In 1861 Yale awarded the first three PhDs in the US. Only one, by James Morris Whiton, has survived. Guess how many pages his dissertation was? 100? 200? 500?
Six hand written pages long. (Rosenberg 1961)
Mind you, he did have to pass examines in German, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit too. But come on, I did that in High School, well not the German, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit (I did Spanish). I have seen PhD’s that were in Volumes, as in they were so big they need to be bounded into several separate books.
Assuming about 285+ words to a single double spaced 8 1/2 by 11 in. page and a PhD has to be between 80,000-90,000 words we are looking at 280- 315 pages. That does not include images, tables, graphs, appendix, cover pages etc. which would expand that X amount.
It makes you wonder how PhD dissertations have gone from six hand written pages to 300+ pages.
Vol. 32, No. 7 (Oct., 1961), pp. 387-394
August 30th, 2011 → 10:36 pm
[...] PhD problem. Posted on August 30, 2011 by Doug Rocks-Macqueen The average PhD has gone from 1 year to complete and 6 pages to about 9 years for a PhD in archaeology (US and Canada) (actually 8 but it has increased by one [...]