Young Academy wants fewer PhDs per supervisor

The Young Academy has published a three-page pamphlet (plus a summary comic strip) about the supervision of PhD students. They propose a “limes promovendi”, which is Latin for a limit on PhD candidates.

Opportunities and money
In their view, the excessive number of PhD candidates under each supervisor is “both the consequence and the driver of an underlying problem”, i.e., the unequal distribution of opportunities and money in academia. 

Scientists often build their careers with money from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), using that money to appoint PhD students. Once someone has received a grant, they have a better chance of receiving the next grant, writes the Young Academy. According to the pamphlet, this perpetuates inequality, and the grant winners get to hire more and more PhD students. 

Consequences
As a result, PhD candidates are not properly supervised, while grant winners see their workload increase. The workload could be shared because assistant professors and associate professors can also be granted ius promovendi, that is, the right to act as a supervisor. But that does not happen often enough.

Therefore, De Jonge Akademie advocates “a reasonable limit on the number of PhD students that someone can supervise at any given time”. How many would that be? The academy refrains from specifying that. Instead, they want to start a conversation.

On 18 May, a meeting on this subject will be held at Trippenhuis in Amsterdam, the building of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

For some members, De Jonge Akademie, which is part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), is a springboard to a career in administration. The new Minister of Education, Rianne Letschert, was its chair.

PhD bonus
Recently, the Dutch PhD Network made a similar plea. "It is time to start a conversation about how many PhD students a university can handle," chair Martijn van der Meer told university magazine Folia.

PNN advocates a review of the “doctorate bonus”, i.e. the government funding awarded per doctoral degree. The system would increase the number of doctorates due to competition among universities.