EUROPE: Doctoral education body launched

The inaugural meeting of the European University Association Council for Doctoral Education was held at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland earlier this month. The new council will help formalise doctoral training within Europe and provide a focus for global dissemination of European work in this field.

"It was clear that the council wants to be a forum to share experience and learn from good practice in other universities but at the same time protecting Europe's unique diversity in this area," said Dr Alexandra Bitusikova, programme manager at the EUA.

"We don't want to over-regulate or to harmonise everything; we don't want the same doctoral programmes all over Europe but we can still learn a lot from each other," Bitusikova told University World News.

Discussion over the three days focused on defining key priority areas to be addressed for advancing doctoral training in Europe. Five main themes emerged:

* Improving the supervision of PhD candidates, particularly through better training and monitoring of supervisors themselves;
* Enhancing institutional cooperation, notably through the development of joint doctoral programmes and double degrees;
* Introducing new structures such as doctoral schools within institutions to manage doctoral education;
* Better provision of skills training for doctoral candidates, particularly 'transferable' skills, and
* Enhancing quality control and evaluation of PhD programmes.

Bitusikova said there were definite regional differences in the uptake and development of doctoral education in Europe.

"In northern parts, the reforms are already in place but in the southern and eastern European parts many universities still need to do a lot of work," she said.

But the establishment of the EUA-CDE showed that doctoral education was now fully on the agenda of many universities.

"We definitely will be a partner of the Council for Graduate Schools in the US and Canada. We'd like to be the voice of European return-intensive universities - all universities that award PhDs should be return-intensive," Bitusikova said.

"We want to be the representative European voice in other regions of the world, of course. We're in discussion with Australia and we want to work with other regions and help the global dimensions of doctoral education, including countries where still the reforms are lacking like Africa. There is a big brain drain there - we want to create partnerships in these countries so that there is a brain circulation and not brain drain."

alan.osborn@uw-news.com