If you are taking a PhD, especially in the sciences, look away now. It may be stale news but I’ve just seen a graph from a 2010 Royal Society report suggesting that of every 200 people completing a PhD, only seven will get a permanent academic post. Only one will become a professor.
Stale, as in, 70+ years old.
I got my PhD in physics, in 1993. At that time, science students were talking about something that we referred to as the "birth control problem," which was that each professor only had to produce one professor in the next generation, and the rest of us belonged to what could have been referred to as a glut.
I mentioned this to my dad, who got his PhD in the 1950s. He listened to my lament, and said: "Yeah, we knew about that when we were grad students too."
I finished my degree and went straight into industry. Just as my dad did.
But industry also has the same problem with management positions. The real problem is the terrible treatment of postdocs due to a lack of "non-training" positions. Imagine if your boss made 5x as much as you because the only two jobs at your company are intern and manager.
Indeed, post-docs are a whole 'nother ball o' wax. I skipped doing a post-doc altogether. In fact, when I knew that I wasn't headed for academia, then suddenly a lot of the hoops vanished, including the need to have a lot of publications.
I finished a Ph.D and became a tenured professor (top of the greasy pole) and I have no regrets despite not being part of academia anymore. The experience of doing a Ph.D changed me for the better and gave me the confidence to take the risk to start my company.
We don't train too many Ph.Ds, we just undervalue them outside of academia. One thing I think would help is to not allowing someone to start a Ph.D until they had a few years work experience outside of academia. Too many students end up on the Ph.D railroad without experiencing anything outside of school.
This too. IME, the phd students who do well are those who had a life pre-academia, and hence didn’t get super-invested in aforesaid greasy pole, didn’t get weird parental issues with their advisors, etc.
I come from a city university, and in my experience many of the master students there (information system or computer science program) are not up to standard when they leave the program (i.e. they can't really program, let alone with theories). I think this is the problem with my school, but when I had this conversation with an old friend he felt that his master classes focused on theory, very little room for programming. He also had the feeling that in PhD, unless one's research requires programming, theory is emphasized over engineering. Perhaps this is an edge case... I don't know.
Then a long time ago, someone claimed to have PhD failed my interview. I asked this candidate to pick a language and write a function to determine whether a string is palindrome or not. He couldn't even start with a function declaration (I don't even program Java but I know how to write a function declaration). I was disappointed, but I gave him another chance. This time I wrote the declaration on the board, and I asked him to write code to determine whether a number is even or odd. He flunked again. Our recruiter never followed up to request evidence for his PhD degree because he failed the interview anyway. Even though I still believe he lied, but if he didn't, how did this university, a university with good reputation, gave him his degree?
(btw, every single time I bring this up on HN, I get downvote, I never understand. So challenge me if you think I am lying.)
A PhD does not guarantee good programming skills. I think you are mistaken in assuming that and hence get downvoted.
I have personally found most people who finish/almost finish their PhD's to be very good in describing problems, approaching solutions from different paradigms and articulating their thinking in writing. If you're trying to hire a PhD for a programming job, in most cases you WILL be disappointed.
That said usually they are fast learners and can quickly pick up good programming skill pretty quickly. (Its not as hard as people imagine it to be).
I was planning on doing a PhD but left after my Masters precisely because I wanted to improve my programming skills, which I knew the PhD didn't care much about.
I was disappointed that he couldn't even come up with a solution for odd or even. I get it for some low-ranked schools, but if for example someone from UC Berkeley can't do any decent programming (I don't expect everyone write a transcompiler because I have no idea how to myself) I'd be very surprised.
Dijkstra famously compared this to astronomers who have no interest in telescopes or observing. I love theory, would happily retire to it—but I can’t see how anyone could have the right imagination calibration without lots of practice.
yep, the fact that computer sciences spend a lot of time on pen/paper/board and brings proofs without actually program them doesn't mean that CS researchers are not interested in code. Code is their ultimate goal, but it's an implementation detail :-)
No offence, but you sound like you haven't worked in or close to such a field. CS theory very often doesn't require coding at all, and coding would be barely helpful.
You get downvoted because your story is about as rational as someone getting angry at you because you did something in a dream.
Compare:
"He told me he was the king of Nigeria. I didn't believe him, but if he is, how come the king of Nigeria is white?"
By far the simplest explanation is that the candidate lied about having a PhD. You have no reason to believe this isn't the case. And yet you're holding onto this story as though the candidate didn't lie, and bringing it up in that context.
I know someone currently enrolled in a CS Master's program. I forgot the term, but they have to spend an extra year taking undergrad classes, since their undergrad wasn't CS. Their friends do the vast majority of their homework and projects for them, and these assignments + open-book take-home quizzes/tests (that they also get help with) count for enough of their grade that they can tank the stuff that you can't cheat on and still pass all of their classes.
I hope that they'll be exposed once they get to post-grad next year, but I doubt it. I don't know anything about being a master's student, but I'm assuming they'll just have their hands held by professors, and get carried through everything by their fellow students. They won't even need to reach out to people outside of the program.
Anyways, now I know how people finish a CS degree without actually being able to code...
I guess it is really hard to believe that a PhD graduate could not even figure out if a number is odd-even. It is usually taught at the first year in a CS bachelor. Maybe they are from a different bachelor?
The interview questions don't sound particularly rigorous, but asking someone to pick a programming language and do something simple with it sounds like a good way to make sure that they at least have actually done programmed before. If the job involved any type of programming, this would seem to strongly correlate with success. What do you think would be better?
It sounds like a good way? Yes, I agree intuitively it sounds reasonable, but that alone is not considered a best practice.
Why do we all work so hard to go by good data in our real work, but when it comes to interviewing someone we’re encouraged to just wing it, or use our best judgement? Careers can be affected with this stuff, and bad hiring decisions in either direction can hurt an organization.
There is research done on hiring but the learnings are slow to benefit the practice. General intelligence is one of the strongest indicators, but not gotcha trick puzzle questions. Work samples are predictive, but again, approach is everything. Track record of past success (when that applies) is important.
This is not my field so I struggle like everyone else to keep up with what’s right. It just burns me that such litttle rigor is typically applied to something so important.
Maybe it’s because interviewing is just one of those topics that seem easy, like, nutrition - most people think they know a lot more about it than they really do.
I also use the odd-even number question in my phone screen. The primary purpose I use it for is to filter out people who can't program at all, my secondary purpose is to see if they can think of using a bitwise operator when prompted for an alternate solution(s). I don't think it's worthwhile to ask for more complicated problem implementations (at least at the phone screen level) since complicated algorithms aren't what we do most of the time. So far everyone I've asked it to has passed the primary purpose, but I keep it around just in case I hit these people who supposedly have Masters or PhDs and can't do it... It's still BS in a way but I don't have a better idea to filter out people who can't program than by asking them to program something, anything.
Yeah it's secondary so I don't hold it against the ones that didn't come up with it (one person came up with an idea I hadn't considered, I like that a person can think of different ways at all, which was casting the int to string and then checking the last character), it's a minor piece of information. All else being equal I'd like to see knowledge of bitwise operations demonstrated (and I'm sad to say that at my work we occasionally have to deal with bit-level concerns thanks to some legacy database decisions...) but things are typically unequal in more important matters.
That's a fairly reasonable approach. Looking for creativity in a relatively mundane problem is probably a good thing. The bitwise operator thing, if it actually needed to be used like you say, could be more appropriate for a coding standards guide if the candidate was otherwise suited. The immediate comparison I made, though admittedly contrived, was to that of the comma operator which I just learned about. Unlike self executing anonymous functions—which I'd consider hard to understand but critical to know—, they both fall into the category of fairly obscure pieces of syntax.
I haven't even heard the word palindrome outside of either college or outsourced coding challenges
So? Half the work I do involves concepts I hadn't heard of or was only vaguely familiar with before starting the work. Being able to have someone explain a concept to you and then you turning that into usable code seems very relevant.
It only takes a few seconds to explain what a palindrome is. It's a very simple concept. A candidate who can't figure out how to tell if a string is a palindrome in the normal amount of time allocated for an interview is probably not a very good programmer, even if the candidate has never heard of palindromes before.
No, I'm saying you are a bad programmer if, after being told what a palindrome is, you cannot invent an algorithm that tests whether a string is a palindrome.
It's pretty simple: a palindrome is something that is the same backwards as it is forwards.
Just from the definition, the naive/brute force solution is obvious: given a string or a list or any other kind of sequence, make a reversed copy of it and check to see if the reversed copy is identical to the original. You don't even need to be a programmer to figure out that approach -- anyone could do it with a pen and paper.
After that, the challenge is to write some code that can do this, and to do it more efficiently, i.e. without making a copy. That's not too hard either, because one of the popular methods that is used to reverse a string (another popular "warmup" interview question) can also be used to verify if a string is a palindrome in O(n) time and O(1) space.
I've seen far more difficult questions on phone screens, not to mention onsite interviews.
Ah, okay. Thanks for explaining a bit better. There are definitely programmers out there who would call someone an idiot if they don't know what a palindrome or other [insert college CS problem here].
I'm surprised this article doesn't try to address the reasons this is happening. It mentions that the employers (universities) benefit from students funding themselves, and I'm not super familiar with the UK's academic system, but this seems to be an oversight by the author/editor since most PhD students (in the US, at least) are funded to do their research.
I think the most important reasons we have a glut of PhDs who can't find academic jobs are that
1. Education is becoming more universally accessible and overall education is increasing. This causes a larger proportion of the population to be interested in getting PhDs and also to be qualified (academically) to do so. Similarly, to stand out in the job market, some people may be getting PhDs to differentiate themselves from people with masters/bachelors (or equivalents), since there are so many people with these degrees now.
2. A university spends less money on salaries by having a small number of professors with huge labs and armies of PhDs rather than a larger number of professors: a graduate student will work for 10-25% of a professor's salary, and without tenure. Maintaining this ratio requires having many more graduate students than professors, but doesn't give those graduate students anywhere to go when they graduate.
3. PhD programs are often used an immigration tool rather than as preparation for academia. Many PhD students I worked with were getting PhDs so that they could emigrate from India/Pakistan/China to the US and get a well-paying job. I'm sure a similar phenomenon occurs in the UK.
4. Research spending hasn't caught up with the increasing number of PhDs.
5. Because of the research boom in the post world-war period (this occurred in the US as well), most people getting academic jobs around then were around the same age. Many of these people haven't retired yet, and they may subconsciously have introduced a new part of academic culture: you need to be old before you get a professorship.
6. Many students graduate with PhDs but without having done significant enough research to merit continuing in academia. This could have a variety of causes: publish or perish, admitting unqualified/unmotivated candidates, the academic "low-hanging fruit" getting harder to research with time.
> A university spends less money on salaries by having a small number of professors with huge labs and armies of PhDs rather than a larger number of professors
It's also worth pointing out that this is pretty necessary from the lab's point of view, especially in some of the more high-end labs: PIs (in my experience, anyway) are frequently spending >90% of their time just writing grant proposals and dealing with the funding side of things.
There's very little time for them to do anything besides the funding circuit, and so the actual research part falls to graduate students and postdocs: People who obviously have less experience as professional researchers (and thus many more of them are required).
no. 2 sounds sufficient, if we want to roll it all into one. If we take PHD to be a, apprenticeship for the academic trade, you can't have that apprentices- tradesmen ratio. ..not unless people are going to be apprentices for a long time.
Universities decide this ratio. It's self contained. We can either have a different ratio, the current issues, or an exponential professor crisis that'd make brontitall look like childsplay
>>3. PhD programs are often used an immigration tool rather than as preparation for academia. Many PhD students I worked with were getting PhDs so that they could emigrate from India/Pakistan/China to the US and get a well-paying job. I'm sure a similar phenomenon occurs in the UK.
I don't think this is true at all. Why do PhD (4-6yrs+), when a MS is enough to find a job and get an H1-B/GC ??
Well for starters, an MS in the US may cost $40k-$60k/ year for a foreign student (as funding is very hard to get for an MS student), whereas during a PhD you'll get paid about $20-25k/year. Also, many universities do not offer MS programs in more academic fields, or if they do, they do not allocate them many spots in the graduate program compared to PhD students.
This fits my personal experience as well. All of the foreign students I know who did MS's in the US were very wealthy, whereas only some of the foreign students doing PhDs were.
While not enough in of itself, a PhD will greatly increase your chances of getting an O-1. Which is much more attractive than an H-1B. Also, remember that H-1Bs from India and China have to wait for many many years before they can get their GCs. Hardly worth it.
This thread is full of bizarre mis-information. I have never heard of a PhD student in the UK who was not funded. Most get around £13k tax-free and don't have to pay tuition. I didn't even have to teach, and I had a company fund my last year as an employee even.
I second the above. I'm about to finish my PhD and within the entire department, I only know of one guy who was self funded. The rest of us all have grants that cover both tuition fees and a tax free stipend which, unless you live in London, is ok.
I looked it up and I'm seeing that it still costs about 6k pounds or less per year. Is there a program designed to provide easy/guaranteed credit to PhD students?
To me it seems really bizarre to charge this amount because it only seems enough to keep out poor or financially unstable people (for the UK), without conferring much financial benefit to the university.
Most students never see this fee, because they receive funding that pays it directly as well as paying them a stipend.
There are various funders - the largest is the government (via Research Councils UK), but universities also provide a limited number of scholarships, as do charities like Cancer research UK or the Welcome Trust.
The tuition fees are limited by what the funding agencies are willing to pay: e.g. for 2017/18, the EPSRC has an 'indicative fee level' of £4,195 (and a national mimum stipend of £14,553 paid to the student) [1].
> Is there a program designed to provide easy/guaranteed credit to PhD students?
Not really: banks do not consider the stipend to be a salary, so when assesing loans treat PhD students as if they had no income at all.
This is about what I figured. In the US PhD programs have a nominal cost but it's almost always waived. In effect graduate students usually make about $20k/year
The only time I have missed not getting a PhD was when lawyers have me explain to someone who has a PhD what I mean so that they can bring my testimony into an IP case by a more identifiable 'expert'.
That said, there is a particularly annoying type of PhD in the tech world, it is one who assumes that the person they are talking to who doesn't have a PhD, doesn't have that degree because they were incapable of getting it, rather than they simply didn't bother. That is, I suppose, human nature. It is always amusing when I encounter it because I know the person underestimates people.
I don't thing those kind of PhDs really exist in significant numbers, especially in research. "Ya, that guy who just got that breakthrough in machine learning? He only has a master degree" is so common it's already normalized.
I'm not sure I get what you mean? If the specific title of PhD is unrelated to people using their titles as false sources of authorities, then what I said isn't wrong. I guess you could argue that in research many people have PhDs, so whether you have one or not is no longer a big deal.
The average occurrence of that sort of mentality across the population suggests most PhDs would have at least that majority view as being a subset of the larger. There’s also no reason to assume the factors that lead someone to obtain a PhD counter an elitist attitude. If anything, it certainly bolsters the odds through sunk cost and other psychological factors.
Put another way, it’s been my experience that nearly everybody has a view that they’re better than average or different in some positive, unique way. The worlds full of hostie personalities as well.
I'm not sure we have a glut of PhD's at all. At least not in fields where there is actual research in industry. I work in industry on a team where almost everyone has a PhD and those that don't have a Master's degree (or two). The team I'm on publishes research, reads papers regularly, attends research conferences, has visiting professors and researchers give talks, but also ships product. Maybe CS and AI is an outlier in terms of having huge demand in industry (relative to the work available, there is a huge shortfall of AI PhD's), but I wouldn't be surprised if much of industry is like this. Plenty of people go into a PhD to go into industry in a research-oriented role. The claim that we would be better off with a less educated society is so extraordinary it requires extraordinary evidence. A handful of cherry-picked data points and a skewed interpretation is very unconvincing. Yes there is a cost in an investment of time. But for many PhD students these are happy years they remember fondly for the rest of their lives, even if they end up outside academia. If we have an actual genuine glut, show me a survey with good methodology showing that most PhD graduates regret doing their PhD's. We don't have anything close to that.
I work at a small unassuming civil engineering company and we have plenty of PhD's here. Within most areas of science and engineering I'd say that getting a PhD because you want to go onto industry is the norm rather than the exception.
I'm probably going to go back to get a PhD at some point in my 40s. Not because I want to become a professor, but because I think it'll be good to sit down for a period of four or five years and just think in the company of other agile minds.
Of course, this is only possible because I'll have made sure to have had an entire career behind me, and I will not be worrying about putting food on my family's table or keeping a roof over their heads. A PhD is to me, therefore, not a profession but an avocation. Something to do after you've done everything else. The idea of doing it a few years after college, with the intention of making academia your profession? That's terrifying to me.
This is me. I am 43, entering my fourth year of PhD. If you have money saved and want to challenge yourself in new ways a PhD is a worthwhile goal. A couple of thoughts:
1) Many of my 20 something peers are struggling financially, 20-30k a year is difficult to live on in CA. I made good money in my 20s and enjoyed life, having less now does not bother me.
2) I don't have children. My peers with children face a much different set of challenges than I do. I suppose it comes down to the support structure in your life, but I am not sure I could do this with school age kids.
3) I cannot stress enough the importance of a top tier school and a strong advisor.
Yeah, by the time I plan on heading back to school, I'm going to have a six year old and a seven year old, and I don't think money will really be a problem (I'm effectively coasting and working on random side projects now anyhow, going to school won't really change anything).
I suspect that a lot of the stress of grad school goes away once money isn't an issue, and your progress in school isn't an existential issue. I really do wish mature grad students were more of a thing.
PhDs are a research training scheme, not an academic training scheme. As the economy has become more competitive, and more of the population has bachelor's degrees, proven research skills (as well as proven skills at independent work, dealing with complex unknown problems, sticking at a long and difficult task for 3+ years to make a unique contribution, and solid evidence that you are at the leading edge of your field) are quite valuable in the industry job market.
Of the cohort of PhD students I went through with, from a rough guess (I haven't taken exact count), the most common role is now "startup CEO", followed by "engineer at enviable company", followed only then by "teaching and research academic".
The other side of the coin is that (in some countries) academic careers are changing, in that things are becoming more specialised between teaching and research -- funding crunches are pushing universities into letting teaching loads increase, while research grant funding is competitive largely based on "how many previous grants have you won" (which as it gets more competitive depends on having a lower teaching load to focus almost single-mindedly on research). A curious side-effect of which is that teaching posts are often continuing (there's a steady flow of students to teach) while at the start of a research career, research-focused staff may be on fixed-term contract (research grants are time-limited).
In other words, your family situation (how much you can move around to build a research career, how much you need a stable income) also has a big impact on your pathway.
The real problem is the inverse. We have too many people ready to contribute new knowledge.... and we think this is a bad thing? Because, all diseases are cured, the jails are empty and we aren't actively destroying the planet?
I think this is actually how we want the future to be (we would prefer more bankers and real estate agents?). The real problem is nobody has worked out a humane way to fund it.
Why does everyone think PhDs want or need to go into academia? I never planned to be an academic when I decided to start my PhD. I think that's fairly common.
Probably because, outside of a STEM discipline and a few other exceptions, there isn't a distinct non-academia/teaching career path.
Combine this with both a larger social push for higher education, declining state support for local public institutions that in turn drive a need for higher enrollments to cover costs without (even larger) tuition increases. And add to that a k-12 educational pipeline that has failed in (fully) addressing the need for quality STEM education.
This, of course, oversimplifies the situation to a large degree. But the above factors contribute strongly. Intelligent and driven students, coming into the Higher Ed community with an interest in advanced degrees but relatively weaker STEM backgrounds, are disproportionately represented in humanities & social sciences programs.
I'm a CS professor, so take everything I say as biased or whatever.
We all know and expect that most PhD students will not end up in academia. The best PhD students often aren't those who want to be academics, but ones who are just insanely curious. There aren't many times in life when you can work on something that just interests you in great depth and (hopefully) push forward what we collectively know. A PhD allows that. If you're doing it just for the qualification, you won't get nearly as much out of it, and may not finish at all.
So, what should you get out of a PhD? If the advisor does it right, the PhD student should learn what it is to do high quality scientific research. That is, ask a question, figure out a series of experiments that might allow that question to be answered, evaluate the data, and come up with conclusions supported by evidence.
It turns out this is insanely hard to teach, and I've never seen a new PhD student, no matter what their background, who can do this at the start. No undergraduate or MSc programme manages to teach this, though some students seem naturally somewhat better at it than others. We try only to admit those.
With a new PhD student, many of the ideas, most of the suggestions for experiments to run, and much of the interpretation of the results will usually come from the advisor.
As a PhD progresses, the student should be gaining experience in what it takes to frame a good experiment that might actually answer the question you want to answer. And they should be gaining experience on how to interpret results and what you can conclude from them. During this phase, much of my role is staring at graphs the student has produced, and asking "why does it do that?". An experienced student would already have an answer, a semi-experienced student will have noticed the anomaly, but not know how to figure out the cause, and an inexperience student will not have noticed anything is strange.
By the end of the PhD, a great student will be ahead of me in suggesting the experiments to run, and will have already run them before they come to see me. Only about 10% of PhD students reach this point.
In the end, people over-rate what the topic of a PhD is in the educational process. What most people get from a PhD is an apprenticeship in scientific method. Those are transferable skills, and the reason PhDs have endured as a qualification is we really don't know any other way to teach them.
Of course, no-one actually teaches professors to teach PhD students - we learned it by osmosis too - so the quality of professors in teaching these skills is pretty varied.
Maybe academia shouldn't be considered a normal career. Rather it is a reward for pursuing something you are passionate about. You are willing to do it for free so anything you get is a bonus -- perhaps not literally, but that is the yard stick one should use when considering an academic career. At least that is what I am telling my older one who is applying to colleges right now.
Lots of people are passionate about academic research in their chosen field, and extremely talented and qualified and even PhDed, and still don't get to do it (certainly, it's difficult to get time to do things for free in a world where one needs money to live), so, I dunno…
That does sound sad. It could happen when your love becomes a profession and you are pressured to do things that keep you the job rather than make you happy. This is what I warn my son about. It may be a happier outcome if one just focuses on using one's skills to make the best living and keeping one's passion a hobby instead, except one may suffer excessively from FOMO (fear of missing out). I really don't know what the answer is. Everyone has to make their own choice.
I work in engineering consultancy. Some of our best consultants come from non-engineering backgrounds. Two in particular - one is an architect by training, the other an ancient historian, with a background in reconstructing ancient power hierarchies from the inscriptions on funeral carvings.
In my field, the transferable skills from academic research are far more important than the domain knowledge.
The PhD system is a Ponzi scheme. First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor. During a professor career, one is expected to graduate 5, 10, 20 PhD students. It is mathematically impossible for the majority of these students to find a professor job. The explosion of higher education, internally and globally, masks the problem to some extent, just like a good old fashioned Ponzi scheme appears solvable for a period of time.
Edit: It is pretty well known that there is exactly "One True Path" for a research career. See [0] or [1]
Quite certainly, becoming a professor is not "first and foremost" what PhD leads to (nor is it what many people do it for).
It is certainly not my experience. I am a PhD student and since the very beginning my mentors (program directors, my PhD advisor, committee members) have been pretty clear about future prospects: "the opportunities in industry are such and such (compared to the opportunities for BS and MS)", "postdoc positions have those requirements", "the chances for getting a permanent research/teaching position is so and so".
While there are people who are dishonest with their students, it is borderline offensive to lump them up with all the rest. All the people I have worked with have been honest about job prospects and have worked hard to give me the best tools to work in those jobs.
Right. I'm the Chair of a (neuroscience and psychology) departmental graduate school and I also sometimes sit in on departmental PhD 'scholarship' interviews. One of the questions we ask is 'Given that your chances of gaining a job in academia are only about 1 in 8, what do you think you will do when you finish graduate school?'. Then, when they arrive, we show them, a discuss, a version of this picture
during the induction lecture on their first day. They are all still there on day 2. I like to think they are smart enough to know what they are doing and that the only people who are still writing phd 'glut' articles like this are those whose ideas about graduate training were formed a few decades ago.
When I was a grad student in the mid 80s, we got the same basic news on our first day. We were still there on day 2 too. I think the idea that we were duped into attending grad school by inflated expectations of academic employment is something we fabricate in our own minds much later. A lot of just enjoyed studying science.
Not to discount your story, but weren't the financial implications of a PhD in the mid 80s and the mid 10s drastically different? If the benefits, the joy of learning and chance of getting a job, are the same but the costs, the massive amounts of debt you need in modern times, are much higher, but the number of PhD students is the same doesn't that mean something had to have changed? Maybe learning is more enjoyable now, which is certainly plausible with the internet, but maybe students are being liked to a higher rate?
Indeed, my parents put me through college, and I finished grad school with money in the bank thanks to the NSF.
At the time, the conventional wisdom was: Don't get a graduate degree unless somebody else is paying for it, or you are in a job that guarantees a salary bump for doing it. I don't think that's changed.
The NSF grant money wasn't paid directly to students. The departments still set the pay scale, and had to deal with COL disparities like all employers do. And if your prof couldn't support you, then you didn't work for that prof, or you got a teaching assistantship.
At least in my field, physics, lack of sufficient funding meant you didn't get students.
This whole business wasn't risk free. There were students who dropped out because their prof lost funding. In my view, the risk of not finishing at all is a bigger cost of graduate education than the pay scale.
Lol.. UCLA pays grad students 18k ish. Barely enough to survive. Yes not finishing is a real risk but it’s not true that students can generally survive on that without loans or savings. In other lower cost areas, they can. MIT, Columbia and other schools also have better financial packages / housing options.
I remember even in the 1980s, there were schools where the pay packages didn't look all that competitive. It's possible that there are grad students who have family support.
At least in STEM, tuition is practically free and PhD students are paid for their research work and teaching. There are even PhD student labor unions in most public and some private universities. (Whether the pay is good and whether unionizing makes sense are separate topics).
You will not get paid well as a PhD student, but there is no massive amount of debt involved either (and again, whether there are opportunity costs is a separate topic).
Too bad you can't (edit: very difficult to) get a PhD, in the US today, without going at least into an order of magnitude more debt (or in debt at all) while in undergrad when comparing to the early 1980's.
I did hear of a German uni that accepts people for PhD programs without an undergraduate degree, but iirc you need like 4 or more publications. But that seems like an exception to everywhere else.
Yes, but this is a problem unrelated to PhD programs (the majority of people go to college and college is expensive).
Moreover a good high school mentor will help you navigate to good financial aid (I have friends who came from the lower middle class who did not pay a penny for their Yale or Harvard or Cornell undergraduate degrees). They did pay for books though...
> …(the majority of people go to college and college is expensive).
This didn't used to be the case, so, yes it is true to say it is unrelated to the PhD programs if you set aside what it takes for people to enter them in the first place and the decisions that have to be made by all actors (of which only the self has control over).
>Moreover a good high school mentor will help you navigate to good financial aid (I have friends who came from the lower middle class who did not pay a penny for their Yale or Harvard or Cornell undergraduate degrees).
Yeah sure, my sister got a full ride for undergrad and for her masters and my cousin got a full ride for undergrad, but for every person like them, there are many more that even leveraging such knowledge of opportunities and trying to pursue them in earnest, doesn't net them opportunities.
It's laudable that the likely end results are presented so clearly and early. Have you ever done a survey immediately afterwards to see how many students goals align with the likely outcomes? It seems like if a student is in that position where they were very successful at being a student for the prior 16 years and succeeded at getting into your graduate school that they might think they are the 1 in 8 - maybe all eight of them for a given eight.
Is it? One way to recruit a certain kind of soldier is to build up the notion of “elite” and then ask, “are you up to it?” Young people often leap at that, and you can always say you told them it would be tough.
I don't know. It does seem that law schools don't do this based on the numerous post graduation interview/surveys, where if memory serves if one doesn't get admitted to a top 20 school or so one might want to rethink a legal education as one's avenue to financial success.
This is a fair question, but you should also keep in mind that there is no stigma to dropping out of a PhD program (if you do not mind the opportunity cost of preparing and applying it is not the worst way to "take a gap year").
I think this varies somewhat by field, but I promise you, in many fields essentially the only reason to get a PhD is for a career in academia. The idea of a someone in graduate school not aspiring to become a professor still sounds odd to me.
And while I never had anyone outright lie to me or tell me job prospects were great, there were also few people who gave me a really clear picture of just how bad they were.
Certainly it varies by field, I don't know a whole lot of English PhDs in industry, but are a multitude of industry jobs require STEM PhDs (e.g, research positions, quant positions in finance, etc.). Whether you agree those positions should require a PhD is a separate argument.
I hope that part of being accepted into a PhD programme involves the ability to realize that there’s not much room at the top.
Personally I loved my PhD experience even when I knew that the race to tenure was not for me. In many ways the reward of a science PhD on the jobmarket is large. At my current company we are treated as superstars among both engineers and management, and there is plenty of ways to make use of whatever lessons learned. (Disclosure: experimental particle physicist working in the European defense industry).
On the other hand, there are fields where the opposite holds. A family member studied Social Sciences, and the non-academia job situation (in journalism, museums, etc.) is pretty much "PhD or bust".
A PhD is literally )as in that’s what the abbreviation stands for ) a license to teach. It’s origins are exactly in training people to pass the torch of knowledge.
Look at the Greats, or even professors until the 50s, they only had at most 6 grad students their entire career.
Many modern professors have as many students a year.
> First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor.
You are grossly misinformed. PhDs programs are training for a career in research. Professorships are only one possible path... and just like you intuited, it's not even the dominant career path.
I think this is more of an indictment of how little real investment goes into R&D at private industry - even as the companies merge into megopolies who should have the finances to best justify it, they seem to become even less inclined to invest in fundamental research.
That doesn't imply that all those people needed a PhD for their job, though. I worked with multiple people at Amazon who had PhDs who were doing the exact same job I was.
Google is exceptional, and also in area of "growth capture". How about large companies in more mature industries? For example, do any of the telecom companies maintain the equivalent of Bell Labs today?
Google is infamous for valuing academic achievement over practical skills in interviews, 8% is actually much lower than what previously reported - I guess they lowered their standards of late.
If google is at 8%, everyone else of comparable size will probably be around 3% at best.
Well, there's a need for certain kinds of researchers in industry. How large that is isn't exactly clear. The difficulty comes to PhD programs when people are able to become researchers without a PhD.
It's also not impossible to become a professor without a PhD. That doesn't make PhD programs useless for that purpose, as long as they make that career path easier to attain.
It's pretty unlikely. In one case there was a tech where I went to grad school, who performed so well that tptb decided she should be a professor. But before they could do that, they felt the pressure to give her a PhD (and where I went to grad school was very much on the "unconventional" end of the spectrum), so they enrolled her in the PhD program, made her take classes, and gave her a degree after she had finished enough classes to cya in the eyes of the accreditors, made her staple her papers together for a thesis, gave her a PhD, and then promoted her to professor.
Part of this was because consider if she decided to leave our institution... There are certainly places where she would have been denied a job opportunity on the grounds that she did not have a degree, e.g. state schools where there are often legally or administratively mandated minimum requirements for professorship and bureaucratic decision-makers who filter out non-conforming applicants before they are even considered.
Also there's lots of government researchers as well. The US has its NIH, FDA, CDC, DOE, USDA, and so on, and other countries have their own versions (if generally not quite as large).
In most countries, being a professor is the only way to have a permanent position as a researcher in academia. You can be a researcher without being a professor, but it may involve changing your position (and country) every few years.
I can't understand why you think this is the case. You can get a full-time job in industry being a researcher. Why would you need to move every few years?
As the first step on the path to understanding, first consider: "in what fields do people get doctorates?" As a second step, consider for each of those "what industry will employ them?"
If you step over to the non-STEM (and to a lesser extent non-TE) fields, the answer to the second question tends to diminish to "academia".
I mean, yes, it is possible for me to do biochemistry in my garage without a professorship (and I do), but will people actually take you seriously? Will you get money to do your research? Where will you publish? Not all of us can be Peter Mitchell, and arguably it's harder now that government funded research has a near monopoly on the research industrial complex.
I guess it comes down to why are you doing the research in the first place. Is it for your own curiosity and self-fulfillment or is it for "people to take you seriously"? I'll admit your point about resources is completely fair and oftentimes you need the prestige to obtain the necessary resources. However there is plenty or research that can be done without insane amounts of resources (<15k). As someone who does research professionally in an area that requires minimal resources (a start up cost of 10k and reoccurring costs that are much less). I do about as little as I can get away with in terms of disseminating my work. I do the work for my own personal motivations and am not concerned about being taken seriously.
There are actually some benefits to this approach in that I don't have to work on "safe projects" that are deemed "serious research" by the community. It is actually quite liberating to work on things that others might scoff at and call you a "quack" or "wack job". And even if I am a "quack" I can honestly tell you that I am happy and feel fulfilled. Just my two cents. Life is too short to worry about everyone else.
You can also be a good, e.g., mechanical engineer without getting an engineering degree, but this is an exception to the rule.
Also, companies use the degree as an indicator of skill, so the good engineer who doesn't have a degree needs to somehow reliably demonstrate a solid understanding of the field to compensate. Obviously, from the company's point of view, one is easier to deal with than the other.
The same applies to PhDs and research. A PhD proves that the person has followed through with and understood a very precise topic of research for 2-3 years.
> You can also be a good, e.g., mechanical engineer without getting an engineering degree, but this is an exception to the rule.
That's an awfully incorrect analogy. Enrolling in a PhD program has absolutely nothing in common with getting an engineering degree. An engineering degree is conceived to give the students a pre-established set of skills and technical knowledge that meets industry demands.
A PhD program is set to help the PhD candidate research a very precise and specific topic, which more often than not is entirely irrelevant to any industry, so that in about 4 years he is able to produce some scientific findings and defend a thesis in front of a jury.
The key difference is that an engineering degree is tailored to teach marketable job skills while the PhD program is the exact opposite.
I would say "not entirely accurate", rather than "incorrect". Are you familiar with what happens in PhD research and the skills you can acquire during a PhD?
> [.،.] so that in about 4 years he is able to produce some scientific findings and defend a thesis in front of a jury.
And that's exactly what having a PhD proves: that you can start from a cursory understanding of a topic and end up contributing something novel to the field.
Given that industrial research requires you to do practically the same thing -- albeit in a more applied fashion -- a PhD is usually a good indicator when hiring for such positions. Again, there may be more suitable people for the position who don't have PhDs, but that is once again an exception to the rule.
> Are you familiar with what happens in PhD research and the skills you can acquire during a PhD?
Yes, very familiar. I've worked as a researcher in a public university and enrolled in a PhD program, but I dropped out after it was made patently clear that the whole thing was a complete waste of time.
I even had my advisor pressure me to continue working for the research group with scare tactics such as warning that getting a job would be virtually impossible and working for the research group was my only viable option.
> And that's exactly what having a PhD proves: that you can start from a cursory understanding of a topic and end up contributing something novel to the field.
...and that on its own is worth absolutely zero. You either have marketable skills or you don't, and a PhD degree does not help a PhD candidate develop marketable skills, It's years of drudge work for a research group that managed to get funding for areas which more often than not are entirely irrelevant. To develop marketable skills the PhD candidate needs to devote extra time that he doesn't have to go out of his way to make himself relevant as a job candidate.
Well... there's intellectual understanding and then there's emotional understanding. These are people who were the very top in their high school and the very top as undergrads. They've always made the cut when most everyone else didn't, so why should a tenure track position be any different?
This. Plus psychological investment in identity as a scholar. Makes it very hard for some people to hear “it’s not a good idea” and harder to see when it’s time to cut losses.
"So why should a tenure track position be any different"
Economics and reality come into play as we are adults.
There's basically no excuse for 'the smartest among us' to not have a basic grasp of the dynamics of how their education will play out into their careers.
But they've always been the smartest in a group of the smartest people. It's not that they're not being smart or not being adult. It's that they feel this is just another step in a road they've been traveling since they were kids.
> The PhD system is a Ponzi scheme. First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor. During a professor career, one is expected to graduate 5, 10, 20 PhD students.
In the US at least, a substantial proportion of professors teach at institutions that are undergrad-only or where only some departments have graduate programs. I am a tenured professor of computer science and have not supervised any graduate-level research (nor will I be expected to do so).
...which is not to say that the numbers aren't all messed up. They are. And I've had many lucky breaks (and also some unlucky ones) to get where I am. But your Ponzi claim presumes that the only outcome of a PhD is an R1 professor position, which is not the case.
Maybe in the US, here in the Netherlands you get a reasonable wage and usually finish withing 4 years during which you learn to write papers, keep yourself busy and determine the direction of a research project by yourself (at least more and more over the 4 years). Afterwards you can make the step to industry, quite comfortably.
During my first year I was already told, 1 of the 100 of you will become professor so I had no illusions.
Few PhDs in my field go into academia, most go on to laboratory jobs. It's a relatively small area though (nuclear engineering) and demand is fairly high for PhDs. A large portion of PhD students are working on projects jointly with national labs, so there is a lot of preparation for jobs beyond being a professor. A significant portion also go into unrelated areas, e.g. someone I know just took a job at Github.
What does an education system have to do with academics? It makes way more sense when educators provide education and education managers run the system.
We could build new universities. Take up the slack in all the excess PhD's, increasing the supply of good secondary education, and help stave off exploding tuition costs. Build it from scratch like Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, or Olin. Who is "we"? I dunno, some rich guy maybe.
and each department at said university will employ what, 20-30 PhDs in each department? who themselves will then go on to produce a pile of new PhDs in their career?
at what rate would new universities have to be constructed in order for this to do anything meaningful about the issue?
Guess it's more or less a management problem. I think it's possible to rebrand a PhD program to be a more targeted education, not just "how to become an academic". Specifically, a doctoral program could teach people how to:
1. identify "known unknowns" and formulate the problem.
2. search and study existing literature and properly cite them.
3. cook up a clever way of evaluation and publish the results.
etc, etc. Unfortunately, in most universities, these techniques are kinda sorta taught, but they're far from being systematic. And many of them don't have the body of knowledge and staffers for this kind of things, probably because they're incentivized for wrong goals (e.g. the number of papers, media recognition, etc.)
I worked with a japanese postdoc who, when he finished up, said he was returning to Japan. I asked him if he was going to get a job as a professor and he said "no, I have to wait for my current advisor to die before I can be a professor".
I used to think that was just Japan, but then I tried to become a professor (during the post-NIH-training exponential burst of the early 2000s) and found that it's basically the same in the US now.
A classic tale, where the product is valuable, yet the demand is scarce. A system where there are few alternative avenues for those who place second or third. It's disheartening to say the least. People look at Blade Runner 2049 and think dystopianism, yet here we are, a system over-saturated, yet, inexorably undernourished.
Why are these would be professors not reading these articles? It's well known for years academia is no place to look for a great job. Find something else, I'm sorry to be harsh, but for the well educated, you should be able to find something else - especially given such early warning.
The interesting part is that this coexists with "we need many more people in science" narrative which pops up when talking about students choices ffor major.
Nope, we don't nee more people aiming for science, we ain't got jobs for them.
>>Despite our moans about hours of work, pay, and pensions, being an academic is still the best job in the world for those of a particular temperament and talents.
I have a slave temperment and enjoy being hauranged by my PI?
My talents include falsifying experiments and writing endless papers about how our method is superior to all other methods? Yet we, much like the communist revolutions in the 20th century, have been working on it for the last 20 years?
I think what we have is a glut of people who don't want to enter the workforce, and have this naive dream of academia, tenure, and doing research. In my humble opinion, the purpose of a professor at a university is to TEACH. Not research, that should be secondary to their teaching duties. Universities are deceiving PhD students into thinking this magical world of research, and lifetime tenure awaits them at the end of the PhD rainbow.
Mine didn't. I did an MA and got an up close view of the life of many academics and recognized it was not for me. But the general impression I got was there are two good reasons to do a phd:
1. For pleasure/curiosity/enjoyment (as in you are independently wealthy).
2. If you can't see yourself being happy in any other life and you understand the compromises you have to make (poor income, high competition, having to move a lot, etc.)
I know some wonderful PhDs who got doctorates with this very understanding and love their lives. But I didn't have the wealth to do it for fun, and I generally land on my feet and get happy no matter what, so I didn't borrow any more trouble and moved on with my life.
America's universities maybe may be different but this is how it was in Ireland!
Universities just need to do a better job of separating teaching and research in my opinion. Someone with a PhD in algebraic graph theory isn't going to want to teach 20 year olds what a group is, or grade their tests, and they shouldn't have to. For every undergraduate class, there are probably more than enough 25 year olds with degrees in that subject capable of teaching that class better than that professor might. But, whoever teaches the class should first and foremost be a good teacher who actually wants to teach, and not whichever professor/grad student could be drafted into duty.
The main problem with universities these days is that they are given the duty of both teaching and research, but they force people to teach that don't want to (some professors, grad students). In addition many people view universities more as job training than learning about a specific subject. If you go to college to get a degree in CS, but all you want to do is get a job at Google, you don't need CS experts to teach you intro to data structures or how to write SQL.
I think the long term solution is to entirely separate the realms of research and teaching, or to make teaching as a research professor entirely "opt-in" outside of discipline specific classes (the algebraic graph theory professor should probably be the one teaching algebraic graph theory). My university has been relying more and more on teaching-only professors to teach CS classes and I think it's a wonderful solution. The teaching-only professors are much more personable and engaged in the actual teaching, and the research professors get to focus on what they're good at.
>>In my humble opinion, the purpose of a professor at a university is to TEACH. Not research, that should be secondary to their teaching duties.
No. PhDs are extremely specialized on a very narrow topic within a single field. They spend years researching that topic to the exclusion of everything else.
Asking PhDs to teach is like asking brain surgeons to treat common cold. They probably can do it, but it's a gross waste of their skills and expertise.
If there is no demand for your skills they can’t be wasted. There’s no necessary reason why being really good at literary criticism is any more socially valuable than being really good at Counter Strike. If no one’s willing to pay you for it I hope you had fun learning to do it because otherwise it was a waste.
I'm a PhD student with no intention of going into academia. I just love science, and being able to do it for 5 more years is inherently fulfilling to me. That's why I came back to grad school after working for two years. Let's be real, real life kind of sucks. Now I get paid less but I feel like I'm living in luxury. I have no illusion about the money I'm sacrificing but in my mind I've made a fair trade.
Do you have a source for this tale of successful deception of poor grad students by universities other than your own imagination? When I went to grad school in the sciences in the 1990s we were all well aware of the job market, because students were constantly finishing and we'd know what jobs they got.
Well, yes & no. It is an oddly contradictory system in this way, especially when you consider Teacher Ed. programs that certify their graduates to teach below the college level. Implicit therein is a recognition that teaching is a specialized profession requiring specialized skills. Yet faculty in higher ed are not expected to have any specialized training in this area, and all learning of it is "on the job".
The result is an educational environment where the most visible job requirement for faculty is to teach courses in their field. But that is the portion of their responsibilities for which, from an incentives perspective, they are least accountable. Instead, to obtain a tenure-track position and ultimately earn tenure itself, primary requirements are research and publishing output, with double++ good to eleventy for bringing research grants to their institution. Teaching and advising/mentoring, not quite an afterthought, is much lower in priority & weighting in tenure review.
I should add that the faculty most consistently dedicated to quality instruction and student mentoring seem to be those who already have tenure, though it is a minority of them. Anecdotally, I perceive higher consistent quality of instruction from adjunct faculty though. I'm not sure if that is because they often end up teaching more courses and gain more experience thereby, or because they have less need to sink time into other research, or some other factor.
I have seen faculty in tenure track positions penalized for focusing too much on the side of student instruction, advising, etc. In one particular case tenure was denied on the basis of a light research portfolio despite an extensive and impressive track record of well-rated course instruction and an impressive dedication to meeting with students far more the the minimum required time. (2.5 office hours/week) Of course there may have been more to the denial, I only know the publicly available details from the fallout when a dispute was filed.
I'd say because teaching has a higher payoff for the students being taught. They can get jobs immediately after college and contribute...
Research on the other hand, outside of the self-serving aspect - like how many papers one gets published - has hardly any immediate benefits relative to the benefits of teaching... and few long term benefits. It's more of a gamble.
Stale, as in, 70+ years old.
I got my PhD in physics, in 1993. At that time, science students were talking about something that we referred to as the "birth control problem," which was that each professor only had to produce one professor in the next generation, and the rest of us belonged to what could have been referred to as a glut.
I mentioned this to my dad, who got his PhD in the 1950s. He listened to my lament, and said: "Yeah, we knew about that when we were grad students too."
I finished my degree and went straight into industry. Just as my dad did.