Doctoral education in Europe and North America: a comparative analysis

Abstract

In recent years doctoral education and training has become part of the focus and scrutiny of policy formation. Currently, a number of reform initiatives are being undertaken to improve the teaching of doctoral students. In Europe, both the Bologna Declaration of 1999 [1] (the aim of which was to create a European Higher Education Area) and the Lisbon Strategy of 2000 (formulated to create a European Research and Innovation Area) have certainly had an impact on the perspective and conceptualization of doctoral education and training. Although doctoral training has been integrated as the third phase of higher education in the framework of the Bologna Declaration (an intergovernmental initiative so far signed by 45 European countries), the presidential conclusions of the EU (European Union) Lisbon Summit stated that more and better trained researchers were needed in order to make Europe the most competitive and dynamic knowledge‐based economy in the world. Doctoral education and training is seen as the link between the two goals, which are to create a European Higher Education Area and a European Research and Innovation Area in order to make European higher education more attractive and competitive in a globalizing world. It is not only Europe that is thinking about strategies to become more competitive. In North America similar changes to policy contexts can be identified. National and international forces and developments have triggered extensive criticism and a major re‐thinking of doctoral education over the last 15 years [2]. In his analysis of doctoral education in Canada, Garth Williams [3] stated that “globalization has altered both the context and substance of university education, advanced research and doctoral training”, with ‘globalization’ being characterized by a number of factors such as; the new economy, the growth of multinational corporations, greater international movement, a revolution in communication technology, increased production and more intense economic competition worldwide (see p. 15 in [3]). It has become clear, through these roughly sketched developments, that doctoral education and training is no longer exclusively regarded as the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, but that the generation of new knowledge has become both an important strategic resource and a factor in a countrys economy. Thus policy makers have begun to scrutinize doctoral education and training, and as a result universities have been requested to develop institutional strategies to improve it, rather than leaving it in the hands of individual professors or departments.