HoD News - 5 February 2019

Dear colleagues,

The management team and Helena Skyt Nielsen, who is responsible for PhD and talent development, have recently initiated an important discussion within the department about what “good PhD supervision” means. I appreciate this discussion because focus on supervision quality is essential in order to improve some inconvenient patterns in PhD statistics measured over the past decade. The majority, 68%, of enrolled PhD students graduate with no delay, 8% graduate with late submission, and 10% graduate after resubmission. However, about 14% drop out or are aborted after end of enrolment; this corresponds to 2-3 students of each cohort.

Dropouts can never be avoided, but the costs of late dropout are simply too high – especially for the PhD student in terms of psychological well-being, loss of career and reputation costs. In monetary terms, the education of a PhD candidate is around 1.25 million DKK plus 30% in derived costs. Moreover, a late drop out implies a loss of PhD-completion bonus to the department; this amounts to approximately 500,000 DKK per student. Thus, the overall costs of the current late drop out are 4-6 million DKK per year.

I hope that the debate will increase our joint focus on supervision quality such that we can avoid the late drop outs from our PhD programme. Attention should be given as regards the number of students a supervisor can supervise at the same time, and we need to make sure that main and co-supervisors take a joint responsibility in supervision tasks and follow up.

Niels Haldrup