The doctoral-education context in the twenty-first century : change at every level

Grant, Barbara (author), Kanjuo-Mrčela, Aleksandra (author)

Doctoral education has become a key element of the higher education landscape everywhere. With the spread of higher education massification and the rise of the global knowledge economy that began in the late twentieth century and continues today, doctoral education has expanded tremendously. There have been significant changes in doctoral education worldwide in the twenty-first century. In many countries, the numbers of doctoral candidates and of doctoral-granting institutions have increased to help drive both national innovation and research performance of individual institutions. Worldwide, there is a greater focus on the diverse employment prospects and transferable skills of doctorate holders and postdocs. At the same time, the world is changing faster than ever, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. There are adverse developments with yet unknown effects, namely digitalisation as a potential driver of progress and of more societal transparency, and simultaneously, the effects of the deterioration of democracies aligned with the rise of populist or fundamentalist movements. We have more research and knowledge about climate change, but also a seemingly greater denial of scientific evidence. We experience new nationalism and hate speeches, but also more awareness of the need for effective societal integration. In summary, at the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, grave political, economic, media-related and cultural tensions challenge scientific work and the education of young scientists across the globe. This chapter provides the larger contextual background of what motivated us to conduct this research project and how we arrived at the Hannover Policy Recommendations outlined in Chapter 3. We chose to place this overview chapter first to pique the reader’s interest in the changes that have occurred since the turn of the twenty-first century and to help understand the ‘social problematic’ for the detailed analyses documented in this book. An overview of the subsequent chapters will follow in Chapter 2 which explains our approach to this interdisciplinary, international and intergenerational project. Here we sketch trends and changes that have emerged on a range of fronts in the international scene of doctoral education over the past two decades and we discuss some of the accompanying tensions. In the later part of the chapter, we turn to two emerging concerns: challenges to doctoral candidates’ mental health and the impact of COVID-19 on doctoral education. The final section of the chapter reminds us that explicit research on doctoral education has become a rapidly growing field.

• Language: English
• Keywords: postgraduate studies, 21st century
• Typology: 1.16 - Independent Scientific Component Part or a Chapter in a Monograph
• Organization: FDV - Faculty of Social Sciences
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2022
• Number of pages: Str. 18-42
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-142387
• UDC: 378.046-021.68"21"
• DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800080188
• COBISS.SI-ID: 123846659

Copyright

Licenca CC BY-NC 4.0 je navedena v kolofonu nadrejene monografije (glej izvorni URL zgoraj). (Datum opombe: 17. 4. 2025)

• Publication date in RUL: 04.11.2022

Record is a part of a monograph

• Title: Towards a global core value system in doctoral education
• Editors: Maresi Nerad, David Bogle, Ulrike Kohl, Conor O’Carroll, Christian Peters, Beate Scholz
• Place of publishing: London
• Publisher: UCL Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN: 978-1-80008-020-1
• COBISS.SI-ID: 123844867

Licences

• License: CC BY-NC 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
• Description: A creative commons license that bans commercial use, but the users don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: podiplomski študij, 21. stoletje