Chronosynclastic Infundibulum

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.