VenturePhD: A Bilateral Venture Capital Model for Doctoral Education: Reciprocal Commitments and Exit Rights

A PhD system built on a 19th-century apprenticeship model is failing by nearly every empirical measure — ~40–50% attrition, depression rates six times the general population, and tenure-track placement below 15% in many fields — while venture capital has spent four decades perfecting bilateral contracts that manage exactly the risks PhD programs ignore: information asymmetry, moral hazard, hold-up, and misaligned incentives. Doctoral students may spend years building a project and a supervisory relationship before they know whether that relationship will support their training. Changing direction can be costly when one super-visor influences a student’s income, research access, assessment, and references. This paper proposes VenturePhD, a policy design for doctoral education that pairs reciprocal commitments with supported transfer and exit rights. Drawing on venture-contracting research, it separates decisions about a project’scontinuation from decisions about student support and recognition of completed work.  Students and supervisors would agree on revisable research and training plans. Universities would guarantee specified funding, appoint reviewers outside the supervisory relationship, and finance time-limited transitions. The paper specifies responsibilities and remedies, gives a worked example, and sets out hypotheses for aprospective pilot. It reports no intervention results. The empirical question is whether universities canreduce a student’s dependence on a particular supervisor without weakening research quality, mentoring, or access to doctoral education.