Depending on his circumstance why would he stop working with professors or as a PhD in the research community? It feels like others on this comment thread are making an assumption he enrolled as an ordinary student and 'skipped' to PhD, and now is about to jettison from academia entirely. The article sounds like he has been working in his scientific field for some time and is just as likely that the master's program was sponsored by his work at that site in his field. If you had someone who was working FT and stopping/starting through a master's program and at the end was more a junior research peer with clear expertise than just someone who 'finished a program' and the work had enough merit why wouldn't you upgrade it?