The graduate school curriculum centers on acquisition and application of highly specialized subject matter learning coupled with at least one other type of expertise. In professional master’s and professional doctoral degree programs, students also develop professional competencies. Master’s degrees earn their name as certification of mastery over the core conceptual knowledge and procedural skills expected in a field or profession. Mastery is but a prerequisite, however, to the expectations in doctoral programs that those who hold the degree will both uphold and advance their disciplines through novel scholarship and/or professional practice.

Today, in PhD and equivalent doctoral programs (e.g., doctorate by dissertation in Japan; Doctor rerum naturalim in Germany), students are expected to develop discipline or field-specific research competencies. It is believed that a core component ...