Socialization: A Requisite for Writing the Doctoral Dissertation?

Low completion rates for doctorates presents a problem for higher education in the United States. Successful completion is essential and maintaining a pool of doctorates guarantees a sufficient number of educators and researchers. The purpose of this paper was twofold: to determine the number of doctoral degrees awarded during the 2012-2013 academic year at public, private and for-profit universities in the United States and, also to share these findings with the academic community. This study is significant because identifying where doctoral degrees are awarded is important to higher education because colleges and universities need to know where the doctoral graduates are before administrators can begin working to eliminate the barriers to completion of the degree. This research study was an archival quantitative, data mining study using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). This study identified the number of doctoral degrees awarded. The findings from the review of the literature and the study suggested that approximately 175,865 doctoral degrees were not awarded during the 2012-2013 academic year in the United States potentially due to insufficient socialization during the dissertation process.