Ronald G. Ehrenberg

This personal reflective essay summarizes and explains why the frequency with which I have coauthored research has varied over my career and discusses the reasons that my coauthored publications and collaborations have arisen. The reasons include research that arises from casual conversations with colleagues, the sharing of data both as a donor and as a recipient, invitations to participate in large-scale projects, the division of labor and working with people with complementary skills and personalities, educating graduate and undergraduate students and the desire to give the former a leg up in the job market and to encourage the latter to pursue doctoral study, discussions with my wife about issues she faced as a teacher and administrator in public K12 education, and efforts to magnify my impact on an area of study by convening conferences, commissioning papers, and seeing conference volumes through to publication.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Graduate Education Initiative (GEI) provided funding to 54 departments in the humanities and related social sciences during the 1990s to improve their PhD programs. This article estimates the aspects of PhD programs the GEI influenced and how these aspects influenced attrition and graduation probabilities. It uses survey data on entrants to PhD programs at 44 of the “treatment” departments and 41 “control” departments during a 15-year period that spanned the start of the GEI. Factor analysis is used to group more than 100 program characteristics into a smaller number of factors, and the impact of the GEI on each and the impact of each on attrition and graduation probabilities are estimated. The article estimates the routes via which the GEI influenced attrition and graduation rates and indicates which aspects of PhD programs departments should concentrate on to improve their programs’ performance.