Determinants of PhD Completion Time at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria

Abstract

The demand for Ph.D degree holders has increased in recent time because of their potential to stimulate national development and promote technological advancement. In view of the desire of the nation to be among the first 20 most developed nations by 2020 and meet the manpower requirement of teaching in the growing tertiary institutions, it is important to examine completion rate and duration of PhD programmes in Nigeria’s foremost university. This paper examined completion time of PhD programme at the University of Ibadan. The main objective is to build a statistical model to explain factors accounting for the variation in completion time. The data used were captured through a survey questionnaire administered by the Postgraduate School, University of Ibadan on 2011/2012 graduating set. Apart from conducting an extensive exploratory analysis on PhD production in the university, a binary logistic regression model was also fitted. The dichotomous responses were: completion on time and completion over time. The fitted logistic regression shows that only 10% of PhDs have predicted probability of completion between 0.4 and 0.94 and factors like gender, Mphil/PhD conversion, marital status and employment status were found to significantly affect PhD completion time.

Keywords: PhD degree, completion time, logistic regression