The Status Quo of Doctoral Education in Universities in Zimbabwe
Globally, the importance of highly qualified human resources (holders of doctoral degrees) in providing the requisite skills for knowledge economies is well acknowledged. Sadly, African universities are reportedly lagging behind in terms of satisfying the required quantity and quality of doctoral graduates (Harle, 2013). This study was aimed at providing empirical evidence on the status of doctoral education in Zimbabwe as well as identifying the reasons for the status quo. Documentary evidence and telephonic interviews were used to collect data from all the 15 (40%) registered universities in Zimbabwe. The interviews involved doctoral students enrolled in local universities as well as in foreign universities, aspiring doctoral candidates and senior academics based in local universities.The findings showed that six out of the 15 universities were offering programmes at doctoral level in 2014 giving a share of 0.2%. The combined doctoral degree enrolment was 150 translating to a share of 0.18% of the total student enrolments. A total of 28 people graduated with doctorates from Zimbabwean universities in 2014. Approximately 565 academics from Zimbabwean universities were pursuing doctoral degrees at universities in the region notably in South Africa and Zambia and yet only one university in Zimbabwe enrolled students from the region. The reasons for this state of affairs included the stringent regulatory environment regarding doctoral study in Zimbabwe, shortage of supervisors due to brain drain, unavailability of doctoral programmes at 60% of the local universities and inadequate funding and resources. The study the study recommends that ZIMCHE and universities should revisit their standards and regulations. In addition, government needs to adequately remunerate university staff and provide funding for research and doctoral studies.
Obstacles to success - doctoral student attrition in South Africa
The article explores doctoral attrition in South Africa, investigating and comparing the attributions of attrition of doctoral students and PhD programme leaders. The article is based on secondary data analysis of two large studies on doctoral education in South Africa. The main point of the article is that the different understandings of the students and the PhD programme leaders, as well as the gaps in the narratives of both groups, are an indication of a lack of in-depth understanding of the actual causes of doctoral attrition. Using attribution theory, the article suggests that this lack of understanding may contribute to further attrition and calls for further research on the topic.
Rubik's for cryptographers
Hard mathematical problems are at the core of security arguments in cryptography. In this paper, we study mathematical generalizations of the famous Rubik’s cube puzzle, namely the factorization, representation and balance problems in non-Abelian groups. These problems arise naturally when describing the security of Cayley hash functions, a class of cryptographic hash functions with very interesting properties. The factorization problem is also strongly related to a famous long-standing conjecture of Babai, at the intersection of group theory and graph theory. A constructive proof of Babai’s conjecture would make all Cayley hash functions insecure, but on the other hand it would have many positive applications in graph theory and computer science. In this paper, we classify existing attacks against Cayley hash functions and we review known results on Babai’s conjecture. Despite recent cryptanalytic progress on particular instances, we show that the factorization, representation and balance problems presumably remain good sources of cryptographic hard problems. Our study demonstrates that Cayley hash functions deserve further interest by the cryptography community.