Abstract
Traditional doctoral training in Germany has been called the “apprenticeship model” in some comparative studies. The doctoral candidate – not student – worked almost exclusively on the dissertation while being supervised, as a rule, by a single professor. The more the universities got involved in highly organized modes of research, the higher the proportion of doctoral candidates grew – up to more than half in recent years – who are regularly employed at a university while working on their thesis. In many cases their employment is part-time and for a limited period. Germany experienced a growth in doctoral degree awards beyond the needs of “academic reproduction”; some decades back and nowadays report one of the highest doctoral award quotas in the world, whereby most doctoral degree holders eventually employed outside academia regard their qualification as well rewarded. A shift from the traditional model towards more structured doctoral education and training has been advocated since the early 1990s, but this has not become the dominant model. Statistical overviews can be misleading, because many university faculties, which have the dominant influence on respective regulations, accept the coexistence of different modes of doctoral training according to the doctoral candidate’s learning and working conditions: whether the candidate is a university employee primarily employed for research, a university assistant involved in teaching and research, a person employed somewhere else, a general fellowship holder or a person being awarded a fellowship for participation in a structured doctoral programme. Finally, it is worth noting that employment in academia after the award of a doctorate is a weak predictor for a continuous career in this sector. Selectivity persists, and the “habilitation” – a kind of advanced doctorate about 5 years later – or a corresponding level of academic achievement is viewed as the typical entry qualification to the professoriate (equivalent to associate professorship or higher in US terms).
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Notes
- 1.
See http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/training (last accessed 2016/07/29).
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Schneijderberg, C., Teichler, U. (2018). Doctoral Education, Training and Work in Germany. In: Shin, J., Kehm, B., Jones, G. (eds) Doctoral Education for the Knowledge Society. Knowledge Studies in Higher Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89713-4_2
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