Quality assessment of doctoral programs by surveying the satisfaction of doctoral students in Bulgaria

Abstract

One of the main goals of higher education institutions is to provide the best possible quality education to their students, specialists, and doctoral students. In order to successfully fulfill this goal, it is necessary to thoroughly research the needs, opinions, and recommendations of current users. The purpose of the present work is to analyze the questionnaires for researching the satisfaction of doctoral students in Bulgarian universities and to establish the main criteria by which the quality of training in doctoral programs is evaluated. The research covers 9 questionnaires for researching the satisfaction of doctoral students from 9 state universities in the country—3 medical universities, 1 university with a medical faculty, and 5 non-medical universities. The types of questions in the questionnaires, their specificity, the categories in which they fall, as well as the similarities and differences according to the profiles of the higher education institutions, were investigated. The main conclusions are: the questionnaires of the examined universities have common features, but also differ significantly in terms of content, number of questions, arrangement, layout and categories of questions and evaluation indicators, and most likely also data processing methodology; considering the survey methodology in the country’s universities, it is appropriate to change the method of collecting data and to enable electronic filling in to facilitate the survey and cover a larger number of doctoral students; unevenness is observed in the selection of indicators for the satisfaction of doctoral students, with organizational aspects predominating. There is a need for more attention regarding the interpersonal and personal aspects of satisfaction. As a result of the conducted study, it is recommended to introduce a standard for measuring the satisfaction of doctoral students in the universities of the country through a unified questionnaire and methodology for its application and data processing. This will allow comparability between universities and doctoral programs, improvement of doctoral training in every university, as well as formation of an adequate policy regarding doctoral programs at the national level.