How international doctoral education could do better

Over the past three decades, European higher education has developed an impressive architecture for doctoral education. Yet one of its earliest instruments has quietly fallen out of view.

The Doctor Europaeus, or European Doctorate label, was instituted in 1991 by the liaison committee of the European Union rectors’ conferences. It is therefore roughly 35 years old, and in my view it deserves both renewed attention and a thorough modernisation.

The label is a supplementary certificate added to a national doctorate.

It is awarded by the university itself, on its own authority and without approval from any supranational body, to candidates who fulfil four conditions: a research stay of at least three months in another European country, the assessment of the thesis by at least two reviewers based in two different European countries, the participation of at least one examiner from abroad in the defence committee, and the conduct of part of the defence in a European language other than that of the awarding country.

It is, in other words, a light and practical instrument that recognises the international dimension of a doctorate without creating a new degree.

The four principles behind the label are sensible, and one might assume that after 35 years they would have become standard practice. My experience suggests otherwise.

At the Global Impact Institute (GII), I evaluate how universities internationalise and how they internationalise doctoral education in particular. In project after project I find that these four principles are far from the norm.

For a great many doctoral candidates, and frequently for the majority, an international thesis review, a foreign examiner, a substantial research stay abroad and a multilingual defence remain the exception rather than the rule.

This is regardless of whether the label Doctor Europaeus is used at all. The concept was named a gold standard in 1991 and yet that standard is still not the reality for most doctoral candidates in Europe today.

The need to modernise

At the same time, doctoral education has evolved considerably. The Salzburg Principles, whose 20th anniversary the European University Association (EUA) marked in 2025, reshaped the way Europe structures the PhD.

Open science and research integrity, the management of research data along FAIR principles, transferable skills and the reform of research assessment have all become central to European doctoral policy.

Sixty-four European Universities alliances now connect more than 560 institutions, many of them delivering joint doctoral training, and the European Commission’s 2024 blueprint for a European Degree Label is already being piloted.

A label whose criteria were fixed in 1991 no longer reflects this reality. Therefore, I propose to modernise it and to give the modern version a slightly adapted name: Doctor Europaeus+.

The four original criteria would remain the minimum. To them, Doctor Europaeus+ would add a set of indicators aligned with current European doctoral policy:

• Doctoral training consistent with the principles of the EUA Council for Doctoral Education.

• Documented training in open science and research integrity.

• The development of transferable skills, evidence of genuine international collaboration.

• Participation in a European university alliance or comparable network where relevant, research data management following FAIR principles.

• And, optionally, a portable digital badge that records these components.

None of this is exotic. It is simply what a well-supported European doctorate already looks like at its best, made explicit and verifiable.

A simple process

It is worth distinguishing Doctor Europaeus+ from two instruments with which it is easily confused.

It is not a cotutelle, which is a binding bilateral agreement between two universities resulting in a single thesis and two diplomas, something that is valuable but negotiated on a case-by-case basis.

Nor is it the European Degree Label, an EU-level instrument that is still taking shape through pilot projects.

Doctor Europaeus+ is considerably lighter than both: a certificate that a single university can attach to its own national doctorate, using existing structures and without new legal architecture.

Implementation is correspondingly simple. A university adopts an internal regulation establishing the label. It incorporates the four criteria into its doctoral regulations as the minimum. It sets up a procedure to verify both those criteria and the modern indicators. And it issues the certificate once all requirements are met. Nothing needs to be ratified externally.

This brings me to a revealing observation. When I searched for the universities that currently award the Doctor Europaeus, my own research – repeated several times to be sure of it – uncovered only around 18 institutions, spread across no more than five countries, and heavily concentrated in Italy and France.

Among them are Ferrara, Udine, Trieste, Cagliari, Naples, Sapienza in Rome and Urbino in Italy; Paris-Saclay, Grenoble Alpes, Orléans and Aix-Marseille in France; Cologne in Germany; and Coventry in the United Kingdom.

Spain, one of the early adopters, formally replaced its “European Doctorate” mention with an “International” one in 2011.

This is what I was able to find; the true number may well be higher. And that is precisely the problem: nobody can say. There is no central, searchable register of the universities that award the Doctor Europaeus, let alone of the candidates who hold it.

For a prospective doctoral candidate this is a genuine loss. A student who wishes to pursue an international doctorate has no means of searching which European universities offer this recognised label and in which disciplines. A ‘European’ label that is adopted unevenly across a handful of countries, and that is not even counted by the sector that owns it, does not yet live up to its name.

Why we need a public register

A public, searchable register would change this at modest cost. The EUA is the obvious host: it brings together Europe’s doctoral schools, it defines the standards on which the label rests, and it already represents this community. A simple directory – indicating which universities award the label, under which criteria and in which disciplines – would make a 35-year-old idea genuinely usable by the students it was created to serve.

I am convinced that Europe does not need to invent a new mark of doctoral quality, as it already has one. What it needs is to modernise it into a Doctor Europaeus+, to hold its institutions to it, and, at last, to record where it can be found.

Uwe Brandenburg is managing director of the Global Impact Institute (GII), which supports universities in evaluating and improving the internationalisation of higher education, including doctoral education. He coined the concept of Internationalisation in Higher Education for Society (IHES).

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.