They blend among the swarm of undergraduates and faculty members as a kind of academic package deal – students, teachers and researchers all in one – who aren't as easy to define as other members of the university.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln's 4,150 current graduate students fall under the office of Graduate Studies, but academically they live under the reign of their respective academic departments, like a series of individual fiefdoms scattered around campus.
Because their academic tracks vary so widely, most universities – including UNL – don't keep numbers on how long it takes students to graduate, or even whether they graduate at all.
Nationwide, millions of dollars from the government and private institutions go to graduate students. Depending on the department's demands and individual's progress, students often spend four to seven years getting their degree.
No all-encompassing studies exist, but other research suggests many graduate students just aren't graduating – that roughly half of Ph.D. students never finish their programs.
UNL officials are confident that most students here complete their programs, but no one has numbers on the subject.
"It's sort of a moving target," said Bill Nunez, director of UNL Institutional Research and Planning. "(Graduate school) is not a direct path many times."
Different programs take different amounts of time, he said. Some students go part-time for a while, maybe take a year or two off, and the department has no way of knowing whether they'll come back.
Not all attrition is bad, said Chris Golde, senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in Stanford, Calif.
"There are some people who tried (graduate school), and it's clear it's not a good fit for them," she said.
But it's not that way for everyone, Golde said. Under different institutions, they would have thrived.
For those who drop out, it means lost years and sometimes a load of debt. For programs that give students financial support and free tuition, it means lost public and private dollars.
"The bottom line was, there wasn't a clear picture," said Ellen Weissinger, executive associate dean of UNL Graduate Studies, who attended a conference on the subject a couple years ago.
Weissinger said she hadn't heard any attrition concerns coming out of UNL, and focused instead on the overall package of graduate studies, staying alert on issues like recruiting, post-degree job placement and program quality.
But the nationwide concern is something she was aware of, she said.
"There is a national conversation on these issues where we're trying to establish what we need to pay attention to," she said.
The national conversation is spurring some research on the issue. The Council of Graduate Studies' Ph.D. Completion Project was launched last year to identify universities' different approaches to retaining graduate students.
In a preliminary report published in July, CGS found that nationwide, about half the students who begin a graduate program actually finish. Engineering students completed at about 65 percent, while students in the humanities lagged at about 49 percent. Life sciences, social sciences and physical sciences/math were all in the 50 percent range.
Because few individual schools keep official numbers, a prospective student must rely on anecdotes to gauge attrition rates.
At UNL, those anecdotes seem positive.
Ryan Weber, who got his masters in geology at UNL, doesn't remember any of his 30 or so fellow grad students dropping out or getting cut for some reason.
Becki Barnes, the psychology department's graduate admissions coordinator, counts four non-completers out of the current class of 23.
Bob Shearman, chairman of the horticulture graduate committee, remembered that out of the 30 students he's advised, only three have left – one to take a job, another to get married and another because of health reasons.
They credit their higher graduation rates with a number of factors that pop up in national studies such as the CGS's findings or Golde's 2001 report "At Cross Purposes: What the experiences of doctoral students reveal about doctoral education."
Attrition is often a matter of lack of funded assistantships, an absence of supportive graduate-student community, bad student-adviser relationships or, as Golde reported, students who just don't know what they're getting into when they start a graduate program.
The Chronicle for Higher Education also reported in January 2004 that students who didn't complete their programs weren't necessarily less talented than those who stayed.
Daniel Claes, chief graduate adviser for the physics and astronomy department, said financial backing for students helps – the program only admits enough students to fill available assistantships with funding already in place.
Also, the department has a good sense of community that helps create a support network.
"By the time you're admitted to candidacy, you've found your niche," he said.
Carlos Asarta, an economics graduate student, said he had a good relationship with his adviser – he'd even enrolled at UNL's graduate school primarily because that adviser was so well-respected in his field.
Nicholas Spencer, graduate committee chairman for the English department, said the department clearly explained the realities of graduate studies to prevent misconceptions among entering grads.
For example, students know that oftentimes the department won't be able to offer a funded assistantship, he said. They know that English Ph.D.s aren't nearly as in demand as higher degrees in the hard sciences – but that UNL appears to have a good track record of job placement compared to its peer institutions.
"We make it very clear to them at the outset," he said.Daniel Denecke, director of best practices for the Council of Graduate Schools, doesn't put much faith in anecdotes. Without official data-collection methods in place, he said, impressions can get skewed.
"The memory can be a little more selective about students who are not successful," he said.
Many institutions don't even know they have a problem until they try to put student attrition rates into numbers, Denecke said.
"When graduate schools collect this data, there's a kind of a rude awakening for the faculty when they see how many students are not getting their degree.
"Often, they're not as rosy as people think."
Golde said although many institutions don't have attrition numbers available, prospective students should make it a point to fully investigate a program.
It's not a matter of picking the most prestigious-sounding or best-ranked university, she said. If students know what they want and do their background research before signing on, they have a much better chance of thriving.
Weissinger said because no institution or researcher had yet formed a comprehensive means of measuring graduate school attrition, the office would just continue to focus on improving UNL's graduate programs generally.
Weissinger said the office focuses on the more tangible ways to improve UNL's graduate studies: quality advising, increased funding support, improved recruitment practices.
"Those are things that the faculty and students can get their hands on."
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