The rapid start to the doctoral pilot
The doctoral education pilot is showing progress – articles have already been published and employment connections made. The three-year goal demands new practices from universities and limits what can be achieved.
Text Terhi hautamäki images Anna-Kaisa Jormanainen Translation Marko Saajanaho
Professor of Education Philosophy Niina Junttila from the University of Turku guides doctoral researchers in the EDUCA-Doc doctoral pilot, whose topics are related to education and learning.
“We already celebrated the first article published in a high-level magazine. We have promised to celebrate articles together and minimise competition”, Junttila says.
The doctoral education pilot commenced last autumn, with a number of doctoral researchers starting this year. Junttila expresses her surprise at how quickly the work got underway. EDUCA-Doc is connected to the EDUCA flagship researching the future of education. Junttila offers her guidance to five out of the nine researchers recruited into EDUCA-Doc at the University of Turku.
The special gift provided by the pilot appears to be the strong sense of community between doctoral researchers.
“Doctoral researchers often join research projects alone and tend to work on their own. In the pilot, the participants meet regularly and offer peer support. When everyone is in the same timeframe and their work is linked to the same themes, that has enabled something I have not seen in my 25-year university career”, Junttila tells us.
One thousand doctors, fifteen pilots
The pilot, aiming to educate a thousand brand-new doctors, is an extremely significant educational investment. Currently, approximately 1,600 doctors graduate per year.
The doctoral researchers in the pilot are recruited to fifteen pilot consortiums across different fields, and these are carried out collaboratively between multiple universities.
The core concept of increased doctoral education has received extensive support, with more criticism levied at the segmentation of positions between different fields, and the three-year schedule changing practices. Currently, doctorates are completed in five to six years on average.
”The quality level of dissertations must not decrease and needs to be kept at least as high as it is.”
The Ministry of Education and Culture selected the pilot consortiums based on an external assessment commissioned by the Academy of Finland. Nine of the pilots are tied to flagships funded by the Academy, and six involve other fields.
The largest pilot, iCANDOC for cancer medicine, received 152 doctoral researcher recruits whereas the smallest, the particle and nuclear physics doctoral pilot, has sixteen recruits.
By last spring, doctoral research applications already numbered more than 10,000. For example, over 2,500 applicants competed over the hundred positions in the artificial intelligence industry’s AI-DOC pilot.
“We tackle the topics together”
One of the University of Turku EDUCA-Doc doctoral candidates is Teea Laiho. She is studying leadership in schools through communal work information, which relates to preventing school absences. The core concept is student participation and experiences of being heard in communal schoolwork.
Laiho’s workload began with refining her research plan, adjusting the theoretical framework, and creating the first partial study and article. Prior to her decision to write a doctoral thesis, she had already spent 25 years in working life. The thesis is a direct continuation of the work she has previously carried out in development projects for the Ministry of Education and Culture and the Finnish National Agency for Education.
Despite the strict timeline of three years, project management experience helps with scheduling and coping with the time pressure.
“This is pilot work, testing to see if this is possible. At the moment, this is a full-time job, but of course we are just as susceptible to possible publishing process delays as everyone else, for example”, Laiho says.
”For example, the research permit processes would probably take much longer without such robust expertise on the supervisors’ part.”
Laiho praises the doctoral researcher and supervisor community and their support of each other.
“For example, the research permit processes would probably take much longer without such robust expertise on the supervisors’ part. With the other doctoral researchers, we tackle the topics together. If there are any concerns or someone feels they’ve hit a dead end, you can always send a WhatsApp message and ask to go to lunch.”
Funding allows working in peace
The head of the EDUCA flagship, University of Jyväskylä professor Marja-Kristiina Lerkkanen is happy with the start of the pilot. EDUCA-Doc is mainly driven by the Universities of Jyväskylä, Helsinki, and Turku and the Aalto University, but there are doctoral researchers in all universities.
According to Lerkkanen, the three-year plans are very concrete. Despite the tight schedule, funding allows working in peace.
“This cuts out the entire grant application song and dance that normally causes uncertainty and stress. Now, that time can be spent doing what you should be doing, which is working on your doctorate.”
The goal is for the doctoral researchers to at least reach the pre-examination stage in three years. Some will graduate in less than three years.
“Those progressing especially quickly are typically already committed to the research project and the material is familiar, or their master’s thesis is so good they can base their first article on that.”
Lerkkanen also finds grouping important. The flagship and pilot researchers gather every six months at a joint event, and other events are organised along the way. The doctoral researchers have started to consider their employment prospects from the beginning.
“Professional life cooperation should be related to post-graduate studies and be a win-win situation benefitting both parties.”
The pilot has already had wider effects on doctoral education. The number of articles required for article-based dissertations has been lowered in many universities, or new policies have been put in place to determine how many articles must be published by the time of the dissertation.
Niina Junttila says the University of Turku’s Faculty of Education still requires three articles, two of which have been published and the third picked up for the review process.
The University of Jyväskylä, on the other hand, has outlined that the ability to apply scientific research methods and create scientific information can be proven with two articles at minimum, typically three or four. At least one of these must be a peer-reviewed article, either published or approved for publication. The number of credits required in addition to the doctoral thesis has been lowered from 40 to 30.
“There is very much an emphasis on not lowering the quality of dissertations,” Lerkkanen says.
Strict schedule for supervisors as well
The doctoral pilot also demands a great deal from its supervisors. EDUCA-Doc has shown that the supervisors must work hard to fit the expected intense guidance into their overall workload.
According to Junttila, each doctoral researcher in the pilot at the University of Turku is meant to receive a total of 300 hours of guidance per year from three supervisors. At the Department of Teacher Education, this annual amount has previously been 20 hours from the primary supervisor and 10 hours from the secondary and tertiary supervisors.
Junttila names herself as an example of a supervisor whose work plan does not actually accommodate these guidance hours. At the same time, she is leading the Right to Belong consortium and is one of the EDUCA flagship’s subproject managers and a member of the EDUCA-Doc board of directors. Scheduling issues have been addressed by guidance being offered by three or four supervisors, whose workload varies as the doctoral research work progresses.
According to Junttila, cooperation between universities has worked well. On the other hand, university administration processes have been slow and require improvement.
“For example, the recruitment guidelines did not arrive until the recruitments were nearly done.”
Junttila states the purpose of the pilot is to test if something works. The answer might be that it works, that it does not work, or most likely that it works with certain qualifications. Three years is suitable for a study with a clear research plan and at least partially complete material. But it is not sufficient if the material has to be gathered from the beginning or an intervention of a few years is required.
“The quality level of dissertations must not decrease and needs to be kept at least as high as it is”, Junttila says.
Emphasis on business cooperation
One of the goals of the pilot is to facilitate doctors finding employment across the different sectors of society. For example, professional cooperation comes naturally in the DREAM pilot for mathematics.
Professor Tapio Helin coordinates doctoral thesis guidance at the LUT University, which has 14 pilot doctoral researchers. The topics are related to the FAME flagship for mathematical modelling, sensing, and imaging. The research focuses on inversion problems, which do not allow the desired information to be obtained via direct measurement and require mathematics to be used, e.g., in medical imaging or satellite data interpretation.
According to Helin, the pilot’s dissertations emphasise industrial cooperation in a field whose theses can be highly theoretical. His advisee works on electrical engine modelling with the ABB technology company.
“When a post-graduate student learns to know the key partners and is able to network within the company, it would be no surprise to me if the company was keen to attract them to work in the industry later.”
The three-year goal is evident in the limiting and planning of topics. As a general rule, the roadmap is more clearly drawn from the start.
“Each doctoral candidate has a team of supervisors, and the goal is for everyone to have close access to multiple senior individuals that can be reached out to for help and support. Three years is the goal, but when fourteen people start working on doctorates, I am sure some will experience delays just due to everyone’s different life situations”, Helin remarks.
Publishing times are often long in mathematics, which makes the three-article requirement for article-based dissertations a challenge. The university has changed the requirements – two articles must be published and approved by thesis submission, instead of all three as in the past.
Helin finds it important for doctoral education to still have enough time to grow into research work.
“Three years is an awfully short time. Certainly, you learn plenty in that time, but the daily life of the researcher only starts after your dissertation. If you are even slightly immature when embarking in the world of research, your career advancement will reflect that. From a research perspective, three years has no intrinsic value.”
New practices required
The head of the DREAM pilot and the FAME flagship, Professor Tanja Tarvainen from the University of Eastern Finland, sees doctoral education undergoing a wider change. When the three-year researcher training’s goal is company employment, training for those targeting an academic career should continue in the post-doctoral stage.
That change requires smoother doctoral thesis work. The DREAM pilot has identified the areas of doctoral thesis work that take the most time, trying to find more efficient ways to use time.
“We have fields requiring a lot of data collection and measurements. Those are time-consuming because, for example, the hospital’s MRI machine is only available in the evenings when there are no patients. We are improving the system to allow the same data to be used in multiple theses.”, Tarvainen explains.
One practice that has proven effective is each doctoral researcher having a supervisor or career mentor from the business sector. The idea is for the doctoral researcher to be able to work on the partner company’s premises for a period of time. Investment in guidance has grown, but the amount varies on an individual basis.
The three-year timeline inevitably limits what can be achieved. Less time is allowed for the work to start progressing in an unplanned direction.
“There is no time to develop into a really mature researcher in the same way. The way I see it, we are not quite getting everything we used to. Either the scope or the level of science must be cut down. That is quite a challenge, and it should be discussed at the universities.”
Tarvainen still sees the pilot as an opportunity. She finds it important for scheduling pressures not to fall on the doctoral researcher’s shoulders. Their universities and supervisors must ensure they can focus on their work.
“The universities and supervisors need to consider new practices. We cannot continue in the exact same way if we want something to happen differently or faster”, Tarvainen stresses.
Evaluation project monitoring the pilot in progress
The doctoral education pilot is an investment worth 255 million euros. No wonder the Ministry of Education and Culture is keen to monitor the pilot’s results.
This is carried out by a monitoring and evaluation project by the Tampere University’s Higher Education Group and the University of Jyväskylä’s Finnish Institute for Educational Research. The project examines the accomplishment of objectives set for the pilot, and the pilot’s implementation itself.
Professor of Higher Education Management Jussi Kivistö from the Tampere university is in charge of the monitoring and evaluation project. He says effects on doctoral education can already be observed as universities have begun updating their degree programmes and lowering quantitative requirements. The project has gathered an extensive collection of material in the autumn and conducted two surveys for doctoral researchers and supervisors. Their first progress report was published in February.
Nearly half of the doctoral researchers are Finnish and slightly over half come from abroad. About half of the researchers have prior experience of development and innovation work at Finnish universities. The doctoral researchers are equally interested in working at companies as at universities or research institutes. However, it should be noted that even at this time, over two thirds of doctors are employed outside universities.
66 percent of the doctoral researchers have a study plan for three years; 13 percent for three and a half years; and 15 percent for four years. Even though three years is the funding duration and not the completion time limit, questions have been raised as to where funding for a new group might be found.
“Some universities have prepared for the possibility of having to finance the period exceeding three years”, Kivistö says.
As for the dissertation work itself, the experiences are positive. The doctoral students in the pilot are very satisfied with the quality and amount of guidance they have received. However, the time pressure poses a challenge and creates stress.
“Both the supervisors and doctoral researchers are now under the loop, but at the same time, the pressure has forced universities to take the doctoral researchers very seriously. The supervisors have been extremely active”, Kivistö says.
