The mish-mash of Europe’s doctorates

Studying for PhDs is diversifying rapidly across Europe as universities respond to demands for doctoral training to produce specialist workers for the knowledge economy as well as career academics.

While university leaders are broadly positive about this trend, a report published this week (4 September) by the European University Association (EUA) expresses concern that governments and funding organisations are not paying enough attention to its policy implications.

"There is," the report warns, "an urgent need for greater consultation and co-ordination at the regional, national and European levels between government ministries, research councils and other funding agencies on doctoral education funding and career development."

The organisation is particularly concerned about the financial insecurity of people working on PhDs. "There ought to be some kind of discussion about the core sustainability of the PhD candidate," insists John Smith, the EUA’s deputy secretary-general.

The EUA was asked by Europe’s higher education ministers in 2005 to investigate the basic principles of doctoral training, at that time newly included in the Bologna process of higher education reforms. The present report summarises the EUA’s work, which concluded this year, and includes a survey of how governments participating in the Bologna process fund PhDs.

The diversity found by the survey is not simply a matter of differences between countries. Two-thirds of those surveyed did not have a single structure for doctoral training, and within the same national system PhD students might find themselves working independently with a university tutor, following a structured programme, or working in a separate graduate or research school.

In some countries, doctoral candidates are purely students or employees, but more often they are both, depending on the tasks they are carrying out. Their money is frequently a mix of salaries, scholarships, research grants and teaching assistantships, a mixture that makes it hard for most countries to say for sure how much they are putting into doctoral education.

Despite the uncertainties over how much public support goes to PhD students, the EUA detects signs of under-funding. At the lower end of the financial spectrum, in Eastern Europe, a PhD student might have as little as €5,000 a year in public funding, while in the old EU countries the lower end is around €7,000 a year.

"In many cases it is clearly too low," says Alexandra Bitusikova, who manages the EUA’s programmes on doctoral education. "How can you live on €5,000 a year?" Another tell-tale sign is that in many countries the average time it takes someone to finish a PhD is longer than the period of public funding.

There are also concerns about the funding that universities receive for doctoral training, in particular for the additional skills that employers want PhDs to have, such as project management and report writing. "Someone has to teach these transferable skills, and that has to be funded," said Bitusikova, adding that such work is not always recognised as important when university teachers are evaluated.

While the EUA’s scrutiny of doctorates began in the context of higher education reform, it is keen for the issue to be taken on in the Commission’s current consultation on the future of European research policy. Despite all the changes in doctoral training, carrying out research remains the core of a PhD and the most important thing for employers outside academia. "For all the talk about transferable skills, they still want the best, original researchers," says Smith.

• Ian Mundell is a freelance journalist based in Brussels.

Studying for PhDs is diversifying rapidly across Europe as universities respond to demands for doctoral training to produce specialist workers for the knowledge economy as well as career academics.