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Comment by arcanus | Hacker News Reader

That certainly jumped out, as well as the much higher female drop out rates. Shameful!

Edit: To be clear, I put the vast majority of the blame on the advisor, not the student. I would not have made it without the remarkable support provided to me by my mentor. Conversely, I saw much stronger researchers leave for lack of a good advisor.

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Seems to me that the entire blame should go to the system itself. The system is broken, and everything you're seeing here is a symptom of this disease: lack of good advisors, exploitation of adjuncts, lack of tenured positions, etc. But there doesn't seem to be much agreement about what exactly is wrong with the system and what can be done to fix it.

Or maybe research level mathematics is actually really difficult.

There's difficult because "the topic is hard" and difficult because "there are unnecessary social barriers put up" and I've seen a lot more people affected by the latter than the former.

(source: am a math phd)

I agree there may be some social barriers, but, for instance 4 of the 10ish math students that started the phd program in pure math at the same as me were filtered out by the written exams, another was pulled to industry in her second year, and another left due to (I think) not being able to finish their research before his funding ran out (had less due to entering with a masters). I could be forgetting someone, but I think I am the only one on the pure side, finishing at the 5 year mark in my program, and I put myself through some serious sleep deprivation to do it. The applied students seemed to do slightly better.

This doesn't have anything to do with mathematics, it has to do with the university system. It isn't just math departments that are having these problems, they're across the board.

   I put the vast majority of the 
   blame on the advisor

One of the social functions of a PhD supervisor is a a'lightning rod' that enables the failed candidate to blame the supervisor, rather than themselves. Highly convenient ...

Two different words are being used here, but they are not interchangeable. The words are mentor and advisor. You are correct in that the Ph.D. is supposed to be capable of original research. An advisor who is a mentor is one to takes the raw talent of a beginning candidate and grows it into an independent researcher. Don't underestimate your importance here.

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