AC21 International Graduate School
AC21's own materials, including pages elsewhere on this site, describe an "International Graduate School" (IGS) among the consortium's recurring activities — a short programme intended to pair doctoral candidates from member universities with supervisors at a host institution. This page sets out what we can and cannot independently confirm about it.
A note on this page: an earlier version of this page described a detailed 2010–2021 chronology of sessions, host universities, session themes, a specific 2017 "Smart Cities" session at Tongji University, participant totals, selection rules, and outcomes including co-authored papers and joint faculty supervision arrangements. We have not been able to independently verify any of these specifics from a source outside AC21's own materials. One claim in particular — direct quotes attributed to unnamed former participants — could not have come from genuine interviews conducted by this project, since this site is an independent editorial project with no affiliation to AC21 or its former members, and has been removed. All of that content has been removed from this page.
What We Could Not Verify
We searched for independent confirmation of the IGS's start and end years, its host universities and session dates, its format, and its participant numbers, and found none. A separate, not-yet-verified page on this site places the programme between 2010 and 2021 across six sessions; that chronology has not been through the same source-by-source verification as this page, and in at least one respect is internally inconsistent with this page's own earlier text (a session attributed to NC State University does not appear in that other chronology at all). We are not treating either version as reliable.
A Related but Separate Programme
Our research did find a genuine, independently documented doctoral programme connected to AC21: a joint PhD degree programme between Nagoya University and the University of Adelaide, launched in 2015, which grew out of contact between the two institutions through AC21. This is a longer-running, degree-granting arrangement between two specific universities, not the short, consortium-wide intensive sessions described as the "International Graduate School" — the two should not be treated as the same programme.
Relationship to Other AC21 Programmes
We have not found a documented, official relationship between the IGS and AC21's other activities, such as the Student World Forum or the Special Project Fund — including a previously published claim that a share of IGS participants were former Student World Forum attendees, and a claim that the Special Project Fund financed doctoral candidates' return visits to IGS host institutions. Both were attributed only to unspecified "secretariat records," with no accessible record behind them, and have been removed.
AC21's own active programming appears to have concluded in December 2022, following its 11th and final International Forum.
For a modern discussion of how research collaboration between institutions works, including governance and funding questions relevant to programmes like this one, see our guide to research collaboration.