Barbara Lovitts left not one, but two doctoral programs. The experience of those leavings led her to this project, which formed the basis of the PhD she did complete.

The standard assumption is that graduate students leave PhD programs because they can’t hack it, whatever “it” is: the research, the self-motivation, the professionalism, the networking, the requirements of the job search. What Lovitts found through extensive surveys and interviews of graduate students, faculty, and administrators, however, is that there are few differences between graduate students who successfully complete the PhD and students who don’t. In the main, the application process does a good job of weeding out those who are inappropriate for graduate study. Those who get in, in other words, are all good enough to finish.

The real determiner of who stays and who goes has everything to do with organizational structures: of disciplines, of institutions, of departments. Those disciplines, institutions, and departments who do a good job of integrating students both socially and academically have a low attrition rate; those who don’t have a high attrition rate.

The bottom line, for Lovitts, is that the structures of graduate education are responsible for graduate student attrition — not the graduate students themselves. And that’s a point I’m glad someone has proven. It’s something most students who leave PhD study need to hear: It’s not you, it’s them.

That being said, this book very much reads like a social science dissertation — lots of analyzing the data in multiple directions and then spelling out the results in excruciating detail. If you want to know the details of how and why departments fail their graduate students, this book is worth reading in its entirety for that very detail. But if you, yourself, have left graduate school, all you need to take away is this: Your leaving wasn’t entirely or even mostly about you and your talents.