Doctoral efficiency in the social and the natural sciences. In search for evidences

Abstract

In the middle of a scenario of a postgraduate-courses explosion across Argentina and the Latin American region within the ‘90s, a consciousness about high dropout rates and default in the fulfilment of postgraduate courses emerged. Like many other countries, Argentina lacks valid and reliable data
which allow the assessment of efficiency at this educational level, as well as research works aiming to
do it. In this article, we reflect about the results of a ‘handcrafted’ report that we have done on the basis
of individual files of 18 doctorate programmes of public and private universities placed in the centre and the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, both in ‘soft’ sciences (7) and ‘hard’ sciences (11 programmes)
within 2012-2014. Here we present ‘efficiency’ measures of each of the 18 programmes for the same dates, taking into account two main dimensions: graduation rate in the regulation time and graduation rate in ‘real’ and ‘average time graduation’ per cohort and per academic unit. We found graduation rate in the case of ‘hard’ sciences, from 45% to 100%, most of the programmes were above the 70%; and in the case of ‘soft’ sciences, from 9% to 57%, most of them below 44%. In the case of ‘hard sciences’, a cohort average time up to graduation resulted consistently less than a cohort average time up to graduation, in the case of ‘soft’ sciences, and closer to the regulation time established by the programmes. The results of our research give rise to a series of reflections about institutional, organizational and personal factors that may explain these problems in the performance among students, enable dropout monitoring at the doctorate level and design strategies to reduce it