Funding PhDs for four years ‘being considered’ by UK council

In fields like business & management (and to some extent economics), the 3-year model is simply not workable. Indeed, the UK model where one needs to have a Masters degree to apply for a PhD is even less workable. For example, 99.9% of individuals getting a Masters in a B&M subject are getting it to get a job. There is no real academic or intellectual content beyond that necessary to be practical and enter the workplace. Someone coming into a PhD programme with an UG degree in B&M plus a Masters in B&M is unlikely to have the skills necessary to take on a PhD and be successful as an academic. Usually, the ones applying to PhD programmes are those who were unsuccessful in getting a job based on that Masters degree. If I go back to my days in the US, nearly all of my PhD cohort had degrees in something other than B&M but were in the b-school PhD programme (they were sociologists, psychologists, economists, engineers, mathematicians, etc.) and none had a Masters degree (I had a BSc). But they were brilliant; which is why they were there (present company excluded). When I was the Research Dean at a Russell Group school, I joked that our best UG students could go and get a PhD at MIT or Harvard but could not be admitted to our programme (except as a special case requiring some bureaucratic gerrymandering) . We came up with a plan to move to a US style model admitting "distinction" level applicants with only an UG degree but giving them intensive coursework that trained them more effectively for their future as an academic. This was necessary simply because we found that they couldn't compete in the academic job market against peers from N. America or Asia where there was no requirement that someone have a Masters degree to be admitted to a PhD programme and where there was usually 5x the level of methodological and theoretical training. So the issue is just not time, but structure and flexibility. The problem with funding from groups like the ESRC is that they need to have uniform systems and these tend to be dominated by certain fields. In reality, there is a need for more flexibility and an understanding that the Masters first approach is mostly an anachronism and simply a deterrent to those with the best options. The model we proposed at my prior institution was 1+4 which might look as if it was a long road but the reality is that if people are forced into the Masters model you end up wasting 5-6 years once gaps are taken into account. This is simply inefficient for the person but also most likely going to not entice the best and brightest to look to the UK for their PhDs when they can go to places where they can waste less of their lives on the degree and get more value from less time.

As someone with experience in the UK, Scandinavia and the US, I can say that the 3-year model in the UK is bonkers. It is so rushed, so oppressive, so niggard, so proletarianized. It is shameful what the UK does to is PhD students.