PhD students’ work conditions and study environment in university- and industry-based PhD programmes

Abstract

During the last 10 years, new models of funding and training PhD students have been established in Denmark in order to integrate industry into the entire PhD education. Several programmes have been conducted where it is possible to co-finance PhD scholarships or to become an employee as an industrial PhD in a company. An important question is what impact these new conditions will have on the PhD students’ training, work conditions and study environment. In this article, the new type of programmes will be presented together with data analysis of PhD students’ work conditions and study environment in various programmes mainly based on a research project from 2006. The results of this study show no significant difference between PhD students in a traditional university PhD programme and PhD students in an industrial programme concerning working environment. However, the study shows significant differences in the intercultural dimension, where foreign PhD students are significantly more satisfied with their study environment compared with Danish PhD students. In general the workload is very high and the environment is stressful for all PhD students.