The Relationship Between the Aggregated University Average GRE and the Completion of a Doctoral Degree in Education

A significant amount of research has been documented on both attrition and retention of doctoral students. The attrition of doctoral students is a loss to society and academia when the prospective scholar does not complete the rigors of the dissertation journey. The time and money invested by the graduate students and the university is of no true value unless the terminal degrees are completed. The correlation study investigated the relationship between average admissions Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) scores and the completion of doctoral degrees in education. There is a very limited amount of research on the completion of doctoral degrees in education. This study used archival aggregated data of 51 universities that conferred doctoral degrees in education in the years of 2015 and 2016. The study dis-aggregated the GRE scores of each of the 51 universities to further study the individual relationship of the verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and analytical sections of the GRE scores to the completion of the doctoral degree in education. The current study desired to fill the gap by investigating the relationship of the average admissions GRE scores and the completion of Doctor of Education degrees. Pearson's correlation found that the verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and analytical writing average admissions GRE scores, at the university level, do have a significant correlation to the completion of a doctoral degree in education at the 51 universities in the study during the years of 2015 and 2016.