I downloaded @DrBiden's dissertation and took a quick look at it. While I did not read every word of it, I read enough of it to arrive to the following conclusions:

It is dreadfully weak in terms of a worthy contribution to human knowledge for several independent reasons. It

is nothing more than a case study of a particular institution using very basic surveys that otherwise do NOT demonstrate an underlying general phenomenon. It is VOID of any hypothesis testing & VOID of any statistical inferential testing. In other words, it is nothing more than

a tallying of descriptive stats that would cause me to FAIL students conducting a research project in my undergraduate classes. I can assure you that the rigor of my class projects be it the tackled phenomena &/or analytic sophistication is substantially higher than Dr. Biden's

dissertation. Again, this does not specifically address the nature of the @WSJ article but it certainly sheds light on the extraordinary differences in quality that arise in different disciplines, schools, & universities. All doctors are NOT created equal. Hope this helps.