Barriers to Doctoral Degree Attainment: Problems of the Period after Postgraduate Studies

Increasing the effectiveness of postgraduate programs is now becoming one of the most important issues in ensuring the economic development of the state. As a rule, Russian postgraduate students, who are aimed at getting an academic degree, fail to defend their theses during their postgraduate studies, and they need additional time to complete their work. The purpose of this research article is to identify and analyze the key problems faced by Russian postgraduates seeking to submit their dissertations for defense. Our investigation comes to be original in two aspects. First, in contrast to other empirical studies of postgraduate school, the authors’ attention is focused on the barriers to attaining a degree, which arise not in the course of study, but after graduation. Second, the analysis is based on interviewing those graduates who have successfully overcome these barriers and defended their PhD theses. The empirical base of the study is online questionnaire surveys of Russian PhDs (Candidates of Science) who have recently completed their postgraduate studies, as well as administrative and managerial workers responsible for postgraduate students’ training and certification. The quantitative data obtained indicate that the presence or absence of a dissertation council in an organization wherein postgraduate students are trained is one of the key factors determining the pace and effectiveness of the postgraduates’ proceeding to an academic degree. In general, the results of the study make it possible to conclude that the difficulties at the final stage of preparing a dissertation are largely due to the imperfection of the mechanism for pairing the systems of state scientific certification and scientific and pedagogical personnel postgraduate training. Thus, we discuss possible organizational and managerial decisions of how to bring these systems closer and improve the performance of postgraduate studies. This paper might be of interest for higher education researchers, as well as for scientific, pedagogical and administrative workers involved in the management of personnel training and higher scientific qualifications certification.