Oh yeah, there's a whole different discussion to be had (and HN does have it often), about the problems with peer reviewed publications and citations being the end-all for graduate students and professors.
My particular school and department is interesting because it doesn't have any hard requirement for publications, and it aims to have students finish a PhD in about three years of full-time work (assuming one enters the program with a relevant master's degree already in-hand). There has been some tension between the younger assistant professors (who are still fighting for tenure) and the older full professors (who got tenure in, say, the 1990s). In practice, the assistant professors expect to see their students publish (with the professors as co-authors, of course) and would strongly prefer to see a dissertation comprised of three papers stapled together, regardless of the what the school and department officially says. The full professors, on the other hand, seem to prefer something more like a monograph that is of "publishable" quality, maybe to be submitted somewhere after graduation. They argue that the assistant professors should be able to judge quality work for themselves instead of outsourcing it to anonymous reviewers. Clearly, there are different incentives at play.
My particular school and department is interesting because it doesn't have any hard requirement for publications, and it aims to have students finish a PhD in about three years of full-time work (assuming one enters the program with a relevant master's degree already in-hand). There has been some tension between the younger assistant professors (who are still fighting for tenure) and the older full professors (who got tenure in, say, the 1990s). In practice, the assistant professors expect to see their students publish (with the professors as co-authors, of course) and would strongly prefer to see a dissertation comprised of three papers stapled together, regardless of the what the school and department officially says. The full professors, on the other hand, seem to prefer something more like a monograph that is of "publishable" quality, maybe to be submitted somewhere after graduation. They argue that the assistant professors should be able to judge quality work for themselves instead of outsourcing it to anonymous reviewers. Clearly, there are different incentives at play.