Foreign doctoral students may be in transit

In a commentary last month, Philip Altbach wrote that the rich were stealing the brains of developing countries. In the case of Spain where doctorate production has grown exponentially, however, the evidence regarding the destination of foreign doctoral students does not support that view.

Spain saw a six-fold increase in the number of doctorates awarded from 1978-04, up from 1,117 to 7,474, according to an OECD 2009 review of Spanish tertiary education. This rose to around 8,000 in 2010, according to Eurostat figures cited in a report by the organisation Cooperation on Doctoral Education between Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe, which placed Spain fifth in terms of European production.

Provisional information from Data and Figures from the Spanish University System 2012-2013, showed that nearly 24% of these 8,000 doctorates were earned by foreign students, of whom 62% were from Latin America and 27% from Europe, with only 4% from Asia-Oceania and 4% from Africa.

Exact figures are not available as to whether these students stayed in Spain once they received their doctorates but some evidence suggests the students may be ‘in transit’ and on their way to continue their research back home.

It is worth noting in this context that Spanish and Portuguese universities are at the bottom of the European pile in terms of offering fixed-term contracts.

On the other hand, some academic experts say that among the total doctorate population generated over many years, foreigners who earn a doctorate in Spain and then stay represent less than 10% of the total while among university professors they do not represent more than 5%.

“The vast majority of doctorate holders go back to their own countries,” says Luis Sanz Menéndez of the national research council at the CSIC, using data from the Eurostats Careers of Doctorate Holders project.

Foreign students make up around 2.9% of Spanish tertiary-level enrolments compared to 29% in New Zealand, 19% in Switzerland and 18% in the United Kingdom.

But that is predominantly because Spain offers few university courses in English where foreign students make up around 24% of those enrolled in advanced research programmes, compared to the OECD average of 18.5%, according to the most recent OECD data and the data provided by the Spanish figures.

Until fairly recently it was argued that Spain’s tertiary system was inefficient because the average time doctoral students took to complete their theses was about six years, compared to four years in most other European countries.

Although Spain graduates 8,000 doctorate graduates each year, some 76,000 students are enrolled in doctoral studies, according to the OECD’s Reviews of Tertiary Education, 2009. Since the introduction of fees for doctorate studies, however, new procedures have resulted in a dramatic fall in the number of enrolled students.

Researcher mobility

Turning to researcher mobility, the two major hurdles some foreigners outside the European Union face are legal problems related to visa acquisition and language barriers, especially regarding administrative procedures, according to the Researcher’s Report, 2012.

The Spanish government sought to address this by introducing special scientific visas under the Immigration Act to ease researchers’ inward mobility.

Another major obstacle for post-doctorates in Spain has been the low level of staff mobility in universities, which is directly related to the way recruitment occurs. National policies have long sought to tackle the perceived common problem of inbreeding, including imposing mobility requirements in some postdoctoral programmes.

Top international universities advertise their vacant posts widely whereas in Spain advertising tends to be in Spanish, which may cause barriers for non-Spanish speakers. Furthermore rectors, for example, are specifically required to come from within the university, according to the OECD Reviews of Tertiary Education: Spain, 2009.

Between 1996 and 2001, 75% of academics who were given tenure in Spanish universities after completing their doctorates, were working in the same place the following year, according to a 2006 report by Laura Cruz-Castro, Luis Sanz-Menendez and Jaime Aja Valle. Mobility was lower in the humanities (at 85%) and higher in science (at 64%).

The authors found that only 6.7% of academics who had gone to universities from another institution received tenure. Experts believe the situation has changed little since 2001, although mobility has increased at some top universities.

On the other hand, a paper by the same authors published in 2010 in Research Policy and based on a study of 1,583 academics in experimental sciences, challenged the widespread belief that mobility enhances careers.

Spain has long been criticised for inbreeding practices in its academic systems but the authors found that, in general, post-doctoral mobility (either national or international) does not reward academics in terms of advancing their careers.

On the contrary, the evidence points to academics taking longer to get tenure if they are mobile – controlling for all other elements.