Dear Ken, Don, Cameron and all,
There is some significant misunderstanding of the '3 year- long thesis PhD' of the Oxford Cambridge type as found in the UK, many ex-colonies such as Australia and to some extent in countries such as Norway.
For decades, the 3 year long thesis PhD typically took around 7-10 years to complete. During that time, candidates were embedded to greater or lesser extent in a post-graduate research milieu supervised formally and informally by a variety of academics of greater and lesser knowledge and research and supervisory skills.
Most candidates muddled through via osmosis, drinking heavily and discussing deep and meaningful things over the red wine with other academics at late into the night parties. A significant element of the process was a socio-cultural indoctrination and acculturation into being an academic In this context, the 3 year specification was a minimum time for submission of the PhD. This minimum period also to some extent guaranteed that the research project would be of a significant size and not subject to vagaries of academic fashion of less than 3 years.
The mess of most PhDs and the lack of prescriptive support resulted in candidates having to explore multiple research methods and pathways often through misunderstanding and failure. Thus candidates indirectly gained a much broader research methods education than otherwise.
The process was inefficient but effective. Effectiveness was important and inefficiency irrelevant when universities were primarily offering education to countries' elites.
For the first three decades of the transition into mass tertiary education paid from the public purse, the inefficient long thesis PhD model remained substantially unchanged except for pressures to improve the educational skills of supervisors.
From the 1990s, however, emerged increasing pressure to make PhD education and university research worthwhile compared to other national initiatives funded out of the public purse.
As pressure increased for PhD research to become more relevant and useful it also became clear that it needed to also be timely. Increased pace of innovation meant that many PhDs were completed after the problems they had addressed were no longer relevant.
Increasingly, governments funding PhDs pressurised universities to ensure completion happened as early as possible. Metrics were introduced to measure universities success in shortening PhD timelines and funding was attached to success.
The effect of all the above is as predicted by Deming (Out of the Crisis etc.) and any number of systems practitioners such as Dr Trudi Cooper, with research into quality management in higher education. For any organisation that specifies metrics for outcomes, then outputs become shaped by metrics regardless of them resulting in reduced quality or even total failure of the system.
The shift to regarding the PhD 3 year measure as a maximum rather than a minimum, reductions in supervision funding and access, increased take up of PhDs in areas such as Art and Design that have little prior PhD education history, increased prioritisation of PhD projects that will be guaranteed to be completed and completed on time and are immediately relevant in knowledge and a variety of other metric related factors has resulted in the observed problems of lack of research skills and expertise of candidates on completion.
The PhD situation follows the old three option rule:
'The only options are good, cheap and fast, and you can only have 2 out of the 3'
At the moment, the pressure is on for cheap and fast. Forget good. Good requires more money and time (for candidates and supervisors)
This is not a matter of 3 year PhD or otherwise, of different cultures and education systems, or even ofdifferent disciplines. The driving forces for reduced quality are from changes in the trajectory of support and the use of metrics.
Bryn Tellefsen and myself reported on some of this discussion in 2002 (published 2004) in relation to design doctorates (http://www.love.com.au/docs/2004/future_of_design_doctorate.htm )
Best wishes,
Terry
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Dr Terence Love
PhD(UWA), BA(Hons) Engin. PGCEd, 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
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-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ken Friedman
Sent: Monday, 29 September 2014 2:17 AM
To: PhD-Design
Subject: Re: Design as taught in different kinds of institutions
Dear Cameron,
One of the problems that has become apparent to me with the three-year PhD is the fact that it may not be a genuine research degree. Since I have made the full argument in the paper on writing and supervising the PhD (Friedman 2014), I won’t make it here.
The short argument is that the full model of the PhD program teaches research skills, research methods, and compare ative research methodology, along with giving students a foundation in appropriate areas that will be vital to a full research career. In contrast, many of the 3-year PhD programs teach only those research skills needed for the specific research project that a student hopes to complete within the program.
What we are seeing is a significant number of graduates who cannot conduct research outside a very narrow project, who cannot and do not publish their research, and who lack the skills required for doctoral supervision outside their own field.
If you’d care to read the full argument, you’ll find it in the “PhD Training, Skills and Supervision Section” of my Academia page. It is the paper titled Writing for the PhD in Art and Design.
https://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
There is another explanation for the complaint that North American universities turn out too many PhD graduates. The PhD degree is the degree for most research jobs, in universities and outside them. There are more people seeking such jobs than the available number of academic and research positions. A careful review will show a mismatch between graduated doctors and appropriate jobs in many nations.
When I served as a dean, our university policy was that the deans would sit on every hiring committee for each research position within his or her faculty. This meant that I reviewed the CV of every applicant and read theses, conference papers, and articles for everyone we shortlisted. I found that many people who held a PhD in art and design fields were simply not competent as researchers; many could not demonstrate basic research skills. In this respect, I am not distinguishing between those researchers that were first rate and those who were merely competent. I saw that many people did not have the basic skills that authors such as Gordon Rugg and Marian Petre (2004: 6-7) identify as essential for completing a doctoral degree. This suggests to me that many 3-year doctoral programs are not simply “easier” than solid North American programs. Rather, it suggests that they fail to meet basic standards.
In this respect, I am specifically writing about PhD graduates in art and design. This is not the case in other fields where laboratory traditions and seminar traditions are in place, along with cohorts of experienced supervisors.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University Press | Launching in 2015
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology
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Reference
Friedman, Ken. 2014. Writing for the PhD in Art and Design. Issues for Research Supervisors and Research Students. A Research Skills Working Paper. Melbourne, Australia: Centre for Design Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology.
Rugg, Gordon, and Marian Petre. 2004. The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research. Maidenhead and New York: Open University Press.
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Cameron Tonkinwise wrote:
—snip—
Not sure 'easier' is a useful characterization.
3 year minimum PhDs are not unique to Oxbridge but standard across the Commonwealth, EU and Scandinavia and increasingly South, Southeast and East Asia and South America. American exceptionalism results from the degree serving different purposes: academic job training vs research degree (crudely put). This why in the US 'too many PhDs for the number of academic jobs' is a frequent discussion, and examples of people with PhDs taking up non-academic positions remain newsworthy.
—snip—
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