Dear Luke,
Thank you for your email. You are raising really excellent points.
While I see a lot of value in what you wrote, I am not sure how I can
connect them with the structural issues that I am describing. Everyday I
get emails from prospective PhD students, or students that are in various
PhD programs in humanities, social sciences or design. They ask my "advice"
about the labor market, as if I know something. All of us, who currently
have positions, suffer from some form of survivorship bias. I am pretty
sure there are many other people who did exactly what I did, and could not
get positions. Now, it is worse and I am not sure what value our personal
experience holds anymore. I see folks in sociology with 10 journal articles
published (I am talking about a friend , this is not a fictional story), 6
of them in top tier journals. This friend of mine has been looking for an
academic position for the last two years, she was shortlisted just once,
and about to give up her search and looking for non-academic jobs. She is
not an exception.
There are other structural factors, like rankings. All rankings are
essentially very problematic (see the story of US News in Weapons of Math
Destruction by Cathy O'Neil). But most rankins over-stress citations and
impact, and this typically undervalues interdisciplinary fields,
humanities and social sciences, since their epistemic dynamics and citation
patterns are very different, say, compared to engineering. These rankings
become a structural force of their own, and start to shape the system (as
opposed to universities shaping them). They create a force which pushes
already shrinking social sciences and humanities to a corner.
What is worse, some governments use PhD-completions as a metric or
rewarding system. They pay hefty sums to universities, who graduate PhD
students fast. And when you have a PhD degree from an accredited
institution, you have some expectations, regardless of the quality of the
education you receive.
Why am I blathering like this? :) Because I believe that these and similar
structural forces create a very unequal academic labor market for PhDs
regardless of what meaning(s) we assign to a PhD. There is a lot of
incentive to set up new programs and graduate a lot of students, but there
are few to create new secure positions. Unfortunately, "go find industry
jobs" is not a strategy that works for many PhD students, demand aside, not
very many programs are set-up to solve the problems of the "industry". And
for many fields like humanities there is no industry or private sector.
I am not claiming to know the answers, but the system is broken, on many
levels. To reiterate, I am just saying that we need to talk seriously and
carefully about these matters.
Yours,
Ali
On Tue, 2 Feb 2021 at 03:36, Luke Feast <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Greetings Ali,
>
> Thanks for your posts. As I see it, thinking about the purpose of PhD
> education is relevant to the issue of PhD supply and demand.
>
> Individuals will have various personal motivations to study for a
> doctorate (f.ex. the challenge, to get a promotion, etc.). Here I’m
> concerned with the purpose of the doctoral qualification as a kind of
> education.
>
> There are three recurring views of the purpose of education in general
> (Egan, 1997, pp. 10-32). First, that education ought to produce reason and
> knowledge. Second, that education ought to develop an individual’s natural
> talents. Third, that education should homogenise useful values and skills
> in the society. Although these purposes are mostly incompatible (i.e.
> nature or nurture, local or universal), education programmes often aim to
> achieve all three purposes together. Consequently, education is an
> essentially contested endeavour.
>
> The purpose of the doctoral qualification has long been aligned with
> knowledge development. However, individual development and socialisation
> have also played a role at different times. For example, in the medieval
> period, the doctorate was a license to teach (Park, 2005, p. 191). The
> modern PhD—the research doctorate—is a product of the modern research
> university, first introduced in Germany in the early 1800s, then in the
> United States in the 1860s. The first modern PhD wasn’t introduced in
> Britain until 1917 (Park, 2005, p. 192). Until the mid-to-late 20th
> century, the PhD was essentially only available to the small elite group
> within the society. Today the PhD is a component of mass education.
>
> The universal feature of all PhD qualifications is that they should to
> create knowledge. This primary purpose is embodied in universities’
> descriptors of the features of successful doctorates. For example, the
> first point in the descriptor for the doctoral degree in the UK
> qualification framework is:
>
> “Doctoral degrees are awarded to students who have demonstrated: the
> creation and interpretation of new knowledge, through original research or
> other advanced scholarship, of a quality to satisfy peer review, extend the
> forefront of the discipline, and merit publication” (QAA, 2014, p. 30)
>
> The doctorate is an exciting and unique qualification within the
> university system because, for the award to be conferred, the learner has
> to change the very topic that they have studied (Clark, 2009, p. 20).
> Graduates of doctoral programmes have the ability to go on making further
> changes in an independent and creative way. Consequently, there is also a
> connection between doctoral education and lifelong learning.
>
> In the last 20 years or so, governments (f.ex. in the UK, EU, AUS) have
> tried to broaden the scope of doctoral education to respond to the needs of
> industry by requiring doctoral programmes to include training in
> transferable skills. This is partly the influence of the North American
> system where skills training has been a feature of doctoral education for
> some time. Hence, socialisation does play a role in doctoral education. In
> North America this is not a big problem since completion time is longer
> (~5-8 years), but in other countries where the completion time is shorter
> (~3-4 years), the time lost to compulsory skills training can have a
> significant effect on the candidates capability to do original research.
>
> Some authors take the argument for socialisation as the primary purpose
> doctoral education even further, arguing that some doctorates should be
> examined by industry rather than the academy (f.ex. Dunin-Woyseth &
> Nilsson, 2017). Others reject the idea that the PhD should be a research
> degree, rather it should be a kind of “super master” (f.ex. Franck, 2017).
>
> Education is an essentially contested subject. For most of its existence,
> the primary purpose of the PhD qualification has been knowledge
> development. That said, doctoral programmes often include training in
> transferable skills. There are documents available that list the learning
> outcomes for training in transferable skills at the doctoral level (Bogle,
> Eggermont, Dron, & van Henten, 2010; Polziehn, 2011; Research
> Councils/AHRB, 2001). Inevitably, there are trade-offs when purposes other
> than knowledge development are introduced into doctoral education.
>
> Best,
> Luke
>
> Luke Feast, Ph.D. | Industrial Design | Senior Lecturer | Faculty of
> Design and Creative Technologies | Auckland University of Technology | New
> Zealand |Email [log in to unmask] |
>
>
> References
>
> Bogle, David, Eggermont, Jan, Dron, Michel , & van Henten, Jan Willem.
> (2010). Doctoral degrees beyond 2010: Training talented researchers for
> society. League of European Research Universities (LERU). Retrieved from
> https://www.leru.org/publications/doctoral-degrees-beyond-2010-training-talented-researchers-for-society#
>
> Clark, Gill. (2009). Quality and Standards of Postgraduate Research
> Degrees – 2009. UK Council for Graduate Education.
>
> Dunin-Woyseth, Halina, & Nilsson, Fredrik. (2017). Emerging epistemic
> communities and cultures of evidence: On the practice of assessment of
> research in the creative fields. In F. Nilsson, H. Dunin-Woyseth, & N.
> Janssens (Eds.), Perspectives on research assessment in architecture, music
> and the arts: Discussing doctorateness (pp. 15-32). New York: Routledge.
>
> Egan, Kieran. (1997). The educated mind: How cognitive tools shape our
> understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
>
> Franck, Oya Atalay. (2017). Criteria for ‘doctorateness’ in the creative
> fields: A focus on architecture. In F. Nilsson, H. Dunin-
>
> Woyseth, & N. Janssens (Eds.), Perspectives on research assessment in
> architecture, music and the arts: Discussing doctorateness (Vol. 51-68).
> New York: Routledge.
>
> Park, Chris. (2005). New Variant PhD: The changing nature of the doctorate
> in the UK. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 27(2),
> 189-207. doi:10.1080/13600800500120068
>
> Polziehn, Renee. (2011). Skills Expected from Graduate Students in Search
> of Employment in Academic and Non-Academic Settings. University of
> Alberta. Retrieved from
> https://www.ualberta.ca/graduate-studies/media-library/migrated-media/profdev/career/careerskillsexpected.pdf
>
> QAA. (2014). UK Quality Code for Higher Education: Part A: Setting and
> Maintaining Academic Standards.
>
> Research Councils/AHRB. (2001). Joint Statement Of The Research Councils
> Skills Training Requirements For Research Students. Arts and Humanities
> Research Board (AHRB) Retrieved from
> https://www.dmu.ac.uk/documents/doctoral-college/current-students/research-development-programme/jointstatement.pdf
>
>
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