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There is no question that international student mobility has transformed the international higher education landscape in recent decades. It has brought diverse benefits to students, institutions, communities, and countries. At the student level, these include enhanced future employability, personal development, language acquisition, and greater intercultural sensitivity—all seen as advantages in today’s globalized world. For the sending countries, the opportunity for the best and the brightest to study at the world’s great universities holds the promise that they will return with greater expertise and knowledge of diverse languages, cultures, and business methods, thus increasing their countries’ competitive edge in the interconnected world economy. For the host countries and universities, international students have become a fiercely contested source of brain gain as well as income. Such expectations have also been fueled by the explosive growth of foreign students at the tertiary level. According to OECD and UNESCO data, the number of foreign tertiary students enrolled outside their country of citizenship more than quadrupled over the past three decades, increasing from 0.8 million in 1975 to 4.1 million in 2010 (OECD 2012, 362).

European countries was strongly criticised (Kivinen, Ahola & Kaipainen, 1999, Sadlak 2004). Critics claimed that doctoral education would lack efficiency, as it would not produce a sufficient number of PhD holders who would be well prepared for the labour market. The lack of transparency in admission, selection and quality assessment was also criticised (Kehm, 2007, p. 315). Enders & de Weert (2004, p. 129ff) point to several issues that challenge the forms and conditions of doctoral education. The changing job markets for PhD holders, the changes in knowledge production, the internationalisation of higher education and the ‘blurring boundaries’ between different forms and areas of research generated stronger interest in, but also critique of doctoral education. Until the late 1990s, critique and several reforms across Europe were mostly at the national level. We find a dramatic change at the beginning of the new millennium. Following the 2003 Berlin Communique by the Bologna Follow-Up Group and the Salzburg Principles on doctoral education by the European University Association (EUA), attempts to reform doctoral education clearly moved from the national to the European level. The 2003 Berlin Communique can be seen as a starting point for this shift in the discussion. It stated that doctoral studies should be regarded as a third cycle in the Bologna Process.1 The Salzburg principles on doctoral education in 2005 formulated general guidelines for doctoral education which included the general nature of doctoral education, the institutional responsibilities for doctoral education, duration of doctoral studies, the status of doctoral students as early researchers or aspects of supervision and funding (EUA, 2007, p. 21ff).