The moment one acquires a PhD degree, that signifies the end of pursing higher degrees in life. Reaching this stage has several implications for individuals and society in general. For the individuals, it is a signal that they have in-depth knowledge of the areas or fields they researched for a number of years. Society gains when they use their knowledge for solution creation towards solving problems and challenges in all aspects of humanity.
According to various sources, PhD degrees are being pursued most in developed countries, such as the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and others. This does not mean that developing countries are not part of the trend of having people with the degree. For example, the National Bureau of Statistics reported in 2017 that Nigeria has 70, 739 PhD holders. During the second quarter of 2020, the agency reported 76,526 PhD holders. With the recent data (76,526), our analyst notes that it is possible that some of the 17,552 PhD students that were at various universities in 2019 [see Exhibit 1] must have graduated in 2020 and 2021. Expectedly, some of these students will graduate in 2022 and subsequent years.
The rate at which the country is churning out these graduates could be attributed to the increase in the number of academics with PhD degrees and their capacity to supervise the students. This position is better appreciated in 2019 because some years later, the National Universities Commission lamented the poor PhD graduates from the universities. According to the Commission, Nigeria needs to produce good PhD holders because “doctoral research is expected to play critical roles in terms of innovation, creating new relevant knowledge by generating knowledge that is marketable for goods and services converted to goods and service.”
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Exhibit 1: Number of PhD students at universities in Nigeria as of 2019 by discipline
This has been the narrative from the agency and others saddled with the responsibility of ensuring quality higher education in Nigeria over the years. Non-governmental organisations and individuals have also expressed their mixed feelings during different fora. Students are not left out in blaming the educational system, which makes it difficult for them and their supervisors to be productive towards the quick and thorough completion of the programme.
From another perspective, based on our analyst’s experience, students have largely been blamed for delays in completing their programmes. Observational analysis shows the majority of PhD students do not have a better understanding of what they want to do during the first and second years of their programme. From selecting a topic or area of specialization to writing a researchable proposal, many students have spent more than 2 years. This challenge is most common among students who are not university lecturers.
Regardless of the blame game, Nigeria requires high-quality PhD holders, not low-quality ones. The length, breadth, and depth of a thesis are prioritized by supervisors, students, and universities in order to produce quality PhD holders. According to our research, most Nigerian colleges have made it a practice in the previous five years to require a thesis to pass a thesis depth test. This indicates that a student must meet the depth of thesis standards after passing the length and breadth assessments in order to receive a PhD. In most situations, the length and breadth tests will be completed collaboratively by the students, their supervisor(s), and other instructors.
The Length
Whether you are pursuing your PhD at a Nigerian or an American university, the length of your thesis will be evaluated based on the number of pages and words written. The required number of pages and words varies from country to country. According to our research, the average page length is between 200 and 300 pages. The average number of words is 80,000. The maximum word count at most UK universities is 80,000. If you want to run your programme in the United States of America, you need to plan for 100,000 words [being expected word count in some schools]. If you need to exceed the maximum word count, you and your supervisor(s) are expected to write the Postgraduate School and justify the reason for the increase, according to our checks.
The Breadth
However, several pages and thousand words are not sufficient to make you a complete PhD holder. Afterall, John Nash produced the shortest PhD thesis in history. His thesis on non-cooperative games has 28 pages with only two references. It is also important to learn a lot about a range of concepts in relation to your chosen area of specialization. This is the breath, which can be achieved through the adoption of mixed methods and theories that are quite different from your field but relevant to the chosen topic.
Doing this has several theoretical and practical implications. For instance, the use of mixed methods will help you collect data from different sources and understand how things work or not in other settings. Using theories from other fields will assist you in getting insights that could be used for solution creation and delivery when the need arises for the people, animals, and objects that were originally considered while formulating the theories.
The Depth
Naturally, depth begins with the first chapter of your thesis. In your background or motivation section, you are expected to walk the readers through general to specific details of what has happened in the area you are working on. Your second chapter, which in most cases is the literature review, shows the extent to which you could be called an expert. This is hinged on the fact that it is the chapter that establishes your understanding of the logic within PhD thesis writing. Failure to present various concepts critically towards forming constructs for your work means your thesis lacks the required depth. Achieving a good depth of thesis does not depend on these alone. Your chapters four and five [for some schools, this is the last chapter] give you the opportunity to acquire more points towards a better depth of thesis. In these chapters, your breath remains the key tool for gaining points.
You need to showcase your understanding of higher-order logic in chapter four by selecting parts of the collected data and presenting them appropriately using an integrative approach. In order to avoid failing the depth of your thesis test several times, you need to pay attention to data analysis, especially the choice of methods of analysis for quantitative data. The era of using simple statistics has absolutely gone for good. The world has shifted to the use of bivariate and multivariate analyses. Not only that, a PhD thesis without concrete contributions to knowledge from the perspective of creating a model quantitatively or narratively [through storytelling] is not deep enough.