Is Europe seeing the massification of the doctorate?

Here we go - the economics of supply and demand of HE is fascinating here - as the price of a degree has risen in the UK, from a negative price in the 1980s, when we had student grants, to now, its value has fallen, because everyone, including the cat, has one. The real price of a degree, not just te 9k++ a year debt but the cost of food, lodgings, and above all the opportunity cost of foregone earnings, totals well over 100k. This has happened because employers have been able to ditch that tedious on-the-job training and farm the task out to university, where the student bears the cost. Then Masters went down a similar road (OK the cat hasn't got one yet, but it will). And now the same with PhDs. Errr hang on, won't the escalating cost of HE versus its diminishing value put off propsective students, who may decide they;re better off settling for a lower paid job straightaway after leaving school. Well that's already happening. Maybe we could then have some radical employer ploicies to upskill the workforce, I know, how about 'on-the-job training'? Or we just settle for an unskilled workforce, probably all they'll be doing by 2035 is cleaning the robots, who will do all the really complex stuff.

I'd be interested to know how/ whether the PhD variant - doctorate by Published Work - fits (or not) in to the scheme of things discussed in the article. This form of PhD enables individuals to reflect on their previously published academic and/ or practice materials; through a 20,000 or so word commentary or narrative. For more, see - Smith, S. (2015) PhD by Published Work. London: Macmillan James

In Ireland it is only recently that there has been a transition from Institutes of Technology to Technological Universities. This only commenced in 2018 where a clear (and challenging) process was put in place for this transition (https://hea.ie/policy/he-reform/technological-universities/). This is very far from a simple rebranding as has happened in many countries and means that the new Technological Universities have significant research and associated PhD supervisory capacity. I think that the lesson is that calling any institution a university devalues the meaning of university.

The UK provides a very good example in this matter, in my opinion, with its various modern universities ranked among the top 500 to top 800 globally. When it comes to the structures, distinct features, and equivalence to the traditional PhD, the Doctoral Degree Characteristics published by the QAA also sets out a very good example of a framework in this context. I must note that any generalisation on the specifics of a UK professional doctorate, which is still an “academic research degree”, should be based on knowledge and information on the topic. As these are professional-practice-based research degrees, the aim, means and the end product of the research conducted varies across professions as well as academic disciplines, so generalisation requires utmost care. For example, for the DBA specifically, although generally the expected word count can be slightly lower than (not half of) that of a traditional PhD (e.g., 80k vs. 65k.), this can vary across institutions, professions, the research topics, and perhaps even the candidates. The word count of my own DBA thesis is well above 80k, for example. This comes with an additional requirement for the DBA, that of a significant organisational change in the real business context of the reearcher in relation to the DBA research, one of the distinctions of the DBA from the traditional PhD.