Enhancing the Doctoral Experience

A Guide for Supervisors and their International Students

Steve Hutchinson, Helen Lawrence

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351939973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

One of the major intangible benefits associated with the postgraduate research experience is precisely that: the experience. And more specifically, for an increasing number of international research students: the British doctoral experience. This experience is often largely defined and shaped by their relationship with, and support from, their supervisor. Enhancing the Doctoral Experience brings together the authors' experience and research, frameworks and models as well as pragmatic feedback and understanding. This synthesis of scholarly theory and pragmatic sampling has produced a book that provides a scaffold for students and supervisors to have conversations about their expectations; to discuss what supervision is; to articulate clearly what both parties need in order for a successful relationship to occur, and to build a mutually beneficial endeavour. In many cases, these conversations can be complicated by cultural and linguistic differences so the text explicitly addresses these and other sources of misunderstanding. Against a challenging background of growing numbers of students but also increasing pressures on time and costs, Enhancing the Doctoral Experience offers an approach to improve the effectiveness of the doctoral student and increase the professionalization of research supervision. It does so by providing both with an awareness of, and a toolkit to approach, student diversity.

Chapter 1
Introducing the UK Doctorate in a Global Context

‘When I think of globalism I always think of that internet factoid. You know, the one that says India has more top A-grade students than we have students in total.’

Research supervisor – Mechanical Engineering

Over the past decade, in universities and research institutes in many countries, each of us has met hundreds of research supervisors and thousands of research students of varying nationalities. Before we embark on our stories and content let’s first consider the context for this publication.

Rise of the Postgraduate

The idea of students moving from one country or culture to study in another is not a new one. The universities of medieval Europe or ancient Islam were ‘far more transnational communities of scholars than the modern national universities founded in the twentieth century’ (Kim 2009).

Recently however, scholarly migration has increased in scale. Significant proportions of research students in the UK¹ are from outside the UK. Also the absolute number of doctoral candidates in the UK is growing. Depending on which figures are used, this may show a doubling, tripling or quadrupling in less than 15 years. The absolute number of PhDs enrolled is often confusing, as many institutions have in the past registered candidates for an MPhil qualification and then upgraded or transferred a candidate’s status to full doctoral registration after a year or more. However, Table 1.1 shows the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data for numbers of doctorates obtained in the UK in 2011/12.

Table 1.1 Number of doctorates obtained in the UK in 2011/12

	Full-time	Part-time	Total
UK-domiciled students	8,235	2,770	11,005
EU-domiciled students	2,360	480	2,840
Non-EU-domiciled students	6,055	535	6,590

Source: Data from Higher Education Statistics Agency (2011/12): https://www.hesa.ac.uk/stats (accessed 19 June 2014).

This means that the total number of doctorates obtained in the UK in the most recent data set is just over 20,000, with EU and non-EU candidates obtaining over 45 per cent of them.

The growth in the number of doctoral students is part of a far larger increase in postgraduates generally. This is far more than a strategic student reaction to the recently sluggish hiring economy, showing clear trends regardless of how the economy waxes and wanes. A sensible estimate (taken from Stefan Collini’s 2012 book What are Universities For?) says that ‘in the last three decades the number of postgraduates has gone from about 60,000 to over 530,000’. And while from year to year there is some fluctuation in the absolute numbers of postgraduates (2011/12 saw a small decrease compared to the previous year), there is no denying that the trend is generally an upward one. The HESA 2011/12 data indicate that non-UK-domiciled students accounted for over a third all of postgraduate students in the UK.²

An interesting facet of the HESA data is the recent sharp decline in postgraduate numbers from India, which is almost certainly linked to the change of policy at national level towards post-study grace periods applied to visas. One of the post-doctoral researchers we interviewed told us:

‘One of the key reasons for studying here [the UK] was that I wanted to stay and seek work as an academic here. I was very lucky to get a visa that allowed this. This is now not the case. Some of my friends from home are looking now to study in Canada and Scandinavia as the situation is better. If you want to study here, look into this carefully.’

Post-doctoral researcher, India

The Draw of the UK Doctorate

An increase in doctoral students is, it could be argued, inevitably linked to the growth of MA and especially MSc numbers, but there are many other reasons for this growth in the UK as a destination for international postgraduates.

The UK doctorate is still a massive draw for international students, for a host of reasons on top of the natural recruitment that can come from a linked masters degree. Firstly, the UK doctorate itself is still widely and highly regarded internationally, and so are UK institutions (the ‘Oxbridge Effect’) and their research facilities.

Add to this the relatively brief period of expected candidacy, which is shorter and therefore cheaper than in the USA and much of Europe, the globally recognized academic standards and the potential employability of UK-educated students. As one international student we spoke to said:

‘I want to be a lecturer in my country. It is easiest with a PhD from [the UK].’
Research student – Sciences, Middle East

On top of these cost, intellectual and career benefits, and of prime importance for many international students, is the intellectual freedom study in the UK brings. Within reason, candidates are largely free to study whatever subjects are interesting and academically valid. This is not the case elsewhere in the world. Travelling to the UK can allow a student to critically examine a facet of their own nation or culture which they would not be allowed to do from within that country.

Moreover, the UK doctoral system is hugely influential in terms of the quality of the support, training and development opportunities (see Hinchcliffe et al. 2007) and all-round activity that sits between the purely intellectual and the purely pastoral. These aspects of the doctorate hold increasing value in the minds of students who are demanding more for the substantial fees they are paying:

‘It’s expensive. It’s a big risk for me. I want to make sure I get the most from my time here. [Such as?] Such as training, networking and opportunities to develop and learn. I’m not going to just sit in my lab.’

Research Student – Biological Sciences, Eastern Europe

Finally, of course, there is the self-perpetuation of the academic system. In essence this is the role-model attractant of academic tutors at bachelors and masters level (‘This lecturer is a “good” academic. I want to study with them’). We will deal with this specific element of the recruitment draw later in the book.

Overall, the UK is an outstanding place to study for a doctorate. It is easy to forget this in the day-to-day grind of academic and bureaucratic pressures, National Student Survey league tables and student appeals – but one of the refreshing things about hearing the stories of students was the positivity from so many of them. For instance:

‘This is a great country. There are so many opportunities here. My friends who are at US and Canadian universities, moan to me [about their experiences] and tell me how lucky I am. It is great here …. I’d tell anyone to come and study here. And I will be qualified, hopefully, in three years. You have so many opportunities to learn. I did not expect so much.’

Research student – Medical Sciences, Saudi Arabia

Combine this set of favourable conditions with the underlying internationalization and globalization agendas and the exponential growth of our knowledge and research-based economy, and these conditions can only serve to make UK (and UK-franchised) doctorates and related postgraduate qualifications more attractive to the international market.

In 2004 the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) published a policy paper entitled Putting the World into World-class Education.³ This influential document outlined three key strategic goals:

1. The establishment of global contexts of all forms of education;
2. The creation of international partnerships;
3. The identification of links to be made between universities and trade and industry.

In some ways this policy manifesto was pushing at an open door since for some time the universities and colleges of the UK had been aiming at exactly these goals – partly through a desire to widen the experiences of their students and faculty, but also because of cold, hard financial realities. Links between the educational sector and the private sector can lead to financial gain for the institutions as well as placements for students and very real benefits to international partners in terms of top-calibre graduate and postgraduate recruits and cutting-edge intellectual property. There are also benefits for researchers themselves in terms of growing a rich and diverse network to facilitate potential collaborations for future projects. The internationalization agenda, at myriad levels, has led to an overall increase in students from global markets, and this has naturally extended to postgraduate and doctoral recruitment.

So the simple upshot is that the number of international doctoral students in the UK is growing. Therefore, in a time when economic concerns are pressing, universities have a growing cash crop – a group of students who are charged higher fees by institutions than the home equivalent. Our experience has taught us that the hand that takes the money is not always the same one concerned about quality. At undergraduate level the sector has started to respond to the challenges of an international curriculum – and has heeded the warnings from both policy makers and educational researchers such as Rees and Porter (1998), who say: ‘Those providers … who do not take account of the special needs of international students, and who do not fulfil their sales promises are likely to be just as much at risk as exporters in any other market.’ Yet a fundamental tension here concerns the value, in global terms, of the spread of an educational philosophy which is essentially ‘Western’ – over-simplistically, one that requires a Socratic challenge to the teacher – held up to be the gold standard and sold to international students, many of whom come from a background where this educational expectation is not the norm.

This book is not about the socio-economic reasons for the growth of the doctoral industry across the board, and is not about the rights or wrongs of taking greater numbers of international students or the intricacies of our universities’ fiscal juggling; rather, it concerns one important facet of what doctoral programmes must do to mitigate the risks of our practice not meeting the expectations of our students. This book is about facilitating and ensuring the effective supervision of international doctoral students studying within the UK system. And by ‘effective’, we refer to both the student and supervisory experience.

The increase in the number of culturally and ethnically diverse students has led to a number of distinct challenges, not just for the supervisors and the students themselves, but also for their departments and faculties. The primary challenge for all concerned, but especially institutions and faculties, is not the fact that there is a difference between home and international students, but the sheer ridiculousness of two suggestions:

1. That all UK home students are a homogeneous group;
2. That international students are a distinct, homogenous group.

Of course, there are differences that can be expressed collectively. But as Geake and Maingard (1999) observe, there are more individual differences within cultures than there are between cultures. Sometimes the very terms ‘home’ and ‘international’ can be a source of exclusion and discomfort, and ‘grouping people together in such ways may be useful to differentiate fee status but it is indefensible when it is carried over into everyday parlance and policy documents, whether these be at local, national or institutional level’ (Trah...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Review of Enhancing the Doctoral Experience
• Notes for the Reader
• 1 Introducing the UK Doctorate in a Global Context
• 2 Doctoral Descriptors within the UK Framework
• 3 Doctoral Motivations
• 4 Doctoral Expectations
• 5 Starting the Relationship and Beginning the Journey
• 6 Building the Relationship
• 7 Laying Firm Intellectual Foundations
• 8 Scholarly Construction
• 9 Making an Intellectual Contribution
• 10 Sophisticated Thinking
• 11 Spreading the Message
• 12 Onwards and Outwards
• 13 Fit for Purpose? Preparing the Candidate for their Viva
• References and Literature Cited
• Index