Potential PhD Programme Models to raise Swansea University’s International profile in China
As a research led university, PhD student quality and quantity play a key role in the delivery of good research and publications, through internationalisation to cooperate with world-class universities, this could help strengthen Swansea’s international profile. The recently developed ‘Swansea-Wuhan’ joint supervision PhD programme presents a good model of this kind. However, at present, this model is only able to support a couple of PhD students for the pilot project due to sponsorship/funding constraints.
Based on information from China Scholarship Council, tens of top UK universities provide a large number of full scholarships for high quality Chinese PhD students every year. King’s College London alone provides one hundred full scholarships, and both Cambridge and Oxford Universities support more than twenty as well.
If we want to have a great impact to increase our PhD numbers significantly, we need to develop a self-sustainable model with long-term strategy.
In China, the Ministry of Education has a tight control on which universities can issue PhD degrees, this is with regards to how many students they can recruit and whom are qualified to supervise PhD-level i.e. on average, just one student is allocated per professor every year. Whilst in reality there are technically thousands of universities and research institutions, that could potentially have a huge demand for post graduates to study PhD degrees.
We could potentially develop different collaboration models with different partners, as follows:
1. Swansea-Wuhan model
Swansea has enough funding to cover the fees for two PhD students selected from Wuhan University. Students need to spend at least one year of the programme attending Swansea University through joint supervision. This will lead to the students obtaining a double degree if they pass their viva.
2. Joint-research lab and innovation centre model
We have set up joint labs and innovation centres with a few high ranking universities, such as Soochow University, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Guangxi University. We can extend our Swansea-Wuhan model to these partner universities whilst they provide funds for their students to attend Swansea University to pursue PhD. The students will undertake research projects with both parties’ interests, whilst also being co-supervised. The students would be expected to register at Swansea throughout their whole candidature. The students will make payment based on how long they spend with SU, normally up to one and half years before they can get a SU degree.
3. DBA model
The new DBA programme at SoM is of great interest in China. If running successfully, we can extend to other subjects, such as education and translation, which could potentially target young academics who need to secure a PhD to be promoted to a higher position. These sorts of students normally adopt part time study, and pay much less than STEM subjects.
4. Full Swansea PhD model
It is envisaged, that a part-scholarship scheme based on students’ academic performance, ought to attract some high quality self-funded students. This has the potential to not only increase student numbers, but to also make it self-sustainable for long-term development of the PhD programme.
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