I know someone who reads five different languages. Poetry is his passion, and he has translated works from Latin, Italian, German, and Romanian. He writes literary essays, too, some in national periodicals and some in little magazines, wielding knowledge of poetic tradition matched by few professors working in literary studies.

He never earned a doctorate, though. He entered a Comparative Literature program in the Ivy League but left after two years. Each day after classes ended, he remembers, the graduate students would drift outside for coffee and a cigarette. They huddled in twos and threes, shoulders stooped and faces drawn, voices muted. He mingled with them, joined the exchanges on Wallace Stevens, shied away from Derrida, then walked across the campus to his apartment. On the way, he passed by the business school and always paused, for the scene in front was entirely the opposite. Students of accounting, marketing, and management gathered on the steps laughing and carousing, their faces cheery and wry, some with a beer in hand. These people are so happy and whimsical, he thought, and the humanists-in-training so dour and anxious. The signs were clear. One day he left the East Coast for the West, three years after that collecting a Stanford MBA.

That was three decades ago, but from what I can tell, things haven’t changed. Humanities grad students feel depressed, burdened, and insecure, more so than their colleagues in the sciences, and it shows up in their completion rates.

The happiness factor goes along with recent findings from the Ph.D. Completion Project. Attrition rates from graduate study have dropped across the board — except in the humanities, where they have stalled.

The Project cites several influences on the differing rates, including financial support and mentoring, which are more certain in scientific fields than in humanities fields. “Program environment” plays a role, too, and from what I can see, graduate humanities departments suffer from widespread malaise. It may be an epiphenomenon, of course, a result of poor funding and job prospects. But one wonders whether something about the nature of graduate study in the humanities might be involved as well, aspects of doctoral training that turn new students off, that gainsay the inspirations that drew them into the field in the first place.

Then again, maybe the relative improvements in the sciences are the result of a differing population. More foreign students enroll in science and engineering programs all the time, and perhaps they have more motivation to finish than their American counterparts. Indeed, the Completion Project itself notes “an inadequate domestic talent pool” as a continuing problem.