Harrison G. Gough
Institute of Personality Assessment and Research
University of California, Berkeley

According to the educational clock, a modal American child should enter
first grade at age six, graduate from high school at 17, and if a college-goer,
should take an undergraduate degree at age 21. If this student continues on
into graduate school, a Ph.D. degree would be anticipated four years later,
at age 25. How do these normative expectations agree with what actually oc-
curs? In regard to entering and completing graduate study in psychology,
there appear to be rather marked discrepancies.

For example, for 623 male and 405 female graduate students in the
University of California, Berkeley, (sample follows) the mean ages at entry
were 25.50 for males and 25.18 for females. Years required to take the
Ph.D. degree were 6.24 for the 350 males who completed their training by
the time this study was conducted, and 6.87 for the 179 females who had
finished. Mean ages on receipt of the degree were therefore 31.74 for the
males, and 32.05 for the females. These figures are similar to the mean age
of 31.55 calculated from data reported by Knox ( 1970), in her study of
graduate students in psychology at four universities.

Graduate students in psychology not only start later than many would an-
ticipate, but also take longer to finish. In the well-known Veterans Ad-
ministration Selection Research Project at the University of Michigan ( Kelly
& Fiske, 1951), the mean number of years to take the Ph.D. degree for the
178 students persevering up to this point was 6.01, standard deviation =
3.02 ( Kelly, Goldberg, Fiske, & Kilkowski, 1978). Lunneborg and Lunne-
borg ( 1972) found that only 21% of their female sample of 38 students, and

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