Ithaca, NY 14853-3901 Tel: 607/255-3026 Fax: 607 255 4496 E-Mail: rge2@cornell.edu Scott Condie Department of Economics, Brigham Young University, 422 5306, Fax: +1 801 422 0194, Email: ssc@byu.edu E-Mail: ssc@byu.edu Albert Yung-Hsu Liu Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. 505 14th St., Suite 800 Oakland, CA 94612-1475 E-Mail: aliu@mathematica-mpr.com AB - Doctoral programs in the humanities and related social sciences are characterized by high attrition and long times-to-degree. In response to these problems, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched the Graduate Education Initiative (GEI) to improve the quality of graduate programs and in turn reduce attrition and shorten times-to-degree. Over a 10-year period starting in 1991, the Foundation provided a total of over $80 million to 51 departments at 10 major research universities. We estimate the impact of the GEI on attrition rates and times-to-degree using competing risk duration models and student-level data. The data span the start of the GEI and include information for students at a set of control departments. We estimate that the GEI had modest impacts on student outcomes in the expected directions: reducing attrition rates, reducing times-to-degree and increasing completion rates. The impacts of the GEI appear to have been driven in part by reductions in entering cohort size, improvements in financial support and increases in student quality. ER -