~40% of life science PhD students in the US don't graduate

It's been almost 7 years since I officially left my life science PhD program. When I first left, I wondered who else was going through the same thing. It was hard to find other PhD dropouts, because this demographic prefers to stay hidden due to the shame and stigma of not completing a PhD. It was a very lonely transition that I couldn't bring myself to talk about for a long time.

Based on anectodal accounts, I suspect there is a sizable number of life science PhD dropouts. But very few of them list "PhD Dropout" on their online profiles, so it's not like I can just search for them. How many people are in this group? After digging around a little, here is what I found: ~40% of life science PhD students in the US don't graduate, which amounts to ~3000 life science PhD dropouts a year.

This is a highly trained life science talent pool that is often under-valued on the job market. Creative life science recruiters could probably build an entire business recruiting from this pool. You just need to figure out where to find them.

Supporting Data

The PhD Completion Project by the Council of Graduate Schools

The Council of Graduate Schools conducted the PhD Completion Project, which tracked the completion and attrition of doctoral students in the US. The study is old, from 2008. But since NIH funding hasn't changed much since then by inflation-adjusted figures, and since life science PhDs are almost entirely funded by the NIH, I assume that the numbers in this study have not changed too much since 2008.

Page 5, Figure 1.1. The life science PhD completion rate is about 43% at the 6-year mark and 60% at the 8-year mark, which means ~40% of life science PhD students don't graduate.

Page 9-10, Table 2.1 and 2.2. A total of 233,500 PhD students were enrolled in the 2003-2004 school year. 19%, or 44,365, of these students were in life science PhD programs. If ~40% of them don't graduate by the 8-year mark, it means we have on average 2,218 life science PhD dropouts every year.

Page 42, Figure 6.6. Asian American students have the lowest completion rate in the life sciences, at just 47%. I guess people who look like me tend not to finish life science PhDs? Interesting.

But this data is quite old, so I wanted to get a more recent estimate.

A Study of Graduate Enrollment and Degrees by the Council of Graduate Schools and ETS

This is a fairly recent study of graduate enrollment done as a collaboration between the Council of Graduate Schools and ETS, which administrates the GRE.

Page B7, Table B.6. First-time graduate enrollment for doctoral students in the life sciences in Fall 2020 is 7,425. If 40% of them don't graduate (see above), and if the number of first-time enrollees have not shifted dramatically in the years immediately before 2020 (Page 8, Figure 7), then each year we can expect about 2,970 life science PhD dropouts. Multiplying that by 10 gives us 29,700 life science PhD dropouts in the past 10 years.

Page B13, Table B.15. Total of 47,012 doctoral students in the life sciences were enrolled as of Fall 2020. So it really hasn't changed that much compared to the same figure (44,365) from the 2003-2004 school year (see above). My previous assumptions that the number of life science PhD enrollees have remained stable over many years were okay.