Dr Nico Cloete of the Centre for Higher Education Trust
As South Africa gears itself up to become a knowledge economy, so too does the pressure to produce a pipeline of suitably skilled doctoral graduates to nurture the necessary higher level skills.
Dr Nico Cloete, director of the Centre for Higher Education Trust (CHET), says that the importance of the doctorate has increased disproportionately in relation to its share of the overall graduate output. This has happened globally over the past decade.
This heightened attention has not been concerned predominantly with the traditional role of the PhD, the provision of a future supply of academics. Rather, it has focused on the increasingly important role that higher education, and particularly high-level skills, is perceived to play in the knowledge economy.
In South Africa, the National Development Plan (2012) prioritised an increase in doctoral output from 1 400 a year to 6 000 by 2030, a call repeated by Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor in her 2014 budget speech.
Furthermore, African Union Commission chairperson, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, declared in November 2013 that Africa needs tens of thousands more PhDs to renew an ageing professoriate, to staff the rapidly expanding higher education field, to boost research and to generate the high-level skills growing economies need.
SciSTIP is launching a research programme that will address four discourses which intersect in current debate on the production of PhDs in South Africa. These discourses concern global and national competition (the national imperative for high volumes of output); transformation (redressing the history of inequality); efficiency (particularly the low completion rates); and quality (a worldwide concern associated with the demand for the increase in production). As part of the first phase of this programme, SciSTIP is currently completing a major study on doctoral enrolments and graduates in South Africa between 1996 and 2012, looking at growth and completion rates, as well as in-depth analyses of the 2006 and 2007 cohorts. A qualitative study investigated 25 productive departments in the social sciences and humanities in terms of their management of doctoral programmes. The third component was a national survey of supervisors and supervisory practices. The final component will be a synthesis of the different aspects and will highlight some of the key policy implications, at both national and institutional levels.
One of the outputs of the study is new insight into how differentiated the South African higher education sector is in terms of producing doctorates, as shown in the bar graph.