"I want to do a PhD!"

One of the students for whom I have occasionally read an essay was standing there outside the library. He was saying this to several other students and they were all laughing.

It is that time of the year again here. The students will be faced with external exams, exams set not by their teachers but an external authority. They will be marked by other people. The future careers of these students will, for the greater part, depend on their results this time around.  Will they get an "ATAR" high enough to get into their chosen courses?

I have watched some of these students since they started their secondary school years and one or two even earlier than that. I don't envy them as I might once have envied them. The world has changed too much for that.

The little group saw me of course and one of them said, "J... reckons he wants to do a Project Half Done."  I have heard and seen that before. It's a joke but a joke with a serious side. I have told more than one of them how some doctoral studies never reach completion, indeed how some undergraduates never finish. 

This little group will probably finish their undergraduate degrees in things like computing, engineering and physics. They are about as motivated to succeed as any other student I know.  

Will they go on to do doctorates? I have no idea. It is possible one or two of them might do further study. They will probably need to do it in order to even get jobs of the sort they believe they want. Doctorates might be in the mix but, if they are, I wonder what they be about. It is unlikely I would understand the topics in sciences like physics. 

What I do understand is that there are doctorates being done which are of dubious value and likely of no interest to anyone else. How much value is there in "a participatory audiovisual exploration of haunting in Palestine"?  Apparently "ghosts are more than symbolic" and someone is being paid a student grant to do this. Someone else is doing a doctorate on the architecture of Chinese temples of a certain period (I have forgotten which period) and someone else is looking at "Animals as builders: Exploring animal buildings as sites of agency, rights, and politics". The first and last of these examples come from an article in the Spectator. The middle one comes from an article about research grants here. It is one of the less embarrassing research topics being funded.

I am not sure how these topics get funded. There must be people who are passionate about such things but where are they? I have colleagues who are struggling to even get permission from "ethics" committees to do what seems to be basic research into issues of communication between doctors and patients in hospitals. Another of my colleagues has just had a request for permission knocked back. It was to do some work on ways in which increased capacity to communicate will led to greater participation among migrant women from a particular cultural group. Perhaps I am wrong but I think these things have some value for all concerned. 

Getting a doctorate was once considered a real achievement. You worked very hard for it. There would be nobody around you who understood what you were doing. It was the nature of a doctorate. A person with a doctorate was respected for their academic achievement. The right to use the title "doctor" was considered to be something special. Now a range of people use the title in their daily professions but some have done no more than what amounts to an undergraduate degree in some form of alternative medicine. It is little wonder that using the title "doctor", unless you are actually a member of the mainstream medical profession, is considered showing off by many here.

And perhaps there are too many "projects half done" out there. We need to rethink the whole business...or perhaps we could do what the Italians do and call someone with an actual doctorate "doctor doctor"?