Doctoral education reform in Finland : institutionalized and individualized doctoral studies within European framework

Abstract

In Europe, doctoral education systems have been systematically reformed. These reforms are aimed at improving the quality of research and the competitiveness of European countries. In Finland, the reform project of doctoral education started vigorously in the mid-1990s which has contributed significantly to the emergence of more structured doctoral training. The starting point for this article was a recent national follow-up evaluation of doctoral education in Finland. The results are based on qualitative analysis of a survey and interview data collected in the evaluation. The results showed that Finnish universities are launching the university-wide graduate school model. Each university is building a single or several graduate schools consisting of doctoral programmes compatible with the university’s research strategies and profiles. Today, there is an apparent need to increase doctoral students’ participation in the reform processes. It can be argued that there is discrepancy between the official statements of the doctoral students’ key position in promoting research excellence within the European context and the actual doctoral training practices at institutional level. Therefore, we need to explore doctoral students’ study conditions from their own perspective, in order to get a better picture of how the new university-wide graduate schools and doctoral programmes promote doctoral graduation in academic, pedagogical and cultural terms.