The number of doctoral students at Czech universities has been declining for a long time, mainly as a result of unfavorable demographic developments. While in 2015 almost 24,000 people were enrolled in doctoral programs, by 2024 their number had fallen to 18,300. However, this development is not uniform across all fields. The most significant decline was recorded in the humanities, social sciences, and especially technical fields, while the natural sciences and health sciences managed to maintain or slightly increase the number of doctoral students and graduates.
The development in the number of doctoral graduates mirrors the structure of students with a certain time lag. In 2024, there was a partial reversal of the negative trend in technical and agricultural fields, whose share of the total number of graduates stabilized after a previous decline. Nevertheless, the field structure of doctoral graduates remains unbalanced in the long term – humanities and social sciences continue to show a continuous decline and in 2024 accounted for only 21% of the total number of graduates.
ICT fields deserve special attention. Although their share of doctoral graduates has been growing slightly in recent years, it remains very low given the needs of the knowledge economy and technology-intensive industries. On the contrary, despite a slight decline in absolute numbers, natural sciences continue to hold a priority position in the disciplinary structure of doctoral studies. These trends suggest that the decline in the number of doctoral students is not the main problem, but rather their disciplinary distribution and the system’s ability to respond to the long-term needs of research, development, and innovation.
From the perspective of R&D&I policy-making, the results of the annual monitoring confirm the need for targeted interventions in the structure of doctoral studies, particularly in relation to technical and ICT fields, where there is both a decline in student numbers and a low graduation rate.
The study is available in the Zenodo repository.
The analysis was professionally prepared by
National Training Fund, o.p.s.
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