Abstract:
Despite the increasing importance placed on doctoral education in New Zealand, we do not know for sure the percentage of doctoral candidates achieving a PhD and how long it takes them to do so. Since official statistics do not reveal the full extent of completion and attrition, an alterative data set was interrogated to produce benchmark data for one discipline over a 40-year period. The New Zealand Journal of History has printed a yearly digest of all history doctorates in the six main New Zealand universities completed in the previous 12 months along with the candidates and their projects that are "in progress". This year-on-year guide enables a longitudinal analysis of completion rates and approximate completion times for doctorates in the humanities over four decades. Using this robust data set of 296 history candidatures, this article presents answers to the questions: How many PhD candidates successfully completed their PhD and how long did it take them? The findings reveal that historically there have been problems with doctoral completion and attrition rates that have the potential to be compounded in the current environment of increasing enrolments for PhDs coupled with institutional pressures for timely completions. Keywords: PhD completion; history; doctoral training