OPINION> Commentary
Real value of doctoral degree
(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-10-16 07:42

The decline of the doctoral education must be rectified from the source, and simply raising elimination rates will not work, says an article on the website of Zhejiang Online. The following is an excerpt:

He Qing, a professor with East China Normal University, said at a recent forum that fabrication of doctoral dissertation is closely related to the low elimination rate of unqualified doctoral candidates and loose gate-keeping of doctoral graduation. As He said, MIT of the US eliminates as much as 47 percent of doctoral candidates while nearly all of doctoral candidates in China can obtain doctoral degrees. This leads to the lack of attention by doctoral candidates to academic research. Therefore, Prof. He suggested, China should eliminate 10 to 20 percent of doctoral candidates.

Years ago, people lamented that there were too many undergraduates in their working units. But now people would say there are too many graduates with master's and even doctoral degrees.

In the past several years, with more and more doctorate graduates being hired by various working units, their salaries have increasingly dropped. They spare no pains in vying with undergraduates for jobs while their performance doesn't seem better than that of the undergraduates. People have a growing feeling that many doctorate graduates are fake, and not as good as their predecessors.

In fact, before we address the quality problem of doctorate candidates, we must first of all understand the following points.

First, is the doctoral dissertation indispensable? We hope more doctoral candidates can spare time doing practical researches rather than fabricating those useless papers.

Second, does China need so many doctorate graduates? According to authorities, China has surpassed the US in the number of doctorate graduates. In 2007, China had more than 50,000 such graduates.

Third, is it time for us to change our out-dated educational system in this respect? In the previous planned economy, the government subsidized the education of doctoral students. But now, the supply of such types of talents is obviously saturated.

If the above problems can't be solved, the depreciation of doctors' values will continue.

(China Daily 10/16/2008 page8)