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There is a real danger that by focusing on national and institutional
policies and strategies to expand PhD production, a truism will be lost:
“It is that supervisors graduate PhD students,” says Professor Johann
Mouton of the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa.
In South Africa’s efforts to triple the number of doctoral graduates
from around 1,500 a year, not enough attention is being given to the
role of supervisors.
“Of course, they don’t do it in a vacuum. They do it within institutions
and departments and scientific fields that give them support and create
the necessary conditions. But the bottom line is that irrespective of
how many resources you put in institutions or what conditions you have
in place, it comes down to the individual who has to supervise and
graduate a student,” Mouton said.
“We are starting to understand why some supervisors are more successful
in producing PhD graduates of quality, and more efficiently.”
Mouton, director of the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and
Technology, or CREST, was speaking at a recent workshop, convened by
South Africa’s National Research Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation
of New York, on “Expanding and Sustaining Excellence in Doctoral
Programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa: What needs to be done?”
In his presentation on understanding the demands and pressures of PhD
production in South Africa, Mouton said that for five years the team at
CREST and others had been trying to understand dynamics around doctoral
education.
“One is the relationship between national and institutional policies and
what happens within PhD production on the ground. The research has
started to give us an understanding of the issues that have to be
addressed when Africa attempts to expand PhD production,” he said.
“Our recent work has tried to understand the interplay between policies
at different levels and the actual behaviour of supervisors and
departments at the micro level. If we understand these dynamics, it
might be useful for other institutions, for future actions and
initiatives.”
The four imperatives
There have been four main imperatives in policies and strategies on PhD
training in South Africa over the past 15 years: quantity, quality,
efficiency, and transformation and equity.
Quantity
Policy and strategy documents by various bodies had articulated the
demand for an increase in PhD production in South Africa, said Mouton.
While this began to be “symbolically” expressed in the 1997 education
white paper, it became explicit in the 2001
National Plan for Higher Education. “But at that point no targets were set.”
In 2003, South Africa’s education department revised the national
funding framework for universities, and research masters and PhDs as
knowledge outputs were added to subsidies for research outputs.
“Suddenly money came into the picture,” said Mouton.
“From 2005, universities in South Africa were rewarded quite
significantly for producing more PhD graduates in all fields of
science.” Producing a PhD was valued as equivalent to three article
units, with the rewards ranging from US$40,000 to US$60,000 per
graduate.
It was therefore not surprising, Mouton said, that in 2007 both the
Department of Science and Technology and the National Research
Foundation set PhD targets for the country, though these targets were
“slightly unrealistic and ambitious.”
First, the target was set at 6,000 PhDs per year by 2025 – at that
point, South Africa was graduating about 1,200. The most recent target,
in the
National Development Plan, is 5,000 PhDs a year by 2030. “The latest figures put current PhD graduations at about 1,570 a year.
“It’s very nice to set these targets from the top. My own view is that
it’s going to be nearly impossible to more than triple our output in the
next 15 years. We haven’t done so in the past 15 years, though we have
pretty much doubled output.”
There are only about 5,500 academics at South African universities with
PhDs and who can supervise, Mouton told the workshop. The assumption is
that they will produce 5,000 PhDs a year. “The current average is one
every four years. Only 10% of South African supervisors, the most
productive, produce one PhD a year.
Policy-makers, Mouton concluded, needed to check targets against trends and statistics.
Quality
While there is no policy imperative that speaks explicitly to quality,
Mouton said, it is assumed in all of the documents. “This tacit approach
is perhaps because the notion of ‘quality’ is an elusive concept that
cannot easily be measured through standard indicators.”
Furthermore, quality in higher education was assumed to be a function of
the quality assurance of institutions. The most explicit national
intervention to ensure quality in PhD production was through Higher
Education Quality Committee audits undertaken between 2003 and 2008.
“These audit reports did focus on ensuring that institutional conditions
and practices in support of PhD production were in place and reasonably
standardised.”
Efficiency
Policy documents also do not speak explicitly about efficiency, which is
seen as improving throughput rates and getting students to complete
faster.
“There seems to be an assumption that our system is inefficient. We
contest that. But it is clear why there is a demand for efficiency – if
you link output (quantity) with monetary reward (subsidy), then you’re
in the efficiency game,” said Mouton.
The most explicit statement of demand for greater efficiency was in a 2012 green paper and the
National Development Plan, which give a target of a 75% throughput rate for higher education.
“This national demand for efficiency trickles down to the individual
supervisor. Academic staff are told by their deans to get students
through in the minimum time possible. Concerns about quality are not
upfront.”
Transformation and equity
Naturally, the demand for transformation and equity in higher education –
including in PhD education – was a major focus in the post-apartheid
years, “and translated into having more black students and more female
postgraduates”, Mouton said.
“We make a small distinction between the demands for transformation in
terms of demographics – race and gender – and also disciplinary
transformation, the shift towards science, engineering and technology
fields.”
Supervision and students
Qualitative case studies, a web-based survey and numerous supervisor
workshops undertaken by CREST identified a number of crucial
supervisor-related determinants of PhD production: competence and
experience, style, burden, models and support.
There were, Mouton found, “huge differences” in supervisor knowledge,
competence and style, a growing supervision burden and differing levels
of institutional support in terms of scholarships and bursaries,
research facilities and equipment, and institutional policies.
There had been an increase in the numbers of students who were not well
prepared for doctoral studies. “As a consequence, we witness a growing
demand for ‘remedial’ training of doctoral students in research methods
and theory, and even more basic scholarship skills.”
The average doctoral graduate in South Africa is 40 years or older, and
70% of PhD students are part-time, with major implications for student
preparedness and commitment to studies – which affects drop-out rates.
Most PhD students are female, with most working full-time and having
families.
“The bulk of doctoral supervision currently happens at a distance, and
the average student gets only two hours of supervision a month.”
These supervision and PhD student dynamics, said Mouton, kicked up their
own challenges in efforts to expand doctoral graduation in South
Africa.
The macro-micro tension
Mouton’s research has found that supervisors are “first and foremost
concerned about the quality of the students they produce” – while
national interests prioritise quantity and efficiency and to a lesser
degree transformation. Therein lies much tension.
“There is a growing perception among many supervisors that the primary
imperative is to get as many doctoral students to complete within the
shortest possible time period.”
These perceptions were fuelled by new institutional policies and
practices that rewarded supervisors who accepted as many PhD students as
possible and graduated them within three years – even though the
average doctoral student takes 4.8 years to complete.
“It is essential that universities achieve the right balance between national demands and good practice in supervision.
“Ultimately universities cannot simply slavishly and uncritically follow
and implement such demands. They need to protect the academic project
(and their supervisors), which is the pursuit of excellence in
everything that we do.”
Idols fans in Mpumalanga don’t have to wait for 26 November before
they can start celebrating. With Brenden and Musa as the last two
Contestants standing, the Idols title is definitely going to Mpumalanga.
