Dear Mauricio and all,
Thanks to Mauricio for raising an interesting question and to Ken and everyone for shining sunlight on some of the issues.
The financial aspect may be also worth taking into consideration? That is, alongside the issues of subject specialism of the supervisor and quality of research training, are PhD candidate's getting the appropriate *value* of supervision, and is there scope for increasing the quality and quantity of supervision resource available to them?
For the classic long thesis PhD with a single supervisor or supervisory team, the following figures seem representative. These are Australian figures for international PhD students, but one might expect national PhD student costs and revenue to be similar. The efficiency of education markets internationally would suggest similar ratios would be likely in other contexts.
Total fees for full time international student PhD candidature $92,890 (high cost) - $70, 875 (low cost) (e.g. http://www.canberra.edu.au/student-services/attachments/fee-schedule/2014/Fee_Schedule_CAPS_RES-Int_14112013.pdf )
Infrastructure costs (library, office, ICT, management etc) $13,000 (high cost) - $10,000 (low cost) (e.g. https://guard.canberra.edu.au/policy/download.php?file_id=2145 )
Supervision salary cost max $5000/year (100 hours supervision @$50/hour/ year) for 3 years, i.e. $15,000 per PhD candidature.
This suggests over the course of a PhD candidature, a university receives $71,000 revenue for each PhD, and the PhD candidate receives $25,000 of services, including supervision, from that.
If the above figures are in the right ball court, the remaining $45,000 of value (64% of the university revenue for the PhD) could be a basis for providing PhD students with around 4 time as much supervision value?
Or is there something missing?
Best wishes ,
Terry
---
Dr Terence Love
FDRS, AMIMechE, MISI
Director,
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629
[log in to unmask]
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|