The doctoral model has not changed in its essential structure for a century. A student is attached to a supervisor, perhaps assigned to a project, and sent away to design, execute and write up a significant piece of research. Along the way, the supervisor checks in, steers, and points towards training that may or may not exist within the institution.
The assumption built into that model is that the student can sustain themselves independently through it: intellectually, motivationally, emotionally. The institution’s job is to provide the framework and regular or semi-regular supervisor meetings. The student’s job is to do the work.
This works for some. For many, it does not.
In 2017, I founded The PhD People because I had seen enough evidence that the gap between institutional provision and what doctoral students actually need was not a funding problem or a staffing problem. It was a structural one. The PhD is, by design, a solitary exercise in expertise. And in a post-Covid age, where remote working is increasingly normalised and where existing networks and communities are breaking down, for many students the doctoral journey is not just solitary; it is lonely. Breakdowns in institutional support mean it is also becoming less structured.
Eight years and roughly 27,000 students later, I want to be precise about what that means, what institutions typically do about it, and what the data from our own community suggests about what actually helps.
The structural problem
Doctoral training is built around a model that made sense when the university was the only place where specialist knowledge could be produced and transmitted. The supervisory relationship was the primary bond because it was, effectively, the only bond available. A student’s intellectual world was their supervisor, their lab or library, and the occasional conference.
That world no longer exists in the same form, but the model persists. And in disciplines where the lone-researcher format dominates — humanities, social sciences, most of the arts — students are still expected to sustain years of isolated, broadly self-directed work with minimal peer infrastructure.
The consequences are measurable. Doctoral completion rates globally sit at around 50%, the lowest of any degree level, with isolation consistently identified as a contributing factor. In the United States, attrition rates across disciplines range from 36 to 51%. A study of 49,000 students found that ten years after starting, only 56.6% had completed. Research into those who do not finish consistently identifies isolation as a major theme.
The mental health data reinforces this. A 2019 Nature survey of 6,300 PhD students globally found that 36% had sought help for anxiety or depression related to their PhD. A 2018 study in the same journal found that nearly 40% of graduate students experienced symptoms of anxiety or depression — a rate six times higher than the general population. Isolation is identified as a consistent contributing factor, partly because doctoral cohorts are small, and partly because the work itself is far more solitary than anything the student will have encountered at undergraduate level.
The British Psychological Society published an analysis that described the structural problem with some precision: PhD students are rarely at the same stage as their peers, which makes mutual conversation difficult; many have children or jobs that make time scarce; and three or more years is a very long time to sustain something without meaningful peer support. None of this is new information. And yet the doctoral model continues largely unchanged.
Then Covid happened
The PhD was structurally isolating long before March 2020. But the pandemic did something specific: it removed the ambient infrastructure that was quietly compensating for that isolation. The office. The library on a Tuesday afternoon. The corridor conversation after a seminar. The coffee with a cohort member that turned into two hours of inadvertent peer support. None of these were formal provision. None showed up in a researcher development plan. But they were holding things together for a significant number of students, and when they disappeared, the underlying isolation became visible.
Remote working has since become a structural feature of the post-pandemic economy, not a temporary adaptation. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 35% of employed adults worked some or all days from home in 2023, up from 24% before the pandemic. Research published in 2024 using data from the Household Pulse Survey found a statistically significant association between the frequency of remote working and loneliness. The more days worked remotely, the higher the reported loneliness. For doctoral students, who were already working remotely in the functional sense — alone, at a desk, on a problem nobody else fully understands — this is not a new dynamic. It is an intensified one.
The broader societal picture matters here too. In 2023, the US Surgeon General described loneliness as an epidemic, citing research suggesting roughly one in two adults in America reported experiencing it. The National Academies of Sciences noted in 2024 that the pandemic had intensified workplace loneliness as remote and hybrid arrangements became mainstream. The isolation that PhD students were already experiencing did not develop in a vacuum; it deepened inside a society that was simultaneously becoming more isolated across the board.
The institutional response has been uneven. Some universities accelerated their investment in pastoral and wellbeing support during the pandemic. Some expanded online provision. But the structural peer layer — the informal cohort infrastructure that Covid temporarily erased — has not been rebuilt in any systematic way. Students who started their PhDs in 2020 or 2021 often formed no cohort relationships at all. Those who started in 2022 or 2023 entered institutions that were trying to return to normal while the social habits and community norms that made normal possible were still recovering. The residue of that disruption is still visible in our sessions.
What PRES tells us (and what institutions do with it)
The Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) is the most comprehensive annual measure of doctoral student experience in the UK. Its two most recent reports contain a finding that deserves to sit at the centre of every conversation about researcher development provision.
Sense of belonging is the indicator with the strongest correlation with overall PGR satisfaction. It is also one of the lowest-scoring areas in the survey.
To phrase it differently: the thing that moves the needle most is the thing institutions are worst at providing.
The PRES data on online and hybrid students makes the point even more sharply. Online and hybrid PGRs report overall satisfaction of 75%, compared to 85% for students studying in person. The ten-point gap is attributed primarily to a perceived lack of community. One structural variable — physical presence among peers — accounts for a ten-point satisfaction gap. That gap has almost certainly widened as hybrid working has become more normalised and more students are completing significant portions of their doctorate off-campus.
What tends to happen with this data is instructive. Universities note the belonging findings. Some commission wellbeing workshops. Some expand counselling provision. Some create social events. These are not useless. But they address the symptom — distress — rather than the structure that produces it. A student who feels unseen in their research programme does not become more seen by attending a workshop on resilience.
The researcher development sector has, in the main, built its provision around the RDF (Researcher Development Framework): competency mapping, skills workshops, one-to-one coaching. These are valuable. But they are largely delivered in isolation from each other, and from the peer layer that makes them stick. Research on what actually predicts lower dropout rates is clear: close contact with a supervisor and regular exchange with other PhD students. The exchange with peers is not supplementary to the skills provision. It is part of the mechanism.
Why we do what we do
The PhD People was not built to replace institutional support. It was built because institutional support, for a large number of students, cannot provide what the research says they actually need at the point they need it most.
The central insight, which took a few years to articulate clearly, is this: doctoral students do not primarily have a writing or skills problem. They have a belonging problem. They sit alone with a problem that nobody in their immediate life — partner, family, friends, sometimes even their supervisor — fully understands. The isolation is compounded by the nature of the work.
What we have built is not primarily a writing service, though we run writing sessions, bootcamps, and proofreading support. It is a community with structured accountability at its centre. The Monday Focus Session — a regular, live writing session with other PhD students — is the core product. The PhD Common Room is the community that grows from it. Everything else follows from that.
The belonging has to be felt live. It cannot be transmitted by email or approximated by asynchronous content.
What 120 students taught us
Across five surveys conducted between 2024 and 2025 — covering new members, end-of-year reviews, Thesis Bootcamp participants, micro-solidarity pod pilots, and leavers — we collected data from 103 respondents. The aggregate NPS (Net Promoter Score) across all surveys is 60. For context, anything above 50 is considered excellent; the education sector average sits in the 30–50 range. Our end-of-year survey, which captures members after sustained engagement, records an NPS of 68.
The quantitative picture is strong. 93% of end-of-year respondents would be disappointed or very disappointed if the community disappeared; 57% would be very disappointed. 83% visit the community three or more times per month. 82% say they strongly identify with the community’s values.
But the more revealing data point comes from a different source. Before joining the community, prospective members complete a diagnostic quiz. When asked what they want to achieve in the next 90 days, 35% of cold respondents say they want help with structure and productivity. Only 9% say they want to feel less isolated.
Among existing community members asked what motivates them to use the community, the numbers almost exactly invert. 35% say their primary motivation is feeling less isolated. 7% mention structure.
Students arrive thinking they have a productivity problem. Once inside, they discover they have a belonging problem — and that solving the belonging problem is what enables the productivity. This is not a gap in self-awareness. It is the pre-awareness problem that the doctoral model creates: there is no framework for naming what you are missing until you experience having it.
The qualitative responses make the same point in plainer language. One member wrote:
“Before joining, I remember thinking: if I were seriously sick, or just stopped showing up altogether, it would probably take quite a while before anyone apart from my parents would notice. Feeling seen here has genuinely changed that for me.”
Others: “I credit The PhD People with being a big part of me submitting my final thesis.” “The feeling of belonging to a community keeps me working.” “It has been a very special lifeline for me at a point when I felt lost and confused.”
Nobody mentions the chapter templates we offer. Nobody mentions the writing frameworks we’ve designed. The thing that lands is presence, accountability, and being seen.
What writing accountability actually produces
The Monday Focus Session runs every week. It is a structured, live writing session: students arrive, set a goal, write in the presence of others, and report back. The format is not novel; structured writing groups have existed in universities for decades. What is different here is that the group is not limited to one institution, one discipline, or one career stage. A history student working on chapter three sits in the same room as a STEM student revising for resubmission and a part-time student writing around a full-time job.
The cross-institutional peer group is not incidental. It is one of the things universities cannot easily provide. Doctoral cohorts are small, discipline-specific, and frequently competitive. The PhD Common Room is none of those things. Members attend because they want to; there is no institutional requirement. That voluntary quality produces a different kind of commitment.
Our Thesis Bootcamp data makes the case for structured accountability with particular clarity. Bootcamp NPS is 94. 100% of participants rated the pace as about right. 90% said the Thesis Map exercise made them feel ready to write. These are not small improvements in confidence. They are before-and-after shifts in the participant’s relationship to their thesis, produced over four days of structured, peer-supported writing.
The mechanism is not complicated. When a student knows that twenty other people are writing at the same time alongside them — people who understand exactly what they’re going through because they’re going through it too — the social contract of the room creates momentum that willpower and solitary working alone cannot sustain. Research on what reduces doctoral attrition confirms this: cohort models, peer accountability structures, and study groups are among the most effective interventions.
The support gap
Our members fund their own membership. They pay £30 to £75 per month, out of stipends that in many cases do not keep pace with inflation, because the peer layer the data says they need is not available to them through their institution.
That is the support gap in its simplest form. Not the absence of pastoral care; universities have invested substantially in that. Not the absence of skills provision; the RDF-aligned workshop programme is extensive. The gap is specifically in the structured peer layer: regular, committed, cross-disciplinary community with accountability at its centre. Covid exposed that gap. The return to something resembling normal has not closed it.
The PRES data shows that belonging moves the satisfaction needle more than any other variable, and that institutions score lowest on it. The attrition research shows that peer accountability structures reduce dropout. The mental health data shows that doctoral students experience anxiety and depression at six times the rate of the general population, and that isolation is a consistent factor. The picture is consistent across sources.
The question worth sitting with is not whether this gap exists. The question is who closes it, and how.
What the data suggests institutions should consider
None of the above is an argument that universities are failing their doctoral students through negligence. Most researcher development teams are working hard, with limited budgets and under the constant pressure of compliance mapping. The problem is structural: the workshop model delivers skills to individuals. It does not, on its own, build the peer layer that holds those individuals to the work over years.
Skills provision that is delivered inside a peer community produces different outcomes than skills provision delivered to atomised individuals. The two things are not in competition. The question is whether institutions commission them as if they were separate.
The Monday Focus Session converts first-time attendees to paid community members at a rate of 50%. That figure does not reflect a particularly effective sales process. It reflects what happens when a student who has been working alone sits in a room with forty other people writing at the same time. They feel something they did not know they were missing. Half of them decide they want to keep feeling it.
And when the peer layer is in place, the practical work still has to happen. Most students find writing a PhD literature review one of the hardest parts of that work, and getting it right is often what the community ends up helping with most.
The solution exists. It is being built outside institutional walls because that is where the space to build it has been. That does not need to remain the case.
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