The University of Ljubljana is the first higher education institution on the Slovenian territory. Prior to its founding, Slovenians mostly studied at Austrian, Czech, Hungarian and North Italian universities. After the collapse of Austria- Hungary, the majority of dissertations were submitted at the University of Ljubljana. Initially, the doctorate method was not fully defined. Most often, a doctoral dissertation was required, which was quite modest at the beginning; it was within the scope of nowadays diploma or master's thesis. At the same time, Ph.D. students had to pass a rigorous exam. First, there were two such exams, the main one and the auxiliary one, both related to the content of the dissertation. By 1925, the university required that the dissertation be submitted in one hundred hard copies. Such a procedure provided public scrutiny of the content on the one hand but also placed a heavy financial burden on the Ph.D. candidate, which discouraged many a student.

By 2017, 2,023 PhDs were awarded at the Faculty of Arts. By World War II, 93 had been awarded, but it should be noted that that particular Faculty was also involved in the natural sciences at the time. That is why part of the doctoral studies, including the first Ph.D. of Ana Mayer, was in the natural and technical sciences.

In the post-war period, the criteria for attaining the doctorate were tightened and, above all, unified. The introduction of the Bologna reform particularly contributed to this since it transformed doctoral studies into a third-cycle study. Successful completion of a doctoral degree, most of which lasts four years, requires certain exams and doctoral seminars, as well as a comprehensive dissertation, which has to be an original contribution to the science of the field to which it belongs. The dissertation concludes with a thesis defense. Today, Slovenia ranks first in the OECD rank in terms of the number of PhDs per capita (3.6%, while the average is 1.1%).