Social Science Doctoral Training Policies and Institutional Responses

Abstract

The paper explores the history of recent doctoral training policies in UK social sciences, how universities have responded to these and some of the positive and negative unintended consequences of the policies, principally but not exclusively in the period 1992 to 2014, as the gradual move first to specification of disciplinespecific training requirements and department-specific accreditation, then to delegation of the selection of candidates for Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) doctoral studentships to universities rather than a national competition and finally to institution-wide or inter-institutional arrangements for doctoral education began.KeywordsUnintended ConsequenceDoctoral StudentSocial Science ResearchResearch TrainingPostgraduate EducationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.