The Future of Education

With “Berlin Communiqué”, the Bologna Process began to focus on doctoral education as the third level higher education. Since then, many improvements and concretizations have been made at the European level. The traditional PhD studies - Aspirantura in Armenia (and in other Soviet republics) was a model of “apprenticeship”: the responsibility for the PhD student is exclusively a matter of the supervising professor (or “scientific supervisor”) due to the close relation between doctoral candidate and professor. Then, after Armenia's independence, structured postgraduate programs gradually began to increase. This process proceeded at almost the same speed in other European countries that joined the Bologna Process (Armenia joined the Bologna Process in 2005).

After implementing the Bologna Process for the first and second cycle in most European countries, the third cycle is the logical next step. Yet, one should not expect regulations for the third cycle as detailed as for the reform of the Bachelors and Masters programmes. The “London Coummuniqué”  states that “we recognize the value of developing and maintaining a wide variety of doctoral programmes”. On the other hand, “Ministers consider it necessary to go beyond the present focus on two main cycles of higher education to include the doctoral level as the third cycle in the Bologna Process”.

How can the research institutes and the National Academy of Sciences handle this situation? An easy top-down approach would be to wait for new national regulations and implement them gradually when they are established by the Government. Our bottom-up approach, instead, is to ask: what is the better model for the doctoral candidates (aspirants) and the scientific organisation? At the National Academy of Armenia we currently run both models, a traditional Soviet doctoral education (with ad hoc funding from research projects) and structured educational doctoral programme. The goal of this research is to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of both models and to come to a preliminary conclusion from the perspective of a modern requirements of the Armenian economy whether to

• go back to the traditional Soviet “apprenticeship model”,
• switch entirely to a structured educational doctoral programme,
• run both modes in parallel depending on the funding opportunities.

Keywords: Bologna process, Doctoral education, structured doctoral programme, PhD, third level, Aspirantura, Armenia