Academics defend proposed changes to doctoral education

University leaders and academics in Finland have rejected criticism of recommended reforms to PhD programmes put forward jointly by all the country’s universities.

Pushing back against claims that they represent a compromise on doctoral education quality, universities argue strongly that the proposals will improve the competitiveness and attractiveness of doctoral training in Finland.

Earlier this year, the Finnish rector’s conference (UNIFI) published a report, The Future Direction of Doctoral Education in Finland: Recommendations for developing doctoral education, containing recommendations to “increase the appeal of researcher training and the number of flexible pathways to training, strengthen its relevance to working life and employment opportunities, and speed up graduation”, according to a UNIFI press release.

“The national recommendations for the reform of researcher training are shared by universities. The recommendations have been developed extensively in cooperation with internal and external stakeholders in the university community.

“The shared recommendations signal a strong commitment by universities to reform researcher training in order to increase its quality, impact and appeal,” UNIFI said.

Criticism of the recommendations tends to focus on the reduction in the duration of the doctoral programme from four years to three years, a reduction in the ECTS requirements and a reduction in the number of papers required to be published by a PhD candidate.

However, the UNIFI report, produced by an expert doctoral reform working group coordinated by UNIFI, with a high-level steering group monitoring the work, claims the aim of the recommendations will “create an attractive and high-quality research and training environment that enhances wellbeing and supports the career development of doctoral researchers both in Finland and internationally”.

Heikki Holopainen, executive director of the Rector’s Council of Finnish Universities and secretary for the working group, told University World News: “The recommendations are quite historic. I believe this is the first time that universities have together initiated such comprehensive recommendations on doctoral training.”

Harmonising PhD requirements

Holopainen said the recommendations were about “clarifying and harmonising PhD requirements, not lowering them”.

He said the recommendations provide a common framework for development. “A lot of focus is on improving guidance, streamlining administrative processes, and enhancing collaboration within universities but also with other sectors in society.

“The national goal is to increase R&D funding to 4% of the GDP. The development of research education is essential to ensure that Finland has a sufficient number of highly educated experts to achieve ambitious research and development goals and to reform society on a large scale.

“The reforms will strengthen the competitiveness and attractiveness of Finnish doctoral education. Uniform and clear requirements, a faster graduation schedule and improved guidance and support attract the best doctoral students from both Finland and abroad,” he said.

Flagship programme

The UNIFI report argues that at the heart of the recommendations is the promotion of a culture of close collaboration and interaction in researcher training, both within universities and with stakeholders, and notes that the reforms will be supported by additional national efforts to develop doctoral education and a political consensus on raising skills levels.

National reforms include the Finnish government's plan to fund 1,000 new doctorate positions through pilot projects for doctoral programmes 2024-2027, which has been previously reported by University World News. Eight hundred of the positions are directed to themes linked to the flagship research fields.

According to Jari Hämäläinen, vice-rector of LUT University and chair of the Unifi Steering Group, Finnish universities have received over 10,000 applications for the doctoral positions, even though not all of the 1,000 positions have been opened.

Thus far, about 700 PhD researcher candidates have been chosen and the rest of the positions will be filled in the beginning of 2025.

Speaking to University World News about criticisms raised through the media that the UNIFI recommendations will lower the quality of doctoral education by, among other measures, dropping the publication requirement, Hämäläinen said: “There have been discussions in Helsingin Sanomat [newspaper] about the quality of doctorates in the future, but some comments are quite irrelevant to the recommendations.

“For example, the national recommendation is three peer-reviewed scientific publications [for qualification], but the University of Helsinki has a different guideline starting from one publication only.”

He explained: “Traditionally, plenty of (good) doctoral candidates have had zero publications – only a traditional book (monograph). And, in business administration and management it is typical to prepare so-called essay theses consisting of unpublished articles. So, quality comes from somewhere else than from the new recommendations.”

Hämäläinen said the recommendation of a three-year duration to complete doctoral education had also been criticised. “Officially, the goal is to do the research in three years and finalise the doctoral degree in four years, when a full salary is offered.

“Usually, doctoral students lose time by applying for personal scholarships and short projects to get some income. Now, we offer directly three- to four-year working contracts without teaching duties, without any administrative tasks,” he stated.

Hämäläinen noted that it was important to consider exactly what the added value of the doctoral degree is compared to the MSc. “How early can we give a doctoral candidate a ‘driving licence’ to do independent research? What should we leave to the postdoc phase?

“I would say that scientific novelty and the contribution of the doctoral candidate (especially in joint publications) are what really matter. Numbers of study points or publications are technical guidelines, but finally the scientific novelty and contribution will be evaluated in the pre-examination process and finally in the public defence,” Hämäläinen said.

Faster completion of studies

Olli-Pekka Kauppila, professor of management and organisation at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki who was a member of the working group, told University World News that the new recommendations were “not intended to be used to justify any quality reductions or compromises”.

He explained: “The main purpose is to enable and encourage faster completion of studies. Thus, the recommendation is that submitting a thesis for pre-examination should be possible after three years ... This does not mean that the studies could not take longer; it means that the universities should not design programmes in such a way that timely graduation is not possible.

“In Finland, all universities have very extensive autonomy by law, and thus they can freely choose how they apply the new recommendations. I represent Hanken (and perhaps business schools in general). For us, the scientific requirements have not been lowered at all.

“The required studies are the same as before and the PhD dissertation is as comprehensive as it has been before (which is on par with other leading business schools worldwide).

“To address the issues outlined in new recommendations, it is important that we (as a university) streamline our internal processes, effective supervision, and funding systems such that the PhD students could focus on their studies and development.”

Professor Michael Jeltsch, part of the IndiviDrug Research Program and Wihuri Research Institute at the University of Helsinki who is a supervisor of doctoral programmes in drug research and integrative live science, told University World News: “It’s not an easy situation.

“Everybody knows that it is impossible to receive in three years the same amount of experience as you could in five or six years. Because of this long PhD education, Finnish PhDs used to have a reputation for being extremely well prepared for a postdoctoral period, for example, in the US.

“However, they also are known for being the oldest PhD graduates on the academic market, which interferes, for example, with family planning (Finland has generally record-low reproduction rates, and I guess PhD graduates might be leading the pack, but I am not sure).”

European context

Jeltsch continued: “It is clear that Finland’s PhD education should be brought more in line with that of the bigger European countries (like the UK, Germany, and France), but for this goal, the reforms are not radical enough. After all, two to three publications are still much more than is required in these countries.”

He noted that some critics regard the current changes as a “race to the bottom”: shortening the Finnish PhD education will mean the speeding up of all other degrees – and money would be the driver.

However, he said that a positive outcome of the reform is that many of the nonsensical administrative barriers to graduation were in the process of being removed.

“Some of them have already been removed, like the number of credits required was reduced, and some ancient protocols that need to be followed are streamlined. It has been a constant joke that if you are ready to defend your thesis in spring, you are lucky if you manage to do so by the end of the year.

“The biggest problem is that the number #1 thing that slows down graduation is the lack of money. And that issue is not addressed well at all. We now have a massive single-money infusion for the 1,000-PhD project, but what after that?

“More than half of PhD students are on grants or work to finance their studies. The constant need to apply for short-term funding takes away the focus from the actual research,” he stressed.

“The bottom line is that the only way to achieve the goals is to reduce the quality. Few people admit this publicly because there is also not much that we can do about it.

“Hence, we try to handle the change in the best way possible, for example, by trying to get more external funding and improving the quality of the PhD education. But there are limits to both of these approaches since some of it is a zero-sum game,” he concluded.

Defining key terms

Taru Siekkinen, a postdoctoral researcher at the Finnish Institute for Educational Research, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, chair of the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers in Finland (CHERIF) and part of the team evaluating the doctoral pilot commissioned by the ministry, told University World News that in her personal capacity she believed the UNIFI report was “very comprehensive” and captured the challenges of Finnish doctoral education.

“In the light of recent developments at universities, where the doctoral pilot project has already initiated many changes in doctoral education, it is definitely good that universities have these recommendations to guide their institutional development work,” she said.

She noted that the doctoral pilot may have some “unintended consequences” that could only be understood via data collection during the pilot. Overall, she believed that it is a positive thing that people were discussing doctoral education and its societal functions.

“We still need to have a critical discussion about what we mean by key terms such as quality, impact and excellence, and recognise that there are huge disciplinary differences in these understandings and in the concrete practices related to them, as in the pilot there is a clear focus on STEM fields.

“Understandings that are too narrow can lead to the development of ‘one-size-fits-all' practices, which can inhibit diversity in a number of ways,” she said.

Sari Lindblom, rector of the University of Helsinki, said her institution has welcomed the harmonisation efforts coordinated by UNIFI.

“For the first time we have in Finland shared minimum requirements for a doctoral thesis and the training. For doctoral students, this is fair. For universities, this is also beneficial as the number of completed degrees is an important element of the national resource allocation model.

“Obviously we have taken this seriously and updated our guidelines for the faculties accordingly. In a comprehensive university each faculty has then redefined their criteria, taking into account discipline-specific traditions and publication practices.

“As we have agreed to the governmental pilot of the 1,000 three-year-salaried graduate school positions, we are critically going through our administrative procedures and the number of required exams.

“With enhanced supervision, leaner procedures and closer collaboration with the industry, we aim to fill the government’s expectations. For the doctoral student, it also increases the likelihood of being recruited immediately after the thesis has been submitted,” she said.

A more ‘sensible’ path

Professor Matti Tedre based in the School of Computing at the University of Eastern Finland and a partner in the Finnish Doctoral Program Network in Artificial Intelligence (AI-DOC), said he did not see a risk to quality with the new recommendations.

“Rather, I see that Finnish universities are making theses more sensible. I moved to Finland seven years ago from Stockholm University in Sweden, and what I saw was that what is expected of a PhD thesis in Finland varies wildly according to the supervisor.

“Some supervisors had the ‘classical’ view that a PhD thesis is a culmination of one's career and has to make waves in the research community. Others take the PhD thesis for what it is: researcher training – that is, getting you to learn the workflow of research in your field of science. For that aim, the new recommendations are good,” he noted.

Tedre said that the role of the supervisor also varied wildly. “Some supervisors just tell you ‘welcome’ and the next time they expect to hear from you is when you hand in your thesis.

“Others take you to be a part of a research group with weekly meetings, clear goals, milestones, roles, etcetera. It is my opinion that the new recommendations facilitate better supervision.

“Previously, the view seemed to be that you need to be a bona fide independent researcher after the PhD is completed, but the new view is that the postdoc period gives you that. From that viewpoint too, five years for ‘old’ PhDs seems necessary, and 3+2 years (PhD+postdoc) doesn't change that at all,” Tedre said.

A ‘goal, not a time limit’

Asked whether the present drive towards more coordinated regulations across universities and academic fields will lead to a more attractive doctorate education in Finland, Minister of Science and Culture Sari Multala told University World News she was “very happy that universities in Finland had decided to cooperate and further develop … doctoral education”.

She explained: “In Finland, universities have wide financial, academic and educational autonomy. They themselves are responsible for the content as well as the structure of the studies. This is something I value very highly.”

She said that the so-called ‘PhD Pilot’ which aimed to educate 1,000 more PhDs in the upcoming three to four years was “a goal, not a time limit”.

She explained: “In Finland, we do not regulate the time to finish one’s PhD. “At the same time, universities have agreed to enhance and develop their practices and guidelines concerning doctoral education.

“This is not as much a matter of regulation but a significant possibility for our autonomous universities to aim for better results. Of course, additional funding comes with certain expectations. It is crucial for Finland that our universities do well.”