With a near-record 113,000 postgraduate research students based in the UK, including 46,350 foreign PhD candidates, Britain’s doctoral education landscape would seem to be thriving. Buoyed by an extra £109 million from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to support PhD and mid-career researchers in 2023-24, and Horizon Europe membership secured, there might appear little cause for concern.
But there are signs that things are not as rosy in UK doctoral education as some imagine. In November, the Student Loans Company noted the “first potential yet small decline in the take-up of postgraduate doctoral student loans”, with sums borrowed in 2022-23 down by 12.3 per cent.
There are also indications that funded PhD studentships will not be as plentiful over the next few years. The biggest single funder of PhDs – the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which sponsored nearly half of the 4,900 UKRI-backed doctoral students who began their studies in 2022-23 – announced last year that the number of its Centres for Doctoral Training (CDT) would fall from 75 to “about 40” from 2024, leading to about 1,750 fewer funded places over the next five years. In addition, the Arts and Humanities Research Council is reducing its PhD studentships by nearly a third, from 425 to 300 per year by the end of the decade, and the Wellcome Trust is severely reducing its support for PhD students under its new strategy to focus on longer grants for early- and mid-career scientists.
Things could get a lot worse in the next few years, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies warning that tax cuts announced in chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement would lead to budget reductions of about 3.4 per cent a year in “unprotected departments”, of which one might be the new Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
