Gold standard of PhD ‘under threat’, professors claim

Many of the criticisms are valid, but who knows in how many cases? It is best to see the PhD as part of a whole range of hoops and hurdles and evaluations, including participation in conferences, publication, teaching. These are relevant if a person remains in the academic field. The greater risk to institutions' reputation is when people brandish a PhD certificate in places where all this contextual information is unavailable and, having obtained a PhD by dubious procedures then take advantage in far-flung places, exploiting local ignorance.

I'm doing a staff PhD, but by research rather than prior publication, and my supervisor is pushing me just as hard as any 'regular' student... and I love it. When I get it, that PhD will be just as valid as anyone else's, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

I hope the thesis is not dead yet, being just about to submit mine. I agree with m.robertson8 I have been stretched way beyond what I thought I could do by a good supervisor and I enjoyed it immensely.

Standards of publications and what constitutes a good PhD vary quite significantly by discipline. Speaking about what I know, In AI/computer science, there are almost no paper with a single author on it, and certainly not PhD students. Most papers are published in competitive conferences with less than 30% acceptance rate. A single acceptance at a conference like NeurIPS or ICML per PhD is quite good already. It takes so long (>2 years sometimes) for journal papers to be accepted that we cannot require them for PhDs. I can say with confidence that I have never seen a PhD in AI/CS with 5 single-author good journal papers at defence/viva time. This is physically not possible in the 3 years of the European PhD funding (H2020 INT funding is 36 months). In mathematics (my 2nd field) it is possible ot achieve this, because there are no experimental requirements, papers can be short, and the field is boundless. Everyone is doing something unique, so reviewers pretty much only need to check that the paper is correct (which is not always easy to do !) PhD is a degree, no longer a gateway to an academic career. We still require a significant contribution to award the degree. I don't think the standards have slipped in recent years in my discipline, on the contrary.

I dispute the premise here that there is something fundamentally wrong in principle with doing a phd this route. In my experience as an External Examiner of normal route PhDs the standard can be appalling and there is alot of pressure to persuade the EE to pass it. Appalling especially because of choice of question/topic which is often irrelevant or way too idiosyncratic, or methodologically suspect. I feel the whole peer review process of external examining is not robust and is in some cases actually borderline corrupt, and the threshold for passing is way too low. There are far too many PhDs, far too many supervisors who are not experts in the field and who are unable to make a judgement call early on that the thesis is not good enough. This may be a social sciences perspective only.