PhDs: Boost research funding and supervision

Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha has shone a powerful spotlight on doctoral studies in Kenyan universities.

He has alleged that only one out 10 PhDs might be genuine. This is worrying if true.

It cannot be denied that there are problems in the procedures of acquiring higher university degrees. This is a global problem though. But what are the factors behind this trend?

The great demand for higher degrees in the job market has spawned what is now called the ‘diploma mills’.

Allen Ezell and John Bear’s suitably titled study, "Degree Mills: The Billion-dollar Industry", exposed how selling fake bachelors, master's, and PhD has become a multi-billion economy.

Other studies assert that over half of those who claim to have PhDs have fake or none existent certificates.

Kenya has recently attracted global attention over a flourishing trade in academic writing for foreign students. But there is also a thriving local market for such services and also for fake degrees.

EXPERTISE

In the last 30 years, university education has expanded exponentially, which has seen an increase of adult learners seeking higher degrees without the corresponding rise in capacity to train them in the universities.

There are about 7,000 PhD students in Kenyan universities. But there are even fewer lecturers qualified to teach them.

Ideally, only professors or experienced senior lecturers should teach and supervise doctoral students, but there are only about 1,200 professors in Kenya, so universities regularly engage fresh PhD lecturers to teach and supervise doctoral students.

There are about 4,000 PhD holders in Kenya, many of them not in active teaching, but in research institutions. Because of this, some advanced PhD students also teach master's or even PhD classes. That is part of the problem.

Doctoral studies are expensive. It costs anything between Sh400,000 to Sh1,500,000 to study for a PhD locally depending on the discipline.

PERSONAL TOUCH

A three-month research for a social science PhD study will be about Sh300,000 and much more for life sciences like medicine and pharmacy.

Scholarships are few. Only those working can afford it. This explains why evening, weekend and holiday classes are popular. Typical PhD students in Kenya are in their 40s.

Online classes have demolished the four classroom walls. The traditional student-teacher, face-to-face, 8am-5pm format has increasingly lost currency.

And without constant personal engagement with the lecturer, academic rigour — the hallmark of science — is bound to suffer.

Consequently, supervision has become the weakest point in PhD studies. Supervisors and students are time and money pressed.

Bounded by job, family and numerous other social-economic demands, little time is left for serious academic enquiry.

Then this could happen: After the proposal, some students disappear, only to emerge two years later with analysed results, wanting to graduate the following day and pile pressure on the lecturer.

SUPERVISION

Luckily, many universities require students to regularly present the progress of their work in seminars and workshops in the university.

But there are still loopholes: Supervisors cannot know for sure that the student really collected data in the field. Strictly speaking, supervisors should frequently visit the student in the field.

Local universities have no funds for such supervisors’ field visits. There is still a supervision component in the fees but this is not enough to cover field work.

Unless the student is part of a well-funded project, to pay for a supervisory visit, the lecturer can do little to physically monitor what the student is doing.

Despite these shortcomings, universities still require lecturers to have supervised a certain number of PhDs and masters as well as publish (under the maxim publish or perish!) for promotion.

Publishing comes at a cost. Many reputable journals (peer reviewed journals or class A) do not charge to publish. Those that do charge upwards of Sh30,000.

PUBLISHING

PhD students are urged to publish at least three papers before they graduate. Good journals take about two years to publish a paper.

Many supervisors rely on their students to extract papers from their works. This is Ok: Co-authorship and mentoring are encouraged. However, there is mostly little time to polish papers for publication in good journals.

This has spawned another lucrative academic industry known as ‘predatory journals’. These publish anything on pay. They are in their thousands: many of them in Nigeria and India.

Last year, a US investigative journalist published a fake paper about the sexual preferences between Democrats and Republicans, complete with bogus citations.

With all these issues, it is no wonder that only one out of 10 PhD students finish their studies in Kenya and the temptation to cut corners is great.

If Prof Magoha is going to reform this segment, he should certainly look at research funding and supervision.

Dr Mbataru teaches policy at Kenyatta University. [email protected]