Research| - "PhD Programmes: Need of Reforms"

Santiago Iñiguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

PhD programmes are essential to the whole education system. They are the pool of future university researchers and teachers. Last week, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, a US based non-profit organisation dedicated to promote excellence in education, released the report "The Responsive PhD: Innovations in US Doctoral Education", an extremely interesting document on doctoral education in the US that calls for important reforms: "there have been too many words and too little action", it states. The report also comprises a series of successful initiatives developed in PhD programmes at different US universities.

I want to focus on two recommendations of this report. First, that pedagogy should be an important part of doctoral preparation. For some time, PhD programmes have focused almost exclusively on training academic researchers. This has been essential, but not sufficient. In fact, the omission of some other important facets, such as preparing candidates to teach effectively and to link with the corporate world, has reduced the potential development and the opportunities of PhD graduates.

Another recommendation is the need of connecting doctoral programmes with other major social stakeholders outside universities, mainly the organisations that may recruit or work with PhD graduates: "the doctorate in totality and in every discipline will benefit enormously by a continuing interchange with the worlds beyond academia", says the report.

This report should be very welcome and it comes at a time when there is a growing market for DBA (Doctor in Business Administration) programmes in Europe. Significantly, the Association of MBAs (AMBA) recently launched a new accreditation scheme aimed at DBA programmes, to cope with the increasing demmand from the market. I do not dare to dissect here the differences between PhDs in Management and DBAs. Maybe in some future post. But it seems that the latter category of programmes is where the growth will take place in the future.

Comments

[Della Bradshaw]

I think any comment on the future of the doctoral market is very timely, especially in light of the Bologna agreement in Europe. Prof Iniguez says he dares not dissect here the difference between PhDs in management and DBAs - very wise indeed!

Isn't the problem that, particularly in the US, DBAs and PhDs in management are exactly the same degree? My understanding of the situation in Harvard University, where the term DBA was coined, is that the PhD and DBA only differ in who awards the degree - if the business school gives the degree it is a DBA, if the department of arts and sciences awards the degree it is a PhD.

Can European schools choose to hijack the term DBA and redefine it for their own ends?

My particular concern in Europe is about the German system of higher education. There university business schools, with 70 or 80 full-time faculty, graduate 100 or more doctoral students a year. The universities claim these doctoral degrees are equivalent to a US or British PhD. But are they?

The Bologna agreement has at its heart the idea of portability of qualifications. How should corporations and academia outside Germany view these doctoral degrees?

[Enrique Dans]

The "Ph.D. experience" provides its "victims" with skills and abilities, such as quantitative and qualitative analytical tools, that are sometimes highly valued by the job market. I remember some of my peers at UCLA being hired by universities, and others by institutions such as large banks and consulting firms. The problem is when firms assume that by hiring a Ph.D. they are just "buying computing power", instead of "true research capabilities". Firms assume that Ph.D. grads will be "weirdos" who are not of any practical value, they need to be reeducated in order to be useful. Most Ph.D. programs prepare students for research from a methodological standpoint, but fail to provide a true research mentality, a real asset that could be useful to firms and corporations. And in fact, very few of these firms feel the need to do real research, or even know what research is about. From my perspective, the problem with Ph.D. programs is that they reflect the nature of research at many universities: instead of being a true value-adding, discovery process, it turns into being a source of useless papers for a tenure track: the more, the less practical, the more complex, the better... finishing a Ph.D. with a set of papers that can be "shown without fear" to a potential employer becomes the real challenge.