Nivel de desarrollo de la competencia lingüística a Alcance

There are several different channels for the financing of students seeking Danish PhD degrees and no complete statistics exist. The lack of information is surprising, and so astonishingly scarce that it is not even possible to say exactly how many PhD degrees are bestowed each year. This is true for many funding agencies. The universities, which receive unspecified block grants that also cover PhD training, can not say how much their PhD training costs, not individually, let alone as a collective enterprise; only rough estimates exist.

The research councils, which fund individual projects as well as large programmes, have no exact information on PhD funding either, nor do they claim to have any responsibility for it. Internal allocation of funds in projects and programmes is the prerogative of the research performer, most often universities. The Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation or the research councils do not collect this type of information. The only funding agency which seems to be in full control of its PhD funding streams is the Industrial PhD secretariat under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, which organises training of industrial PhDs. It has perfect overview of its well-managed programme, which has also recently undergone a very positive evaluation (2005).16

Because of these factors, it must be emphasised that it is only possible to provide an estimate of the situation. The numbers shown here are taken from a handout provided by the Ministry for the evaluation panel members (October 2005) as well as from websites.

Furthermore, when discussing the financing of a PhD degree, it is important to distinguish between two different aspects of the funding. There is (1) the basic “cost” of a PhD student, which covers the salary and (2) overhead (uddannelsestakst) for the research institute to which the student is attached. The nominal overhead that should

16 _{Effect Study of the Danish Industrial PhD Programme. A Study conducted by Kvistgaard Consult A/S for}

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be “charged” by the research institutions is DKK 132.900 per year for an experimental PhD and DKK 88.500 for a non-experimental PhD (these figures may, however, vary in practice). For several experimentally oriented PhDs in the natural sciences, as well as for some in other disciplines requiring a lot of field work, the nominal sum is not enough to cover the actual expenses. It is important to consider this in the context of a future expansion of the number of PhDs (in particular for the expansion within the natural sciences) or there is a danger that PhD students will not receive adequate training due to lack of resources (equipment, chemicals etc.). The costs of consumables alone for an industrial PhD student at NOVO Nordisk is typically between DKK 50.000 and 200.000 per year, occasionally more.

The basic funding of PhD students can be divided into the following categories – we concentrate here on the individual students and their stipends and salaries, in the next chapter we will analyse the gross funding streams.

I. Faculty Grants (fakultetsstipendier)

This can be considered to be the “classical” funding scheme. Before the change in the university legislation in 1993, a number of PhD positions were allocated to each faculty every year. The universities seem to have largely kept the number of

studentships after the reform, which they had before (though it should be emphasised that they are not obliged to do so and could choose to cut down on the numbers and spend this money on other things, including better infrastructure and other resources for PhD training).

Typically these stipends are handed out to “the best and the brightest”, though in several places the competition is not carried out on the faculty level, but only on the institute level in the sense that each institute is allocated a fixed number of stipends every year. It is questionable (as we discussed in the previous chapter) whether this is the best way of ensuring that the stipends really reach the best people doing the most challenging, frontier-oriented research. An additional problem is that these stipends are being “eaten” by the necessity to match with core funding the external funding for co-financed stipends (samfinansierede stipendier) (see below).

The 2000 PhD evaluation indicated that the universities provided the main financing for about 50% of the students. Since the universities did not co-fund stipends back then, presumably all of these were faculty stipends.

II. PhDs financed through individual research grants

These PhD studies are financed through research grants for individual researchers. Typical sources include the research councils (Det strategiske forskningsråd, Det Frie

Forskningsråd), but also private funds and international sources such as the European

Union. The basic research fund (Grundforskningsfonden) provided about DKK 33 million per year for PhD stipends, including co-financed stipends (samfinansierede

stipendier). No data exist on how large a fraction of the sources provided by the

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specified parts of large grants to universities), although we do know that the number of individual stipends payed by the research councils is around 100 (2005).

III. Stipends in cooperation with industry/external research institutions