It has changed in Aus. At my university many PhD students are on a government fees scholarship. These used to be loosely administered, and students could go years over their original submission dates and still complete. But now the time limits are much more strictly imposed by the funding body. And, more seriously, no funding is now released until the student completes. So the pressure is very high to complete as quickly as possible. As a part-time student I'm not subject to quite so much pressure, and p/t students who complete generally do it under their time limit, unlike full-time students who often have to stretch the limits. As you'd expect - major projects, big brain work and their presentation in the form of a 100,000 word thesis isn't always amenable to an imposed timetable. In addition, the introduction of some course work at the beginning of the process to make up real or perceived deficits in the candidate's knowledge isn't reflected in a shorter thesis, so the process has in fact become much more pressured downunder. M-H On 06/10/2006, at 12:55 AM, Nancy Baym wrote:
Regarding the PhD student/older academic split Mary-Helen alludes to, I guess I now qualify as the latter, and my sense sitting in there was that the PhD students might be romanticizing what it was like back in the old days. I don't recall a world where writing a dissertation caused no stress, where we were assured of rewarding academic employment, and so on. It was hard then too, we just didn't have blogs to share the experience. That said, one of the interesting things I got a little bit of a feel for in Brisbane was the differences between the Australian higher educational system and the American one, and maybe it is different for younger Australian academics than older ones.