German universities fear losing monopoly over doctorates

"Giving doctoral powers to universities of applied sciences should improve social justice, she argued. Many of their students come from families where no one has been to university before, Professor Gross said – at Beuth the figure is 60 per cent. “Give them a chance,” she said." That's nonsense. They have every chance they need by going to a full university instead to one of applied sciences. I come from a family where nobody before me had attended the university or even had the necessary qualification (Abitur) to do so. And I went to a full university and made my way through. And that was almost two decades ago when there were not nearly as many support services for students in place as there are today. The thing is that you either have to decide whether you want to receive an application oriented education or a research oriented application. Now, if a student realizes during his or her students that they are more interested in research instead of application or vice versa I am all for making the transfer from one type of university to the other as easy as possible, be it as an undergraduate or a graduate student, etc. But a university of applied sciences should not award a research degree. The PhD should qualify you for an academic career - in research - and we already have more than enough PhDs who cannot get the academic job they dream of simply because there are not enough of those jobs. And, yes, there needs to be a change in the perception culture: a financial advisor is not smart than his/her colleague simply because she/he holds a PhD degree.