Some 60 percent of PhD candidates revealed they have been assigned more than half of their professors' research projects.
"According to my personal observation, this happens all the time. Professors in China are underpaid compared with talents in other careers who may have the same educational background," said Zi Liang, 30, a second-year PhD student in Beijing's Renmin University of China.
The relationship between PhD students and their supervisors has become an employment of sorts, in other words, a "master-apprentice" relationship, since professors use their students as cheap labor to do research. Besides, there is no comprehensive appraisal system to assess the professors, said Zhou.
"Chinese universities should step up efforts to reform the tutorial system and introduce more stricter requirements for people to get a PhD diploma in a bid to improve the quality of education," Ge told China Daily.
However, Liu Xin, a 25-year-old PhD candidate at the University of Sussex in England, argued that a major reason China is producing low quality doctorates is that most of the candidates do not have a passion for academic research.
"The best college students of China have seldom ended up in academic positions. Most of them pursue careers in either banking or foreign companies, which pay much better.
"The quality of doctorates is based on the quality of students," Liu said.
(Source: China Daily)
