Majority of academics at universities recruited from within

The Swedish Research Council – Vetenskapsradet or VR – has published a report showing that just over half of academics at universities and university colleges are recruited from the same higher education institution from which they got their doctoral degree.

Using register data from the central bureau of statistics the report identifies the proportion of researchers and teachers in Sweden holding a doctorate from the same higher education institution at which they are employed, from another Swedish higher education institution or from a foreign institution.

"The low degree of mobility is worrying," Director General of VR Sven Stafström said. “Swedish higher education institutions ought to a larger degree look upon recruitment as a strategic leadership task."

To redress the imbalance, VR suggests that a national recruitment career system with open competition should be established and that mobility should count positively when competing for an academic position.

Although more than one in two academic positions at Swedish higher education institutions are internally recruited – defined as having the doctoral degree from the same institution at which they are employed – there are differences between academic subject areas, employment categories and types of institution.

Internal recruitment is lowest in the natural sciences, and in these subjects the number of academics holding a foreign doctorate is also the highest.

Agricultural sciences has the highest degree of internal recruitment followed by medicine and health sciences and engineering – in all these fields the proportion of internal recruitment is above 60%. Around one third of PhDs employed in medicine, engineering and natural sciences have their degree from another Swedish higher education institution.

For recruitment to academic positions in the humanities and social sciences 7% have a foreign degree, while the proportion of employees holding a doctoral degree from another Swedish university is just above 40%, and law has the highest level of internal recruitment at 68%. In clinical medicine internal recruitment is above 70%.

Women are consistently recruited internally, to a higher degree than men.

The study divides higher education institutions into large universities, smaller universities and university colleges, finding that the large universities have a significantly higher level of internal recruitment, notably with regard to the highest academic positions of professor and senior lecturer.

Part of the explanation for this could be that the smaller universities have been granted the right to award doctoral degrees comparatively late and that some university colleges still do not have that right.

On the whole, the report says, the large universities have a very high tendency towards recruiting their own PhD graduates, with just over 60% of professors having been recruited from holders of their own doctorates. Only 7% of professors in medicine hold a foreign doctorate.

Also in career-developing positions at post-doc level, more than 60% studied at postgraduate level at the same higher education institution as they are employed, and in medicine and engineering this accounts for two-thirds.

Post-docs at large universities in the natural sciences have the highest degree of international recruitment at 45%.

According to the report, one of the reasons for the low degree of international mobility is that Swedish doctorate holders are comparatively older when graduating, having already established themselves with a family.

Why mobility matters

Professor Bo Rothstein from the department of political science at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden said at a seminar that there are too few talented candidates hired from outside the University of Gothenburg due to the Swedish system of research and higher education recruiting internally.

“Intellectual 'inbreeding' is bad for gender equality, and it is bad for creativity. Instead it leads to long asymmetric dependencies, which generates group thinking,” he argued.

The report has hit a chord in other Nordic countries.

Jonas Persson from the programme for teacher training at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, or NTNU, told the university magazine Universitetsavisa that all researchers should have international exposure.

Persson, who has a doctorate from Gothenburg University, has been employed by the universities of Birmingham in the UK and Jyväskylä in Finland, and worked in Japan and Sweden before coming to NTNU. “I have seen many different cultures and different ways of doing things. I have seen how others approach different parts of science and teaching, and I have a broader horizon,” he told Universitetsavisa.

Speaking to University World News, he said: “Mobility is important as you will gain experiences and make contacts with people that you will never get otherwise. You might not be able to publish more than if you stayed at home, but you will be better at looking at things from another perspective. You grow as a human and a researcher in a way that is hard to measure but will be an inspiration to your students.”

Not all Swedish universities conform to the trend identified in the report. Stockholm University, in a press release commenting upon the report, stated that new statistics show that a majority of teachers recruited to Stockholm University in the past five years have received their PhDs from, and been employed at, other universities.

“Stockholm University´s policy is that teaching positions should be advertised internationally and filled in open competition with the strongest possible candidates, without giving preference to local candidates and without requiring that candidates have external funding,” Professor Astrid Söderbergh Widding, the university’s rector, said.