Why they forgo PhDs: a qualitative research into the erosion of academic interest among Academic Master’s students in China

• In Event: The Academic Journey: Perspectives and Trends

Proposal

Globally, fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees, posing a severe challenge to doctoral education due to diminishing appeal to prospective students. In recent years, doctoral program enrollments in countries such as Australia, Japan, Brazil, and the United Kingdom have persistently declined, which policy specialists are calling a worrying trend (Kwon, 2025). As the preparatory cohort for doctoral candidates and academic professionals, Academic Master's students (referred to as "AMS") play a crucial role in renewing and iterating academic talent (Zhao & Wang, 2022). China, hosting the world's largest and fastest-growing graduate education system, mirrors this trend: AMS' intentions to pursue doctoral studies decline significantly with advancing grade levels, with first- and second-year students exhibiting intentions 3.930 and 2.178 times those of third-year students, respectively (Niu & Zhou, 2021). Per the Theory of Planned Behavior, behavioral intention—defined as "the individual's subjective probability of performing a specific behavior" (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1975)—serves as the most direct and powerful proximal predictor of behavior (Ajzen, 1991). Aggregated individual behaviors inevitably produce macro-level societal outcomes (Coleman, 1987). Consequently, waning intentions among AMS to pursue doctorates may culminate in collective withdrawal, precipitating a "dual decline" in doctoral candidates' quantity and quality at the macro level. Ensuring AMS furnish adequate reserves for academia poses a formidable global challenge to master's education.
Existing research largely ascribes the phenomenon to individuals' rational economic decisions based on market value, citing high educational opportunity costs, scant stipends, and scarce, competitive post-graduation academic positions as primary barriers to advanced studies (Kwon, 2025; Horta et al., 2023). Yet, reducing this multifaceted social issue to mere economic rationalism oversimplifies its core. This study posits that while market value assessments are influential, they mask profound psychological and social motivators tied to students' academic trajectories. Academic interest, a holistic psychological orientation encompassing passion, confidence, aspiration, and self-expression (Lee & Durksen, 2018), evinces sustained research zeal and anticipations for scholarly careers (Shen et al., 2019). Thus, the group-level attenuation of AMS' doctoral intentions fundamentally signifies academic interest's collective erosion—a dynamic involving shifts in identity, emotions, and meaning-making—that offers a critical vantage for grasping the doctoral recruitment crisis.
In Chinese academia, relevant research is scarce, with existing studies primarily examining the formation and erosion of academic interest. Shen et al. (2019) identified cultural capital, guidance from significant others, and perceived talents as pivotal in its formation. Wu et al. (2024) employed netnography to examine doctoral students' academic interest, finding its erosion shaped by real-life circumstances, past experiences, future anticipations, and exit pathways. Internationally, such discussions are embedded in doctoral attrition rate research, addressing "why doctoral students no longer aspire to become scholars" (Cidlinska et al., 2023), and have spawned doctoral student professional socialization theory (Weidman et al., 2003), whose emphases on academic completion and career choices resonate with academic interest's maintenance and transformation.However, extant scholarship primarily targets doctoral students, yielding a paucity of systematic qualitative inquiries into academic interest's evolution during master's studies among AMS—the preparatory cohort for doctoral programs. Unlike professional master's counterparts, academic interest ought to define this group's core identity (Zhao & Wang, 2022). Entrants often bear academic ideals, yet frequently forfeit them post-master's education. This study thus interrogates: (1) What are the characteristics of AMS' academic interest trajectory? (2) What are the underlying psychological mechanisms behind its evolution? (3) Which structural and institutional factors influence these changes? (4) How can effective intervention and support systems be constructed to sustain and stimulate their academic interest?
The transformation of interest fundamentally entails shifts in emotional attitudes, where quantitative approaches falter in detailing processes or unearthing deep issues, thus favoring qualitative methods (Creswell, 2013). This study employs doctoral pursuit intention as an observable proxy for academic interest transformation (Pyhalto et al., 2019), interviewing 27 third-year AMS from 17 Double First-Class universities across nine Chinese regions. Semi-structured interviews focused on intention trajectories, transformation rationales, decision logics, and enhancement needs, while eliciting personal narratives, views, and emotions from the master's phase to uncover ascribed meanings and structures (Hatch, 2002). Sessions spanned 100-180 minutes, yielding over 480,000 words of qualitative data. Analysis adhered to Saldaña's (2013) coding principles, emphasizing iterative, systematic, and reflexive processes.
This study elucidates the mechanisms underlying the shift in AMS’ intentions to pursue doctoral studies from positive to negative, revealing that the erosion of academic interest is a complex process involving cognitive reconstruction and meaning deconstruction within specific contexts. Findings indicate that this transformation sequentially traverses five dynamic stages: ideal construction, reality cognition, value weighing, identity deconstruction, and value reconstruction. It emerges as the outcome of interplay between “push” forces from negative academic experiences and “pull” forces from transformed perceptions of non-academic career paths. Throughout this process, AMS exhibit a quest for meaningfulness, valuation of autonomy, and struggles amid uncertainty.AMS’ reluctance to pursue doctoral studies essentially responds to deficiencies in the current graduate training system, including flaws in the supervisor-student regime, performativity culture, scarcity of support systems, and academic inequities. The primary reasons for pivoting to non-academic paths are alterations in preferences for specific occupational attributes and ideal lifestyles, alongside changes in self-perceived research capabilities. Although individuals play a dominant role in the interest transformation process, within the prevailing graduate training environment, this shift remains inseparable from indirect influences of external contexts and institutions. The transformation of academic interest embodies individuals’ agency in confronting diverse contextual stimuli while reflecting its constructed and exogenous character constrained by environmental factors.Addressing the doctoral candidate crisis fundamentally requires reshaping the micro-ecology of graduate training to foster an academic environment characterized by enhanced humanistic care, inclusivity, equity, and supportiveness, thereby sustaining and stimulating AMS’ academic interest. Theoretically, this study enriches discourse on academic interest and the doctoral candidate crisis, providing a profound and dynamic lens for understanding academic career choices. Practically, it offers critical entry points for optimizing the graduate training ecology and mitigating structural attrition of academic talent.

Authors

• Zhang Xinyi, Department of Education，East China Normal University

• Yawen Xie, Department of Education，East China Normal University