In the late autumn of 2025, when Meng He (a pseudonym) received a notification in the faculty housing of a Shanghai university stating that her doctoral dissertation had “passed the Ministry of Education’s national spot check,” she finally let out a long sigh of relief. This delayed verdict—arriving half a year late—did not merely determine whether she could retain her doctoral degree and the hard-won faculty position she had secured; it also directly affected her former supervisor’s doctoral enrollment quota for the coming year.
Meng recalled that agonizing period vividly. After graduation, she had already been hired as a lecturer at a university, participated in multiple research projects, and even begun supervising undergraduate students. Yet the spot-check notification hung over her like the Sword of Damocles: if her dissertation were deemed unqualified, all of her efforts could have vanished overnight.
Across the Pacific, in Boston, Sarah, a doctoral candidate in biomedical sciences at Harvard University, was enduring a different kind of ordeal. During her third progress review, her dissertation committee required her to postpone submission by six months due to a minor flaw in her experimental model. Sarah told me that while this forced her to re-examine her entire research design, it also made her acutely aware of the ruthless competition of academia—failure to meet the standard could permanently bar her from entering the lab she aspired to join.
These two sharply contrasting scenes reveal a core question confronting higher education systems worldwide: How do we prove that a PhD is “qualified”? In China, the answer is increasingly tilted toward administrative authority, relying on a rigorous system of state-led audits to safeguard minimum quality standards. In the United States, by contrast, the answer is embedded within the internal reputation mechanisms of the academic community, relying on an “invisible hand” of peer evaluation and market selection.
According to data from China’s Ministry of Education, approximately 87,000 doctoral degrees were awarded in 2023, making China the world’s largest producer of PhDs. Data from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) show that the United States awarded around 58,000 research doctorates in the same year, but with an attrition rate as high as 40–50%. This contrast reflects not only institutional differences, but also divergent trade-offs between scale expansion and quality assurance.
Dissertation Spot Checks: China’s “Last Line of Defense” for Degree Credibility
Within the administrative framework of China’s Ministry of Education, the doctoral dissertation spot-check system is regarded as the “last line of defense” for maintaining the integrity of national academic credentials. As China has become the world’s largest grantor of doctoral degrees, preventing the dilution of academic value amid rapid expansion has become a top priority for policymakers.
Between 2000 and 2023, China’s annual doctoral enrollment surged from 14,000 to approximately 87,000 students, while the number of doctoral degree–granting units expanded from about 500 to over 3,000. This explosive growth has underpinned initiatives such as the “Double First-Class” strategy and the nation’s innovation-driven development agenda, but it has also raised serious concerns about quality.
In response, the Ministry of Education formally introduced the spot-check mechanism in 2014. Under the Measures for the Spot Inspection of Doctoral and Master’s Theses (Degree [2014] No. 5), approximately 10% of dissertations from the previous academic year are randomly selected for evaluation each year. The goal is to ensure the credibility of the degree system through random audits.
However, China’s spot-check system evaluates more than just individual dissertations; it functions more like a credit audit of universities and their supervisors. Once a dissertation is deemed “problematic,” the consequences cascade sharply: the student’s degree may be revoked; the supervisor may be publicly criticized and barred from enrolling new doctoral students; and, in extreme cases, the entire doctoral program may face the revocation of its authorization.
This rigid “one-vote veto” design transmits pressure down the administrative hierarchy to every department and research group. An education official, speaking anonymously, explained: “In a highly centralized system, administrative intervention is a necessary anchor. Otherwise, quality control easily becomes performative.” Statistics show that the failure rate in spot checks declined from about 5% in 2015 to around 2.5% in 2023. Behind these numbers lies a process of high-pressure self-reinforcement: universities often conduct extensive internal pre-reviews and multiple rounds of simulated spot checks to mitigate risk.
This is not anecdotal but a routine reality at nearly every university with doctoral programs. One notable case occurred in 2022, when multiple doctoral dissertations in the field of education at East China Normal University were rated “C” in spot checks, leading to mandatory rectification and a 30% reduction in enrollment quotas. Internal investigations revealed no data fabrication; instead, the issue was “insufficient innovation”—experts deemed the topics overly conservative and lacking frontier contributions.
Another case involved Fudan University in Shanghai, where a humanities doctoral supervisor lost three years of enrollment eligibility due to a student’s failed spot check. In an anonymous interview, the professor lamented: “Shouldn’t writing a dissertation be the student’s responsibility? In the end, it all became my responsibility. Sometimes I can’t even tell whether the student is pursuing a PhD—or I am.” Such collective accountability places enormous pressure on supervisors and significantly dampens their enthusiasm for mentoring doctoral students.
To counter entrenched networks of personal connections, Chinese universities have widely adopted complex systems of “double-blind review” and mandatory plagiarism checks. Before submission for spot checks, dissertations must undergo multiple rounds of blind review, both internal and external. Reviewers do not know the author’s identity, and authors do not know the reviewers’.
While this system has largely curtailed overt rent-seeking, it has produced unintended side effects. Because reviewers often lack deep familiarity with highly specialized topics, evaluation criteria increasingly favor easily quantifiable indicators such as formatting, length, citation density, and stylistic compliance. A senior professor at a top-tier university admitted: “To minimize the risk of blind review and spot-check failure, many students prefer safe and mediocre topics rather than genuinely disruptive but controversial frontier research.”
For example, a computer science supervisor at Tsinghua University disclosed that his lab holds weekly progress audits emphasizing metrics such as citation rates above 20% and experimental reproducibility exceeding 95%. While these measures strengthen minimum standards, they also push students to devote more time to polishing form rather than deepening substance.
The most distinctive feature of the Chinese model is its post hoc nature. A PhD holder may already be employed at a university or even promoted to associate professor when, years later, they suddenly receive notice that their doctoral degree is being revoked due to a failed spot check of their dissertation. Although this retroactive accountability mechanism has strong deterrent power, it also generates massive resource waste and career risk. Universities are forced to invest heavily in administrative self-inspection during the “production process,” turning quality assurance into a prolonged game of cat and mouse.
A 2023 World Bank report warned that China’s doctoral unemployment rate stands at approximately 8%, higher than the U.S. rate of 5%, partly due to “insufficient degree value” and employment pressures. In interviews, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences noted: “Blind review was originally meant to fight corruption, but it has degenerated into technocratic fetishism. Real reform must balance administration and autonomy—otherwise innovation will be further stifled.” Overall, while this model is effective in preventing systemic risk, its rigidity has raised serious concerns about academic freedom.
Dissertation Committees: America’s Reputation-Based Academic Community
In contrast to China’s intensive administrative spot checks, U.S. universities exhibit an almost “detached” level of administrative involvement in dissertation quality control. The U.S. Department of Education rarely intervenes in dissertation content. Yet this administrative vacuum does not imply the absence of standards; instead, it is underpinned by an invisible system of reputational accountability.
NSF data from 2024 show that the United States awards approximately 58,000 research doctorates annually. The average program length is six to seven years, with an overall ten-year completion rate of about 57%, implying an attrition rate of nearly 50%. This high attrition is not the result of government intervention, but of natural selection within the academic community.
In the U.S., the authority to determine whether a PhD candidate graduates lies not with an administrative agency, but with a dissertation committee typically composed of three to five professors. This is not merely a mentoring relationship, but a miniature community of shared interests. Committee members’ names are permanently printed on the dissertation’s front matter and archived in global databases such as ProQuest.
The core logic of this system is reputational collateral. If a professor consistently approves mediocre or fraudulent dissertations, their standing among peers will suffer severe damage. In academia, reputational loss can mean exclusion from journal review boards, failure to secure research funding, and diminished prospects in future job mobility. This form of professional self-discipline, grounded in “academic honor,” often inspires more fear than any administrative sanction.
Unlike China’s post-graduation spot checks, quality control in the U.S. is fully front-loaded into the training process. If a supervisor believes the dissertation does not meet the standard, the defense is simply postponed—sometimes repeatedly. While this can drive students to despair, it also forces them to pursue academic rigor to its limits. If, despite revisions, a student’s research still fails to reach doctoral standards, committees typically require withdrawal or conversion to a master’s degree before any defense takes place. For U.S. universities, the inability to consistently produce successful PhDs signals a lack of competitiveness, eventually leading to market-driven elimination of the program itself.
American doctoral dissertations are highly public. Anyone, anywhere in the world, can download and scrutinize original data decades later. With the rise of platforms such as PubPeer, numerous established scholars have been forced to resign due to flaws discovered in their doctoral-era work. This form of “global, real-time, lifelong” scrutiny creates a self-cleansing environment without government intervention. In the eyes of U.S. professors, constant peer surveillance is far more intimidating than China’s 10% random spot checks.
For instance, in 2023, Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino was accused of data fabrication in behavioral science research. Following an internal investigation, she lost tenure in 2025, sending shockwaves through academia. Another case involved Khalid Shah, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, who was accused in 2024 of fabricating data and manipulating images across 21 papers, leading to the closure of his laboratory. In 2023, Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned over data issues in his lab; although he was not directly implicated in his students’ misconduct, the reputational damage led to a 50% reduction in research funding.
Can the American Model Be Transplanted to China?
If China has already recognized the innovation-suppressing effects of administrative spot checks, why not simply adopt the American model and return authority to the academic community? The obstacle is not mere policy inertia, but profound differences in social trust. The World Economic Forum’s 2024 Trust Index reports academic trust levels of 78% in the United States, compared to only 58% in China. The American model presupposes a complete separation between academic and administrative power, with professors exercising independent evaluative authority. In China, however, academic resources remain highly centralized within administrative structures. Without administrative oversight, internal evaluations in a society shaped by personal networks and bureaucratic hierarchy could easily collapse into mutual accommodation among acquaintances.
In this context, administrative spot checks function as a “neutral third party,” forcibly establishing quality standards in a low-trust environment. In the United States, a degree is essentially a university-issued private credential; if one purchases a diploma, the labor market punishes them by refusing employment. In China, however, a PhD carries quasi–public-service attributes, directly linked to urban residency permits, government rank classification, and institutional resource allocation. When a degree becomes a scarce, state-backed public good, the government, as the certifying authority, is compelled to ensure its seriousness through audits.
For the foreseeable future, the machine known as “spot checking” will remain a standard fixture of China’s academic quality assurance system. Yet, as one policy researcher observed, genuine reform lies not in the mechanism itself, but in dismantling the twin constraints of administrative intervention and personal networks to build a truly autonomous academic community. Only when supervisors and evaluators regard the approval of substandard dissertations as a career-destroying disgrace—rather than a calculated compromise—will the system become internally coherent. For graduates, this form of post hoc accountability feels more like a nightmare. “I would much rather have all doubts raised before or during the defense, instead of receiving a notice years later that my dissertation failed inspection and my PhD has been revoked,” said a newly employed doctorate holder.
Faced with a system that leaves all stakeholders dissatisfied, the path of reform may already be clear. The remaining variable is whether decision-makers possess the wisdom and courage to reconstruct the evaluation framework itself.