How long is the average dissertation?

A major deterrent that keeps people away from graduate school is the requirement to write a dissertation or thesis. One often hears horror stories of the excessive page lengths that are expected. However, most don’t realize that dissertations are filled with lots of white space. The actual written portion may only account for less than 50% of the page length. Regardless, students tend to fixate on the ‘appropriate’ page length for a dissertation, as if it’s some sort of measure of how much work you’ve done to get your degree. Here is an interesting analysis on length of dissertations:

http://www.r-bloggers.com/how-long-is-the-average-dissertation/