Institutional Members of the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) are increasingly offering graduate programs. A decade ago, in 2013-2014, only 45 percent were classified as Carnegie Masters or Doctoral. In 2023-2024, 55 percent fall in these categories. To better understand how independent colleges build, support, and sustain graduate programs…

The purpose of this qualitative interpretive study was to identify aspects of leadership theory prevailing in the practice of educational leaders by analyzing how 22 participants experienced leadership. The study was framed using a conceptual framework grounded in a select body of theoretical and empirical leadership literature. Data were…

Withdrawal from doctoral education has been recognized as a problem with negative consequences for different actors, leading researchers worldwide to explore its underlying factors and processes. However, even if many PhD candidates who withdrew intend to re-enrol, there is a gap in the literature regarding the factors and processes related to…

Preparing students for the transition to graduate-level education with greater learning demands in a condensed time frame is a challenging process for health professions educators and incoming students. Prematriculation programs offer a solution for exposing students to the foundational sciences in preparation for the academic rigor of a doctoral…

Predominantly white institutions (PWIs) struggle to attract and retain underrepresented faculty. Despite aspirations for diversity, the reality remains that underrepresented faculty are not hired and retained in numbers sufficient to change the institution's demographics. The leadership of PWIs strives for solutions to ameliorate the trend in…

This study aims to provide a complex account of a PhD candidate's reflexive doctoral engagement process emergent from the changing doctoral environment vis-à-vis the neoliberal higher education context. Drawing on a critical realist theory of reflexivity, it analyzed narrative interview data collected with the participant over an 18-month period.…

In this paper, we present a conceptual model of the development of a relationship between first-generation Latino men while navigating the unchartered waters, or the unknown, of a doctoral program. Drawing from focus groups, we outline the various components (e.g., institutional role and support, resilience, cultural affinity) that contributed to…

A number of key drivers are responsible for the major shifts taking place in doctoral education globally, including massification, globalisation, digitalisation and the knowledge economy. While each of these drivers permeates the South African higher education context to some extent, we argue that the country's complex historical legacies provide…

Purpose: Higher education, as a field of study, is one of the few programmatic areas that offer two doctoral degrees: The Doctor of Education (EdD) and the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). In the United States, the two degrees are often conflated. Conversations, to this point, have done more to contribute to the theoretical debate than to operationally…

Black men historically in graduate education have endured issues of racial indignity, hostile classroom environments, microaggressions, and questioning of intellectual ability, which subsequently have a negative effect on doctoral enrollment. Not only do Black men in doctoral programs undergo acts of racism in their educational experiences at many…

In this article, we first analyze the situation of statistics education in Brazil, within an international context of interest for this discipline. Secondly, we aim to answer the following research question: How has doctoral research in statistics, probability, and combinatorics education evolved in Brazil? For this purpose, we analyzed the…

This study examines the procedures, criteria, and decision-making in doctoral admissions at China's leading research universities. A content analysis was performed on doctoral admissions texts (N = 312) from 264 faculties of C9 League universities, representing China's elite research-intensive universities. The results show that the admissions…

While research around attrition during doctoral programs exists, the lived experience of grief during a doctoral program has little footing in the current literature. This autoethnography examined the lived experience of one doctoral student, acting as both the researcher and the researched. The purpose of this study was to have a meaningful…

Doctoral employment outside universities has been increasing, as universities cannot employ all doctorate holders. Nevertheless, it has been argued that the shift from doctoral programs to the non-academic labour market has been limited. In this qualitative study, more than 800 verbal answers given by doctorate holders to a pair of open-ended…

Empirical social science research increasingly involves working collaboratively with organisations beyond the university. This paper contributes to the growing international literature on doctoral collaboration by exploring how UK doctoral students in the social sciences negotiate organisational collaborations. We draw on narrative interviews and…