Doktora Programı: Türk Üniversiteleri Doktora Programları İçin Bazı Öneriler

Doctorate programs describe the ultimate degree of science. Doctorate programs constitute the extent of passing on faculty- academic from deputy faculty in universities. On the other hand, practically, the ones who desire to come somewhere in bureaucracy are expected to have a PhD degree anymore. Doctorate programs are generally designed as two types on world-scale. The first one is ‚Doctorate in Philosophy (PhD)‛ that is based on earlier times, the other one is ‚Doctorate in Education (EdD)‛ which is younger compared to the first one (The first one was launched in Harvard University in 1993). According to Jablonski’s citation, studies (Osguthorpe & Wng, 1993; Deering, 1998; Kolbert et al., 1997; Nelson & Coorough, 1994) show that there is not a clear difference between these two types of doctorate programmes, nevertheless, while EdD is relatively predominant on professional development, PhD becomes more dominant on training of ‚scientist‛. Therefore, in this study it is conducted with the assumption that doctorate programs are generally designed in the same format and content. Without making distinction between fields, it could be asserted a typical doctorate program includes three sections; (1) subject field, (2) research field, (3) the field of interest and attitude towards the profession. In this study, a discussion on developments and implementations related to different dimensions of a typical doctorate programme has been stated, according to Britain and United States of America(USA)1 ‘s implementations. It could be mentioned that doctorate programmes of Turkish Universities have been institutionalized and achieved a certain quality on a large scale. However, putting forth the functions and implementations of particularly developed countries’ doctorate programmes and comparing (benchmarking) national doctorate programs with these ones will definitely contribute national doctorate programs’ progress in order to benefit from the good samples. Hence as a comparison (benchmarking) study, this is what exactly done in this study. The objective of this study is to put out the recent developments and practices of USA and British Universities’ doctorate programs, and to compare with Turkish doctorate programmes and eventually to contribute the growth of national doctorate programs.