Reframing European doctoral training for the new ERA

ABSTRACT

In 2014 the institutionalization of European higher education and training, as well as research and innovation, policy entered a new phase: a number of financial instruments were simplified and merged. The Erasmus Mundus programme, wherein consortia of European and overseas universities built joint master's or doctoral degrees, was split into two parts: joint master's degrees now belong to education policy, and joint doctorates became a minor part of the Horizon 2020 programme for research and innovation. The programme illustrates how supranational institutions use ‘soft power' to harmonize policies. Using data from interim evaluations of two funding instruments, this article argues that the policy change marks the institutionalization of emerging concepts of European master and European doctorate as two distinct areas, not only different cycles of education. The master is constituted as individual investment, and the doctorate becomes a means to Lisbon (innovation and economy) more than Bologna (streamlining education systems) objectives.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctoral training
• education policy
• Erasmus Mundus
• European Union
• research and innovation

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the colleagues at the UACES's European Research Area Collaborative Research Network conference ‘Governance of the Europe of Knowledge’ (Cambridge, 10–11 April 2014), especially Dr Meng-Hsuan Chou, who provided valuable comments on the first draft of this paper, also Dr Vitalis Nakrošis for supervising the author's earlier research on European integration in education and research, and anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Daiva Repečkaitė is a junior researcher at Vytautas Magnus University, the Centre for Asian Studies. She focuses on inter-regional mobilities, as well as images of countries and cultures. The author was one of the researchers working on the evaluations of Erasmus Mundus II and FP7 Marie Curie Actions, both carried out by Public Policy and Management Institute and commissioned by European Commission Directorate General for Education and Culture. However, no unpublished evaluation data are used in this article.