The Lived Experience of Late-Stage Doctoral Student Attrition in Counselor Education

Doctoral student attrition often creates negative consequences for the university and the student. Attrition results in the waste of a university's human and financial resources (Kerlin, 1995; National Research Council, 1996). Time spent on students who never graduate drains the resources of a doctoral program, and these resources are unrecoverable (Pauley, Cunningham, & Toth, 1999). Doctoral study noncompleters (students who drop out of doctoral programs prior to graduation) pay an emotional toll. Students' personal lives may be devastated as they spend years explaining why they did not finish the degree (Sternberg, 1981). The emotional impact of attrition causes some to struggle with bouts of serious depression, and has even resulted in a few cases of violence and attempted suicide (Hinchey & Kimmel, 2000; Lovitts, 2001). Given the various costs associated with doctoral student attrition, a study of the experience of doctoral student attrition in counselor education is vital. Various barriers found to contribute to doctoral student attrition include (a) procrastination (Green, 1997; Kluever, 1997), (b) low researcher self-efficacy (Faghihi, Rakow, & Ethington, 1999), (c) finances (Abedi & Benkin, 1987; Bair & Haworth, 1999; Girves & Wemmerus, 1988), (d) poor advisor relationship (Ferrer De Valero, 2001), (e) low integration level with faculty (Golde, 2000; Hoskins & Goldberg, 2005; Lovitts, 2001), (f) low integration level with peers (Hoskins & Goldberg; Lovitts), and (g) incongruence between student goals and program focus (Bair & Haworth; Golde, 1998; Hoskins & Goldberg; Lovitts). Because barriers leading to attrition vary widely across academic disciplines (Bair & Haworth), barriers leading to doctoral attrition in counselor education need to be identified and examined. In the specific context of counselor education, Hoskins and Goldberg (2005) conducted qualitative interviews finding three main categories of the student-program match: (a) the social-personal match between the student and his or her peers, (b) the social-personal match between the student and the faculty, and (c) the academic match that entails the congruence of the student's goals with the program's focus. The findings of Hoskins and Goldberg represent only a few of the barriers that have been shown to impact doctoral attrition across other disciplines. In addition, all five of the permanent noncompleters in the Hoskins and Goldberg study withdrew during the first three years of doctoral study. Given the limited scope of research on doctoral student attrition in counselor education, additional research is appropriate. In particular, the voices of noncompleters who withdrew during the dissertation stage of doctoral study need to be heard. The current study attempted to add to the existing body of knowledge concerning doctoral student attrition by focusing on noncompleters in counselor education who withdrew during or after the third year of doctoral study. Studying noncompleters who withdrew later in doctoral study will add to the picture begun by Hoskins and Goldberg (2005). The research question for the study was: What is the nature of the participants' experience of doctoral attrition in counselor education? Method This study was conducted within a grounded theory framework in order to fully explore the experience of the participants. Grounded theory is an inductively developed theoretical stance taken from the body of data. The most desirable outcome of the analysis is that the theory espoused will fit the dataset perfectly. The contrast is with a theory formed deductively without data, which may not fit any data set available. Grounded theory is most appropriate when dealing with case studies or case-oriented data. A case rather than a variable perspective is used in Grounded Theory. Another way to look at this case construct is that the researcher takes each case to represent a whole or gestalt, where the individual variables interact to produce a specific outcome. …