Abstract
The implementation of Research Training Groups (RTG) by the German Research Foundation at the beginning of the 1990 was one of the major steps towards a reform of doctoral education in Germany. A main intention of the RTG was to increase the efficiency of doctoral training. RTG aimed at a lowering of time-to-degree and age-at-graduation, also at achieving a higher degree of transparency as regards the supervision and training of doctoral students. To achieve these goals RTGs were implemented as temporary research units with a focused (interdisciplinary) research and study program at universities.
Given this background the paper will compare processes, training conditions of the RTG along the following lines:
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As regards efficiency we will have a closer look at the time to the doctorate.
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Regards the conditions of doctoral training the RTG will be compared to other forms of doctoral training for those aspects that the RTG tried to change.
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Finally, the paper will investigate in the question to what extent different conditions of training and other determinants have contributed to achieve more efficiency in terms of shortening the time to the doctorate.
To answer these questions a comparative analysis will be done. The paper will be based on a survey among former doctoral students who pursued their doctorate in Germany during the 1990s. In this survey former members of RTG as well as former doctoral students who were graduating in a different, traditional setting had been integrated. These two groups will be compared. In total individual data from 1,424 doctorates from a wide range of different academic disciplines graduating from their doctoral studies between 1995 and 2000 will be analyzed.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
To date there has not been much research to what extent the organisational structure of supervision has an impact on the doctoral student’s performance. While implementing the RTG the GRF assumed that (interdisciplinary) teams of supervisors would help to overcome the traditional dependence relationship between doctoral student and his/her doctor father or mother. Pferdmenges, Pull and Backes-Gellner’s study on the composition and performance of the research training groups (2015, in this volume) made clear that in RTG group heterogeneity does not per se lead to a better performance of the group, only under certain conditions heterogeneity also leads to a higher research performance. Our assumption therefore should be understood as tentative.
- 3.
The study was funded by the DFG and led by Jürgen Enders.
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More details on the sample can be found in Enders and Kottmann (2009).
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Bornmann and Enders (2002: 55) distinguish between the time to the doctorate, which is the time difference between the end of the first study and the successful graduation from doctoral study and the time span of actually completing and successfully defending the PhD.
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The results in the table show the impact of the factors on the time to the doctorate. Positive values indicate that the factor is lengthening the time to the doctorate; negative values indicate the reverse effect. The final grade of the first study reflects the German school grading system; the scale is from 1 = very good to 4 = sufficient. The items for integration into collaborative research were measured on a Likert scale ranging from 1 = to a very low extent to 5 = to a very high extent. Both factors, final grade and integration into collaborative research, were integrated as continuous data into the GLM.
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Kottmann, A. (2015). Bringing Efficiency In?. In: Jansen, D., Pruisken, I. (eds) The Changing Governance of Higher Education and Research. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 43. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09677-3_3
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