Temporal Inequality in Doctoral Education: Rethinking Time, Justice, and Institutional Responsibility

Doctoral education is governed by temporal regimes, time-to-degree benchmarks, fixed funding clocks, milestone calendars, and expectations of uninterrupted full-time engagement, that are widely treated as neutral instruments of efficiency. This paper argues that time constitutes a primary but under-recognised axis of inequality in doctoral education. Drawing on sociologies of time, adult life-course theory, and theories of justice in higher education, it shows how doctoral systems privilege early-entry, continuous, and linear trajectories while converting biographical difference, care, employment, health, and later-life transition, into institutional disadvantage.