This post is in response to Abi’s post on getting more students to pursue PhD in India.
While I agree with all of the points and suggestions in the original post, I think we are missing some important points. Looking at it as a problem in economics, the effort is to create a market for PhD programs in India. Like with many products, the PhD Program in India needs market makers, quality product, and a demand for the product. Lets looks at each aspect more closely:
Market Makers:
In order to get students in pursue PhD, you need to create a market for PhDs. Currently, there is very little market for PhDs in India. There are a select few openings in academic institutes of repute, and that’s about it when it comes to a real market in India. Granted that more and more industries are looking for PhDs, but are very picky about their recruitment (and rightly so). Additionally, once you get a PhD you become overqualified for most of the jobs in the market, and so you job prospects actually diminish with a PhD. This trend needs to be reversed. Only if PhD is made an attractive prospect will students pursue it.
Quality Product
Even if there is a market, if the product offered is not of quality, then you cant sell the product. The same is true for PhD programs. How many PhD programs in India are actually of international merit? Very very few! I know of people who have graduate with a PhD from Indian universities without a single publication at an international venue! If no result of this person’s work was deemed original and significant by his/her professional community, then how can the entire dissertation be deemed worthy of a PhD by the university? Furthermore, if that is the quality of the PhD, who job prospect can the person expect after graduating?
But in order to produce quality PhDs, you need to recruit quality PhDs to begin with. Its not easy, its expensive, but its got to be done. There are so many Indians with PhDs abroad who want to return to India. All you need to do is provide them with a venue for research, with good funding and competitive pay and you can get them. But a sincere effort needs to be made to recruit and retain such researchers.
There needs to be a quality control mechanism within the PhD program and the local professional community to ensure that PhD students do produce quality results. It could be anything from mandating publications in international venues, to holding conferences and symposiums on high-quality research being done nationally/locally.
There needs to be encouragement for research through independence, autonomy, authority, and responsibility.
Demand for the product
You have a market for PhD programs, you have quality programs in place. You still need a demand for these programs. Here’s where marketing, prospecting comes in. It is very important the students are educated about higher degrees, their requirements, benefits, and future prospects. There needs to be massive talent scouting with pin pointed, personal hard-sell efforts by each educational institution to recruit select PhD candidates in each program who can help establish and flourish the institutes’ reputation, profile, and research potential.
Recruitment alone is not sufficient, retention is equally important. Given that the program is already of high quality, the best way to retain good PhD students is best described in Abi’s original post.
Until we have these basics taken care of, no amount of effort on funding, industry participation, etc. is going to help us get more PhDs of decent quality.
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Thanks for this discussion. I am curious about your assertion that the market for PhDs is small. Can you cite some evidence for it? I am really interested in knowing how this perception has gained ground (on my blog, Biswajit also cited this lack of a market for PhDs as a problem).
Just as I would not use a high-impact PhD from a leading institution to assume that all Indian PhDs are absolutely wonderful, may I suggest that you show similar care when you make observations that go the other way? These are clearly extremes, and policy choices cannot rely on such outliers.
@Abi:
To the first query about the assertion that the market for PhDs is small, I guess I need to clarify what I mean by it. Firstly, when I talk about the market for PhDs I am talking about the jobs/positions that require PhDs (and not positions for which a PhD is eligible, but a bachelors or masters graduate would do). Secondly, when I said that the market was small, I was speaking in relative terms. Relative to the market for bachelors and masters, the markets for PhDs is very small. More so in India because there is far more emphasis on the ‘Development’ part of the ‘R&D’ than ‘Research’. Now PhDs are the experts in research, and proficient in development, but masters graduates are experts in development. This is indicative of why many private companies ‘farm out’ their research to universities but keep the development work in-house. Sure you can hire a PhD to do development work (many do), but a PhDs time and worth is best served in a research position. However, for unit work of research, it takes several unit works of development (and testing) to create a product. In India, at this moment, there is a dire need for vigorous development and healthy research. It is from this observation that I conjecture that the market for PhDs is small.
As for the quality of PhDs in India, there indeed are very few institutions that have PhD programs of reputable merit. The reflection of this can be seen in many places: (1) consider the demographic of the affiliation of authors in various international journals in any field; very few of those are from India. (2) Consider the number of consulting projects from the industry and government that do come to institutions in India, they are few and far in between (lets leave out the handful of IITs, IISc, IMSc, ISI, CMI etc.). Look at a typical professors CV in India, how many such projects do you see? This is not a criticism against the faculty or the institution. This is merely an observation. In absence of such projects and investment, one cannot expect a high quality PhD program from institutions.
With regards to policy choices, what I stated in my post are merely symptoms, and reliefs from them. This problem needs a more thorough study, and our blog posts are merely crutches for such a study. It would be ludicrous to make policy choices based on these symptoms. Policy choices must address the root cause, and immediate action should address the symptoms to level the playing field.