Doctoral candidates at the Faculty of Science and Engineering take far too long to complete their PhDs. As a result, the faculty is implementing measures to reduce the duration of the doctoral process.
Only 47 percent of the doctoral candidates at FSE complete their PhD within five years after the start of their appointment. This is far below the faculty’s target of reaching 70 percent by 2020.
This extended duration has adverse effects on the faculty, which expends additional funds and energy accommodating and supervising doctoral candidates who are no longer employed at the university. Some candidates never finish their dissertation, resulting in the faculty missing out on the completion bonus and scientific articles not being published.
Taking longer to finish a PhD is also detrimental to the doctoral candidates. ‘It is unfair to hire people for four years and expect them to stay longer,’ emphasised dean Joost Frenken during the faculty council meeting last week. ‘Currently, only the best or the luckiest manage to finish within four years.’
Project
Therefore, the faculty board aims to ensure that the standard duration for completing a PhD is four years. The approach: consider the PhD as a project.
On one hand, the board aims to focus on the candidates. Supervisors must take the go/no-go decision more seriously. Currently, very few PhD trajectories are terminated after one year, even if the candidate’s performance is insufficient. There should also be a more stringent selection process, such as imposing strict language requirements.
But the university also needs to make several changes, Frenken stated. Often, supervisors set unrealistic expectations. ‘There are significant differences in the ideas of what constitutes a thesis,’ he says. Hence, minimum requirements will be established. A peer-to-peer buddy system will provide additional support to PhD students.
Supervision
A doctoral candidate should not be in the lab until the end of their appointment if they still need to get started on writing their dissertation. Additionally, during the ‘exploratory’ first year, PhDs are often a little too aimless, believes Frenken, not receiving adequate supervision. ‘Getting to know the subject is a good way to lose time.’
Implementing these changes will not be easy, acknowledges the faculty board. To that end, a PhD monitoring committee will oversee these matters. There are also plans for a supervisor to be compensated for the costs of a no-go decision, although current budget cuts make this challenging.
Extensions will not be granted easily in the future. After six years, a PhD student will be ‘deregistered.’ ‘This measure is meant as a psychological boundary,’ the plan states. ‘Registration can be reactivated at a later stage if necessary.’
Increased output
Ultimately, Frenken believes these measures will result in more completed PhDs. ‘At the moment, we have many dropouts who have already moved on to their next job without completing their PhD,’ he says.
‘This means no papers, no defence, no income for the faculty, and no academic output. But if we manage this as a project and focus on results, I think the output will increase.’