The Societal Value of Doctoral Research

I was delighted to have been invited to speak at the annual Pride (Professionals in Doctoral Education) Network Conference in Helsinki last week. I was asked to speak about the societal impact of doctoral graduates. The challenge I set myself in the talk was to respond to this notorious anonymous blog post:

Is it naïve to think that doctoral graduates make society more productive and healthier? There is a straightforward economic response to this, namely to innumerate the benefit doctoral graduates bring to the exchequer:

In other words, each full-time doctoral graduate will, on average, contribute £121k more into the public purse through increased tax contributions than their first-degree counterparts over the course of their lifetime earnings. For the 2021–2022 postgraduate cohort (PGT and PGR, and all modes of study), the total lifetime contribution is £9.84bn (2024: p.27). That would be roughly £250m per year over 40 years: perhaps equivalent to 125 school budgets per year; or 5000 teacher annual salaries; or the annual fiscal equivalent of running one large NHS hospital or one mid-sized university every year.

This kind of economic data clearly indicates that doctoral graduates do make society more productive. This is not, however, the kind of argument I made in Helsinki.

My argument about the societal impact of doctoral graduates was different. I suggested that global communities are facing an unprecedented set of ​‘wicked’ challenges: from climate change, to migration, to poverty and inequality. The scale and complexity of these challenges means that social progress is no longer inevitable. In that context, we need new thinking and new approaches. My argument is that doctoral graduates make an impact in our societies by being the kind of disruptors and innovators we need in order to address the kinds of uncertainties and complexities inherent in the wicked problems we’re all facing.

I suggested to the conference that we need to take seriously the notion that doctoral graduates are, or should be, ​“creative, critical, autonomous, and responsible intellectual risk takers”. These are people who are trained to understand ​“the uncertainty of knowledge and the distinction between problems that can be resolved with certainty and those that have no single solution”. In other words, these are the kinds of people we will need if we are to ensure the continuation of social progress in the face of complex existential threats such as climate change.

There is, I admit, something idealistic in my argument. I certainly concede that it is an open question how successfully we prepare our doctoral graduates to live up to my claims. In Helsinki, I concluded by suggesting that if we are to have a chance of producing the kinds of doctoral graduates society needs we need to do two things. Firstly, we need to redouble our efforts to create positive environments for doctoral researchers. Amongst other things, we need to think again about: psychological safety; flexible funding; power dynamics in supervision; status; and normalising failure as part of research. 

Secondly, and just as importantly, we need to convince the public why doctorates serve the public good. At present, much of our efforts are in ​‘translating’ doctoral skills into language appropriate to industry and other sectors. We must put equal effort into explaining why doctoral skills are distinctive, perhaps even disruptive, and why those skills might just help to save the world.