Continuing professional and career development: the doctoral experience of education alumni at a UK university

Abstract

This article reports on a study of alumni who completed their doctorates 2, 5 and 10 years ago at a Graduate School of Education in the University of London (n=162). It investigates the circumstances within which these research students started and completed their research and how they have subsequently used their studies, showing the particular place of the Ph.D. and the new Ed.D. in professional development in the field of education internationally. It questions current national proposals to ‘improve’ doctoral ‘training’ in the UK by enhancing students' employability and suggests that policy should be based on the actual employment and other life needs of postgraduate students in different disciplines. It argues that research students are paying for the privilege of satisfying their intellectual curiosity and making an original contribution to knowledge and are as concerned with personal growth as with vocational development.

Notes

Corresponding author. CLC, Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H OAL, UK. Email: [email protected]

Key documents include Office of Science and Technology (1993), Higher Education Funding Council for England (1996, 2000, 2003) Research Councils/AHRB (2002) and Metcalfe et al. (2002). Compare Kemp (2000) in Australia. In the USA the concern is more with doctoral overproduction/unemployment (see, for example, Nerad & Cerny, 1999).

Experience tells us that such instances do exist, often involving men and women from low to medium income countries who have to leave their children behind unless they are able to afford to bring a helper or a spouse with them.

Higher Education Institutions are required to provide information to HESA on the employment of all graduates 6 months after the award of any qualification. The task of data collection is usually assigned to the careers advisor via a telephone/postal enquiry of leavers. The response rate is reported as 60–80%, but we are dubious as to the reliability and validity of the data. Follow‐up studies require a degree of time and persistence which is not available to many of those responsible for this task and although they are spoken of as ‘first destinations’, graduates, and particularly doctoral graduates, may have been in them for some years.