Task Forces and Research Groups

1. Meta-Forces: Doctoral education & the global economy
2. National/International: Nation-building & international community
3. What is the PhD? Doctoral education competencies
4. Research & Data: International comparative data on doctoral education
5. Quality: Evaluating doctoral education across boundaries
6. Policy: Identifying & developing policies to promote doctoral education

During the Forces & Forms of Change in Doctoral Education Internationally Conference I, several Forces & Forms Network members volunteered to lead teams to expand on key issues and advance efforts to address the following six Task Force topics. Thank you for your efforts and leadership!

The following is a Draft summarized version of discussions led by the Task Force groups. We welcome feedback. Please email any comments to Mimi Heggelund, mimih@u.washington.edu , by December 1, 2005. Thank you.

Task Force 1: Meta-Forces

Issues: Doctoral education & the global economy

Task force members: Jeroen Bartelse, bartelse@vsnu.nl, Ahmed Bawa, bawa@ukzn.ac.za, Andreas Frijdal andreas.frijdal@iue.it, Maresi Nerad, mnerad@u.washington.edu.

Much of the discussion centered on the labor market and understanding the implications of globalization for doctoral education, including key aspects such as:

• Is the PhD the best investment for a nation, if indeed there is a high mobility of people across borders?
• Brain drain: Mobility is greater and easier, so there is greater capacity for richer countries to absorb people.
• Does globalization influence the way a country decides which doctoral programs to establish or expand?
• How does the labor market influence the PhD?
• How do PhDs influence the labor market?
• How does the rapid rise in power and sophistication of technology influence PhDs? What used to take a month now takes a day—what are the consequences?
• What are the possibilities of remote experiments, using the Web to control equipment based elsewhere?
• Demographic developments: When countries send students to study elsewhere, how do home countries create an environment for those individuals to return? When there are changes in developed countries, what are the consequences?
• How to address entrepreneurial individual universities, those who wish to keep their best students?

Task Force 2: National/International

Issues: Nation-building and the international community

Task force members: Armando Alcantara, aralsan@servidor.unam.mx, Marc Renaud, marc.renaud@sshrc.ca, Linda Smith, lt.smith@auckland.ac.nz.

The group focused their efforts on addressing “the tension between the imperatives of nation-building and the need to connect to the world” and identified several key aspects:

• Language preservation
• Meeting the challenges of brain drain: how to participate in international exchanges without losing PhDs to other countries and how to adapt to changes in brain drain, as people studying/working in host countries more frequently maintain contacts with, and recruit, others from the home country.
• Reducing inequalities within countries, especially in developing nations.
• Addressing the relevance of doctoral education in developing countries where there are currently few PhD students but where the government and the institutions of higher education are striving to increase their numbers. How can increased numbers of PhDs contribute to the development and betterment of these countries?
• Levels of cooperation. Traditionally most doctoral students from developing countries go off to study in more developed countries. Sometimes doctoral students move in the opposite direction, but to a much smaller degree.  How can we foster this second direction, as well as take advantage of the cooperation between developing countries?

Task Force 3: What is the PhD?

Issues: Doctoral education competencies

Task force members: Barbara Evans, bke@unimelb.edu.au, Hans Siggaard Jensen, siggaard@lld.dk, Bianca Bernstein, bbernste@nsf.gov.

Why should competencies define a PhD?

“A person holding a doctorate degree should acquire certain competencies. The group focused on this notion because it works backward from the end result to the entry requirements and type of program.”

Desired types of competencies for a PhD recipient:

• Internationally competitive: Competency translates into eligibility for membership in an international community of scholars?
• Independent researchers:  Is this what we want? Many models produce dependent researchers who may learn to become independent researchers later. Others produce independent researchers and professionals who make significant contributions to the field and to society. There is also the related notion of contributing to problem-solving by participating as a value-added contributor to a research group or research area as opposed to “independent research,” suggesting sole contributions.
• Leadership ability: How do we begin to define “leadership capacity” and leadership attitude and make that a characteristic of a doctoral recipient?
• Communication skills: Ability to talk across disciplines and to a variety of publics. This also revisits the issue of independent research. With the creation and interpretation of new knowledge, communication competency includes elements such as the ability to identify and ask the big questions, to be able to sort and filter information—to focus on the important and separate it from the less important—as well as communicating the research product.

Points for thought:

• Competencies are what a person with a doctorate should know, do, and be. A general understanding of this will still allow for broad variation in types of programs.
• These should be thought of as aspirational goals, rather than an absolute standard that would form the basis for assessment.
• What is the threshold level when talking about aspirational goals? How high do we set it?
• What is the feasibility of devising standards? At what level would you assess? Do you expect everyone to have these competencies, or do you look at the program level?
• Descriptive vs. normative, from communication to teaching. Should teaching ability not be expected of all doctorates?
• Do we have a plan for how we are going to address these topics?

Task Force 4: Research & Data

Issues: International comparative data on doctoral education

Task force members: Terry Evans, tevans@deakin.edu.au, Andreas Frijdal, andreas.frijdal@iue.it, Maresi Nerad, mnerad@u.washington.edu.

Proposal for data collection and analysis:

• Include additional nations to the Forces & Forms Network, preferably two that are very poor, two that are former “tiger” economies, e.g., Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, and some Eastern European countries.
• Attempt to gather publicly available data. For data that we lack, we will return to members of this group for further information to get some rough evidence/data rather than trying to get exact data.
• Choose a common year, .e.g., 2003, and try to get basic data on enrollments and common breakdowns, e.g., gender, nationality, discipline; rates/TTD. We know we won’t get that for most nations; but we will attempt to find it from some to point to existing types of differences.
• For the next conference, Forces & Forms of Change in Doctoral Education Internationally II, we would like to publish a paper providing some sort of synthesis and analysis of that data and have citations so people can go to sources themselves, as this study may raise more questions than answers.
• It can be difficult to come up with meaningful comparative measures of rates and times with the U.S., Australia, and Canada. WE WELCOME THE NETWORK’S HELP in this matter.

Task Force 5: Quality

Issues: Evaluating doctoral education programs across boundaries

Task force members: Toko Mayekiso, mayekisot@umthombo.wits.ac.za, Renato Janine Ribeiro, rjanine@capes.gov.br.

Important Questions:

The team created a framework for evaluation and for quality assurance:

• Ensure quality scientific production of faculty members—that it is well balanced among the faculty, that it is quality work, and that they continue to publish throughout their careers.

• Scientific production should be evaluated according to the norms in the field, e.g., publishing in English-speaking journals is not as important in the humanities and social sciences as it is in other sciences.
• The same is true concerning engineering and technologies: their evaluation should take into account technological innovation, which isn’t always expressed in papers.
• What should be the final product(s) of the doctoral study: the thesis, several articles, etc.?
• Is the doctoral student solely engaged in the research his/her supervisor is currently doing? It is important that this connection between them not prevent the student to follow his/her own interests.

• Can we dream of national (or, for the European Union, supra-national) systems of evaluation that can communicate amongst themselves?
• Which criteria should be the object of a consensus among different evaluation systems, and which should be particular to each nation?

Task Force 6: Policy

Issues: Identifying & developing policies to promote doctoral education

Task force member: Shinichi Yamamoto, syamamot@sakura.cc.tsukuba.ac.jp.

One important question is: Why is there so little interest in this topic? Maybe because there is a lot of other work to do before thinking about policy matters. Nonetheless, our goal is to foster effective reforms and innovations. Why? As with every other topic, the environment has changed.

Proposal: To compare policies/models between countries. Compare different policies within the same topic, in terms of what they are and their effectiveness.

What should we compare:

• Position of the university vis a vis government and society
• Policy formulation procedure
• Outcome of policy, e.g., expansion of degrees, or quality assurance