Learning to be Entrepreneurial in Cambridge

King's College Chapel at Dusk, 
by Tom Worthington 1996

Inger Mewburn, the Thesis Whisperer & ANU Director of Researcher Development, will be speaking on Learning to be Entrepreneurial, Monday 10 July at King's College, University of Cambridge. Professor Mewburn has been researching the  the UK job market, looking at who needs research graduates. There will be a more in depth event the next day, "After Academia? : Connecting with Industries Outside Academia", 11 July. I wish her luck, as I found Cambridge students a very tough audience at my first talk there.

My first visits to Cambridge was to investigate how they interacted with industry. On my return I recommended Canberra adopt a similar approach. That seems to have worked reasonably well, with initiatives such as the Canberra Innovation Network, just next to the Australian National University.

Making Doctoral Degrees More Useful

Professor Inger Mewburn, The Thesis Whisperer,  has warned of a imminent economic crisis in higher education and called on those involved with doctoral education to change what they do now, before the crisis hits. While I agree we need doctoral degree graduates, changing the PhD is not the only way to do it. We need more Professional Doctorates, which are specifically designed to train people with the highest skills for industry.

Professor  Mewburn suggests more time be spent on students "developing their full professional selves". Students need to learn to present in public and be more outward looking, as they are unlikely to find a job in the department where they trained, or in any university department, anywhere.  While I agree with all of this, Professor  Mewburn has overlooked the Professional Doctorate. This is a degree at the same level as a PhD, but focused on the needs of professionals working in industry.

In a way it does not much matter if PhDs are reformulated to be professional doctorates in all but name, or genuine professional doctorate programs are introduced alongside PhDs. In either case, universities , need to make some hard decisions to make this happen, quickly. Otherwise economic conditions will make the decisions for them.

The Role of the PhD in the Modern World

Greetings from the Canberra Innovation Network for the launch of

"PostAc", to help PhD students into non-academic research careers. Professor Keith Nugent ANU Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation, explained that the ANU was redefining the PhD for wider roles outside academia. Professor Elanor Huntington, ANU Dean of Engineering and Computer Science, pointed out she had a Masters of Computer Science as well as a PhD in the more esoteric area of physics. Also she pointed out that the PostAc service will also collect information on PhDs and jobs. Dr Mewburn mentioned they were open to offers from companies, such as LinkedIn, to purchase PostAc.

One option I suggested to Dr Mewburn that PostAc might consider is auto searches. The student may not know what to search for.  Perhaps the tool could read the student's thesis and suggest a job based on that, and whatever else is publicly available on them. This might include hobbies: an academic in a job interview once told me that had no leadership skills, but then mentioned the lead the university alpine climbing team (if you can get people up a mountain, that shows leadership).

PostAcc is a clever hack to overcome a public policy failure. Unfortunately none of the speakers directly addressed this policy failing: universities produce many more PhDs than there are research jobs for. While someone who has an advanced research degree might be able to find a non-research job with PostAcc, it would be better if they enrolled in a degree which suited those jobs. In most cases a coursework masters is a suitable postgraduate qualification for a job. If more specialized skills are needed, then there is the option of a professional doctorate. These are at the same academic level as a PhD (with the title "Doctor"), but the focus is on skills for industry, rather than just research. PostAcc can provide a palliative for the failure to direct students to these more useful degrees, but not cure it.

Reference

Pitt, R., & Mewburn, I. (2016). Academic superheroes? A critical analysis of academic job descriptions. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 38(1), 88-101. URL https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1360080X.2015.1126896

PostAc Helping PhDs Escape Academia

The app "PostAc" has been developed to help PhD students into non-academic research careers. This is by Dr Inger Mewburn, director of research training at The Australian National University, better known as "The Thesis Whisperer". There will be a launch at CBRIN in Canberra, 2pm, 3 February.

PostAc could be useful not so much in getting PhD students jobs, but  getting them thinking about jobs outside academia. At PhD final seminars I routinely ask students how they will apply the results of their research. In the past many would have not thought beyond publishing their work. They had a vague idea that as they had a PhD they would be able to get a university job. They had not yet faced the fact that their chances of getting a secure job at a university were minimal, and they needed to look father afield. About the only doctoral graduates not in this situation are those who do a professional doctorate related to a profession, where there is a demand for graduates. But a doctoral education for most is a PhD, and not a guarantee of a job.

Improving Australian Doctoral Programs

Recently I was asked how Ph.D. programs at Australian universities could be improved, so the graduates had better real-world skills, for jobs outside research. But this is the wrong question, and once you know what the right question is, the answer is easy.

As Carr, Evans, and Hornby (2017) point out, an Australian Ph.D. (they use the example of Monash University) follows an apprenticeship model for teaching research. An Australian Ph.D. is not intended to provide a broad range of skills for industry, or to train educators: it is to produce researchers. In contrast, a Ph.D. in the United States includes elements of what Carr, Evans, and Hornby (2017, p. 180) call a "taught doctorate" and a "professional doctorate".

Australian higher education regulations do not recognize a "taught doctorate", however, there is provision for a "professional doctorate", alongside a Ph.D. ("research Degree") at AQF Level 10 Doctoral Degree. The professional candidate still does research, but the emphasis is on the professional practice context.

Professional doctoral students are likely to be out and about, in the field, not on the campus. Maor and Currie (2017) looked at the use of technology for postgraduate supervision at Australian universities, noting that this will be increasingly demanded by distance and part-time students.

Kiley (2017) examined three Australian universities which had introduced coursework for Ph.D. students, including material derived from Professional Doctorate programs. They concluded that many supervisors consider "... in Australia that the Ph.D. is an individualized learning program negotiated between candidate and supervisor". I would agree this is the view of supervisors, but will this approach achieve the best outcomes for the individual student, or for the community (who are subsidizing this education)?

Australian universities could tie themselves in administrative knots by trying to retrofit coursework requirements and non-research skills on an old fashioned Ph.D. apprenticeship model. However,  this will be frustrating for supervisors and students who actually want a Ph.D. program. Alternatively, universities could accept the reality that more than 95% of doctoral graduates are not destined for a research career and instead offer them a Professional Doctorate program, with coursework and team supervision. The other 5% of students can undertake a PHD program.

Reference

Carr, M. E. M. E., Evans, E. B. H. W. H., & Hornby, G. (2017). Comparative Review of Education Doctorates in Three Countries. The Future of Accessibility in International Higher Education, 175. 

Kiley, M. M. (2017). An emerging PhD curriculum and what this might mean for doctoral level threshold concepts. Practice and Evidence of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 12(2), 294-312. URL http://community.dur.ac.uk/pestlhe.learning/ojs/index.php/pestlhe/article/view/173/195

 Maor, D., & Currie, J. K. (2017). The use of technology in postgraduate supervision pedagogy in two Australian universities. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 14(1), 1. URL https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-017-0046-1

Combating the loneliness of learning

In "The loneliness of the long distance learner" (The Guardian, 8 December 2018), Judith Vonberg writes that there are an "... invisible group of distance learners ... studying on standard postgraduate courses, but they live ... at a distance from their university ...". I suggest the solution is for universities to remove the distinction between distance and on-campus, part-time and full time students. Programs should be designed on the assumption that students will be, for all or part of their studies, away from the campus.
Rather than making special arrangements for distance students, programs should be designed by default for them. Then additional on-campus options can be added, as required and as resources allow

I have been a postgraduate student for two years, studying by distance education for part of this time, while also designing and tutoring on-line courses on-campus and on-line myself. The most important lesson I have learned is how hard it is to be a student and how a well designed course, with well trained tutor can help. This is most important in the on-line environment, but the same teaching techniques apply on campus.

As an example, tutors are trained to first introduce themselves to the class. In the on-line case, this is done by providing a photo, a bio and a welcome message. The next routine step is to have the class introduce themselves to each other. Isolation can be further broken down by using group exercises.

While being an on-line student can be isolating, it is better than when I was (briefly) an on-campus, part time, night student. This was a bleak form of education. I would arrive on a cold, dark campus after work, go into a depressing uncomfortable tutorial room with a group of people I did not know and listen to a tutor who never introduced themselves who would simply read out what was on the slides. At the end of the class we would all leave. There was no-where on campus to go, as everything was shut and everyone had homes to go to. I lasted a couple of weeks. In contrast on-line asynchronous education is a much more social experience.

Fund Research Not PhDs

A media report suggests that the leading Group of Eight Universities in Australia has proposed that funding of PHD students be limited to the world ranked universities: "Fund PhDs at the best unis and forget the rest, say elite universities" (Tim Dodd, AFR, 5 September 2015). I suggest instead that universities charge student fees for PHDs, as for other postgraduate degrees. Universities can then compete for research grants to cover the extra cost of any research facilities the PHDs need.

The Go8's proposal would cut funding in some disciplines from Macquarie, Flinders, La Trobe, Newcastle, Western Sydney, Curtin, James Cook, Bond, Murdoch,  Griffith, Tasmania, Murdoch and RMIT universities. Instead I propose abolishing the Research Training Scheme, Australian Postgraduate Awards and the International Postgraduate Research Scholarships. The funds from these schemes should instead be awarded to universities on a competitive basis for research.

The current system conflates funding of research training and research. I suggest these be separated.  University and departmental rankings are not a good way to select the best research to fund. A better alternative would be to have the tuition costs of research students covered by fees and the research paid for by competitive research grants. Those universities with a good research track record, and good research proposals, would be able to attract more research funding and so be able to have more PHD students. Those universities unable to attract research funding could still offer PHDs in fields which do not require expensive equipment and offer "professional" doctorates, paid for by fees.

Also I suggest "flipping" the approach to research training. The Go8 submission assumes there should be a few PHDs and everyone else has to have an inferior "professional" degree. I suggest reversing this and assume a professional degree is normal and a PHD is a specialized subset of this. All doctoral candidates would be required to start with a professional style program, where they have to take courses in communication and innovation, as well as research techniques. These courses would be paid for by the student through fees (with the usual government loans and subsidies available for domestic students). A small proportion (perhaps 10%) of those students who show the greatest aptitude for research would go on to a research degree (partly funded by research grants), most would complete a professional doctorate (paid for by the student fees).

The current PHD funding scheme is flawed in that it pays universities to produce far more research graduates than there are jobs for (about ten times as many) and does not fund the best research. If funds were moved from these unnecessary PHDs, there would be more for quality research and more graduates with useful skills.