The Effects of Institutional Transformations on the Russian Doctoral Education Performance

Abstract

Currently, enhancement of doctoral education performance is becoming one of the central tasks for state policy in the field of science and education. In 2013–2015 Russian doctoral education experienced radical transformations aimed to increase the performance of doctoral programs and enhance the quality of dissertations. First, doctoral education moved towards the structured (educational) model. Second, norms and rules of the work of dissertation boards changed significantly. The purpose of this study is to explore how these reforms affected the performance of doctoral education. The empirical base for the study comprises the data on dissertations defense of graduates of 2018 at 12 Russian universities (N=1022), which were collected by the authors using the web scraping technique. The main findings obtained from the analysis of these data are threefold. First, time-to-degree has increased with most of the dissertations now being defended only after the completion of the programs. Second, in social sciences, this delay of defense has intensified abnormally (80% of dissertation in this field are defended after the program completion). Third, the actual performance, i.e., one that takes into account dissertations defended after the program completion, has decreased significantly in social sciences and humanities. These results show that the traditional practice to evaluate performance based on the proportion of graduates who defend their dissertations during the normative period of time does not reflect the reality. To made adequate managerial decisions regarding doctoral education, it is necessary to arrange the monitoring of dynamics of dissertations that are defended after the program completion both on institution and state levels.