Bridging the expectation gap: a survey of Australian PhD candidates and supervisors in politics and international relations

ABSTRACT

What do PhD candidates and supervisors say about the quality of PhD training, the supervisory experience, and post-PhD career prospects? With little research into the quality of Australian politics and international relations PhD programmes, and the impacts of COVID-19 exacerbating concerns about academic job prospects, we need to evaluate the quality of PhD training. This paper reports on two mirrored surveys of PhD candidates (n = 109) and supervisors (n = 55) in Politics and International Relations from twenty-three Australian universities. The survey, conducted in 2022, drew on a 2013 survey of Australian PhD candidates in these disciplines, allowing for temporal comparisons. We find that methods training is perceived as largely non-existent or insufficient. We also find that there is a lack of job preparedness training built into the PhD programme, whether for academic or non-academic careers. Finally, we highlight ongoing gendered disparities that negatively impact female candidates and supervisors.

博士候选人及导师如何看待博士训练的质量、导师有何经历、博士后职业前景又如何？迄今对于澳大利亚政治学以及国关博士项目的质量缺少研究，新冠疫情又加剧了人们对学术职业前景的担忧，这就需要对博士训练的质量有所评估。本文介绍了两项对23所澳大利亚大学政治学和国关博士候选人（109人）及导师（55人）的镜像调查。调查实施于2022年，并采用了2013年对澳大利亚该领域博士生候选人的调查，因此可以做时间上的比较。我们发现，方法上的训练被认为是不存在或不充分的。另外博士项目中也缺少学院或非学院的职业准备训练。再就是性别差异也对女性候选人及导师有着负面的影响。

KEYWORDS:

• PhD training
• doctoral training
• PhD supervision
• doctoral supervision
• gender and academia

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Nicholas Falcinella for his input at the survey-design stage of the project, and Ian McAllister for his comments on a draft of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ethics approval from the Australian National University Human Research Ethics Committee, protocol 2021/810. See Appendix A for the full survey instrument.

2 i.e. Australian National University; Monash University; University of Adelaide; University of Melbourne; University of New South Wales – Sydney; University of Queensland; University of Sydney; University of Western Australia.

3 This is based on the ratio of students to tenured/tenurable staff at the University of Adelaide (Mayer 2012) and applying the ‘Studies of Society and Culture’ student/staff ratio to the number of students undertaking ‘political science and policy studies’ (Australian Government 2022) and a 2012 estimate (Kefford and Morgenbesser 2013).

4 e.g. https://politicsir.cass.anu.edu.au/events/anu-online-summer-school-political-analysis-2023, https://www.ipsa.org/ipsa-summer-schools and http://www.ecpr.edu/Events/EventTypeDetails.aspx?EventTypeID=5.

5 Alongside ‘The panel’s perception that the applicant would fit well into the department, in terms of their research interests’.

6 Respondents were given the choice to select up to five of the following: a high quality thesis; relatively high number of publications in academic journals; at least one publication in a top-ranked journal; relatively high number of publications in/contributions to non-peer reviewed or non-academic platforms (e.g. newspapers, blogs, podcasts); extensive teaching experience; excellent SELTs; strong letters of recommendation from supervisors; relatively high number of conference presentations; a high quality job talk; the panel’s perception that the candidate would fit well into the department, in terms of research interests; the panel’s perception that the candidate would fit well into the department, in terms of personality.

7 Fisher’s test p-value = 0.023. See Appendix B, Table 1.

8 χ²= 8.0, df = 1, p-value = 0.005. See Appendix B, Table 2.

9 χ² = 6.2; p-value = 0.045. See Appendix B, Table 3.

10 It might be argued that it is not the role of graduate programmes to prepare candidates for non-academic jobs, if they are open with candidates about the availability of academic jobs and candidates choose to persevere in the programme regardless. To respond, we would stress the need for programmes to indeed be explicit with potential PhD candidates about potential career outcomes. We would also suggest that programmes consider how they can ensure that candidates can learn how to communicate the ways in which the skills they develop in the programme (e.g. in research, administration, teaching, and communication) are translatable to non-academic careers.

11 Fisher’s test p-value = 0.000. See Appendix B, Table 4.

12 There is no statistically significant difference when we compare first- and later-years (Fisher’s test p = 0.869), or male and female candidates (Fisher’s test p-value = 0.527). See Appendix B, Tables 5 and 6.

13 The survey found some evidence that junior supervisors (i.e. lecturers and research fellows) were more likely than senior supervisors (i.e. senior lecturers and above) to say that they focused on ‘academic careers’, however, this was not statistically significant (Fisher’s test p-value = 0.709). See Appendix B, Table 7.

14 In this section we focus on those in the survey who identified themselves as female and male, as there were too few non-binary respondents to include in the analysis (n = 1).

15 χ²= 1.4, df = 1, p-value = 0.238. See Appendix B, Table 8.

16 χ²= 0.1, df = 1, p-value = 0.706. See Appendix B, Table 9.

17 An average of 4.2 students being supervised among female academics, compared to 3.6 among male academics, t = 1.0835; p = 0.285. See Appendix B, Table 10(a).

18 t value −1.533, p = 0.13. See Appendix B, Table 10(b).

19 χ²= 2.6; p-value = 0.279. See Appendix B, Table 11.

20 Fisher’s test p-value = 0.417. See Appendix B, Table 12.

21 Fisher’s test p-value = 0.6311. See Appendix B, Table 13.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Casey

Daniel Casey is a PhD candidate in the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University. He can be reached at [email protected].

Serrin Rutledge-Prior

Serrin Rutledge-Prior is a research fellow at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. She can be reached at [email protected].