The Changing Landscape of Doctoral Education
Globally, doctoral education has been in the throes of change throughout most of the 21st century with massification, diversification, regulation, capitalisation and numerous other ‘ations. But relatively little is known about the ways in which these factors have impacted upon different higher education systems.
This became a topic for discussion with two colleagues, Karri Holley of the University of Alabama and Margaret Kiley of the Australian National University, and we decided to try and investigate the question by inviting a group of distinguished researchers from a sample of countries to produce papers to form a basis for comparison. We were very fortunate that Gina Wisker, the editor of Innovations in Education and Teaching International, agreed to host the collection of papers in a special issue of the journal which was published in August 2023.
The issue on ‘The Changing Landscape of Doctoral Education’ starts with a paper by Stan Taylor setting out a potential framework for analysis based on his previous work on key issues in doctoral education. This article is open access and available at the bottom of this page. There then follows national studies of developments in Australia, Chile, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Russia, Turkiye, the UK (also available at the bottom of this page), and the US. In all, in 2017 these countries were responsible for 62% of doctoral enrolments and 70% of doctoral graduates.
The country studies are contributions in their own right to national doctoral education literatures and they also constitute a dataset for comparative analysis, which is undertaken by the editors in a concluding article. In reaching conclusions, the editors were aware that the 14 countries covered were a small sample of the 178 countries which provide doctoral programmes and that contributors were asked to comment on what they thought were the key developments for their countries and that the articles did not all cover the same ground. For these reasons, the conclusions can only be tentative.
That said, the study identified trends in the vast majority of cases in ‘McDonaldisation’ (cutting completion times and improving completion rates), increased regulation, institutional structuration, massification and diversification, distance delivery, interdisciplinarity, and capitalisation (redefining the purpose of doctorate as producing researchers for the knowledge economy both within and increasingly outside academia).
But it also found considerable disparities in other areas, including commodification (shifting from a master-apprentice to a producer-consumer paradigm), collectivisation (single vs team supervision), obligation (institutional duties of care for candidate wellbeing), casualisation (shift from full to part-time study), and utilisation (shift from knowledge creation per se to producing ’useful’ knowledge). This left the question of why there had been different outcomes in particular cases, for which the editors considered that four explanatory variables could be identified. These were: the degree to which states prioritised doctoral education; the extent to which they controlled it; the relative mix of STEM and other disciplines in doctoral education provision; and differences in national labour markets in terms of the availability of academic and non-academic roles. The editors suggested that these explanatory variables could be usefully investigated in future studies.