Some Facts and Figures about Graduate Education in History at Duke
Like many Ph.D. programs in History, we made a decision in the mid-1990s to reduce the size of our program, partly because of the difficult academic job market, and partly in order to be able to offer guaranteed funding packages to those students whom we admitted. In the 1995-96 academic year, when we cut the size of our target for incoming classes from 18-20 to 10-12, we had a total of 107 students in the program; in 2005-06, the number has stabilized around 70. The close cooperation between our department and the History program at UNC-Chapel Hill makes for a larger graduate student community than the numbers for Duke alone would suggest.
In the last ten years, women have comprised slightly more than half of our graduate student population, and just over one fifth of our students have been Americans of color. The proportion of foreign students has risen from roughly one in eight during the 1995-96 academic year to one in five during 2004-05. We also admit many students who have had non-academic careers before deciding to pursue the Ph.D. in History. Our median time to degree is one year under the national median of nine years, and we are hopeful that our new curriculum will help to reduce that time further. For extensive demographic data on the grad student population in the department, see this page.
Duke graduate students play a significant role in departmental governance. The Graduate Student Association (GSA) provides a central conduit for student input into departmental policy; it also organizes presentations of work in progress by grad students. In addition, GSA representatives attend faculty meetings; they play vital roles on the departmental Graduate Committee and within our Carnegie Committee on reforming the graduate program; and all of our faculty search committees have a voting graduate student member. In recent years, a number of our graduate students have also assumed leadership roles within the American Historical Association.
Our students do very well in external fellowship competitions, regularly receiving Fulbright Fellowships, Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowships, and other predissertation research grants; they also compete successfully for the wide array of internal research grants, dissertation-writing fellowships, and library internships available at Duke. Many grad students also get the chance to help organize and run academic conferences during their time in Durham .
One key measure of a graduate program's strength is it's placement record. Our graduates have had excellent success on the academic job market, gaining tenure-track positions at leading American research universities such as Harvard, Penn, Cal-Berkeley, Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Michigan, Ohio State, Emory, Rice, Dartmouth, and Cornell, as well as numerous four-year colleges in the United States, and universities in Canada, England, New Zealand, and Australia. Many of our Ph.Ds have also found employment in government, historical museums, other non-governmental organizations, and the business world.