In December, the government presented the research bill that sets out the path for higher education policy in the years 2021-2024. As SFS has written about in a earlier blog post We lacked initiatives that take a comprehensive approach to education and research. Although there have been hopes for reforms in education as well, not least in the allocation of resources for education, the research bill had a one-sided focus on research.
In a few blog posts, we will reflect on a few more issues that have characterized the higher education debate in recent years: Dimensioning of doctoral education; the system of price tags for education; and gender equality and sexual harassment. We want to shed light on them based on the research bill, and also say something about what else needs to happen in these areas until the next parliamentary election in the fall of 2022. In this post, we begin with dimensioning of doctoral education.
The long-term trend has generally been that the number of doctoral students is decreasing, even though the rest of the university is growing. One contributing factor is that doctoral student places are financed through the same grants as other research and that the universities have not taken responsibility for how the money is distributed. Another reason is that the conditions for doctoral students have improved, which means higher costs for each doctoral student.
Figure: Postgraduate education started at the latest at the age of 30 for cohorts born 1956–1987, percentage of the total population and divided into women and men. Source: UKÄ statistical analysis “Half of the population begins a postgraduate education” 2019.
This is a worrying development, not least because the universities themselves are dependent on the training of doctoral students to secure their own supply of skills. We can already see problems here in certain subjects. When UKÄ in 2018–2020 has quality-reviewed the teacher training programmes, a recurring feature is that there is a shortage of teachers with a doctorate. This weakens the scientific basis of the education. One consequence is also that the existing teachers have a high workload within the educational mission and thus do not have enough time left for research. In this way, it negatively affects both research and education. In total, these increases correspond to just over 130 doctoral student places.
Within teacher and preschool teacher education and within health education, there are graduate schools to educate more graduate students. The research bill announces that the existing graduate schools will be strengthened. Fully expanded, this will result in an additional 50 million kronor for the graduate schools for teacher education and 65 million kronor for health education. There is also a smaller amount of 2 million kronor for a graduate school for folk high school teachers.
The other areas with the lowest proportion of doctoral students in relation to the number of undergraduate students are the humanities and social sciences. In the research bill, the government announces that the Swedish Research Council will be tasked with announcing funding for national graduate schools and thus securing and strengthening the supply of skills for teachers. This amounts to SEK 30 million per year, which corresponds to approximately 60 doctoral student places.
To put the investments in the research schools into perspective, they correspond to an estimated 170 doctoral student places in total. However, the funds for research schools can be used in other ways, for example to increase the throughput of doctoral students, which means that it is not certain that it will lead to quite such a large increase in the number of places. Regardless, the resources contribute to strengthening the doctoral education, which is welcome.
Another measure included in the research bill to increase access to doctoral-level teachers is to make it easier for foreign doctoral students to remain in Sweden after graduation. This was done a little over a year ago by changing the rules for residence permits. These changes are positive.
At the same time, there is a systemic flaw that the government does not seem to dare to address in the bill. The universities have difficulty taking responsibility for doctoral education on their own. It is a matter of both resources and priorities. Perhaps it is a matter of the universities feeling compelled to focus their basic funding on more experienced researchers in order to increase their chances of attracting external project funds. But such a problem needs to be solved by strengthening the proportion of basic funding in relation to external research funds. Another measure could be to set more comprehensive goals for how many doctoral students the universities need to graduate. However, this stops at specific initiatives.
While targeted interventions may solve the problem in the short term, they do not provide the universities with the right conditions to take responsibility for the situation. The number of doctoral student places needs to develop more proportionally in line with other research and the expansion of undergraduate education. The way forward may need to be to investigate how the dimensioning of research education should be controlled in the longer term.
In the next post, we will comment on how the work for increased gender equality and the preventive work against sexual harassment may develop in the coming years.
Simon Edström, Chairman of the Swedish Federation of Swedish Students (SFS)
Pil Saugmann, Chairman of SFS-DK