No 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.

The last decade brought a number of reforms to the higher education system in Russia: restructuring of the higher education system, creation of national research and federal universities, and the launch of the “5-100” excellence program. The results of these transformations system have stimulated a plethora of research in the field of higher education. However, the effects of these changes on doctoral education have been less often in researchers’ focus. In this paper, we have examined the changes and effects of the reform period on doctoral education based on the data from the Monitoring of the Universities’ Effectiveness. The analysis showed that during the last five years there has been a redistribution of the doctoral students towards the leading universities. Moreover, there are magnet universities in the federal districts which attract a significant part of the doctoral students. Regions with no leading universities face the most difficult situation: the dynamic of the studied indicators in these regions is either negative or significantly lags behind other regions.

Departmental academic support plays an important role in a doctoral journey. However, different types of support may be related to different outcomes. This paper aims to provide a categorisation of types of departmental academic support and analyse the relationship between these different categories of support and doctoral students' confidence that they will complete their dissertations.

The paper examines the rules and procedures of the doctoral students’ admission at Russian universities. The inefficiency of the selection process often becomes the subject of discussion in the studies devoted to the low performance of Russian doctoral education, but these studies lack structured information about the current rules and procedures. The present research closes this gap. Using the quantitative content analysis of the local admission rules of 150 random Russian universities, we estimated the prevalence of various admission practices. Two groups of universities are compared in the study: those with and those without special statuses (federal, national research, flagship, participants of the «5-100» program), since the presence of such a status implies that the university implements a set of measures aimed at developing doctoral programs and increasing the graduate students’ demand. The results of the study show that despite the absence of the regulatory restrictions on the choice of selection tools, Russian universities tend to choose fairly formal procedures: traditional exams and consideration of the individual achievements (papers, patents, diploma with honors). More flexible tools to assess the applicant’s motivation, his or her research experience, and plans for a dissertation are extremely rare and appear in universities with special statuses. The results of the research can be useful for the heads of the doctoral education departments at Russian universities, as well as for other staff involved in the process of the doctoral students’ admission.