Outcomes of research degree training in higher education: Conceptualization, measurement, and prediction.

The training of research degree students (PhD and MPhil) is an integral part of university education and one of the most costly investments in many societies. There has been an increasing pressure from stakeholders on universities to assess the quality of their research degree graduates. We developed an outcome-based model to evaluate the quality of research degrees education in a relatively young public university in Hong Kong SAR. Three categories of outcomes were identified from the literature, namely, disciplinary knowledge and performance, employability, and generic graduate attributes. Several factors were selected to predict the outcome, comprising pre-admission factors (e.g., gender, English proficiency), programme factors (e.g., full- versus part-time study mode, PhD versus MPhil), quality of the learning environment during study (e.g., perceived quality of supervision, assessment), and students’ academic acculturation and social integration. Regression analyses found that whilst few contributing factor on their own made a significant prediction of the outcomes, they jointly explained a substantial amount of the variance, suggesting that education is a complex process made up of multiple contributing factors. The multi-faceted process is underscored further by the interaction between the learning environment and students’ academic acculturation, themselves complex factors on their own. Hence reliance on just a few indicators without a full understanding of their interactions for achieving quality or outcome would be unwise.