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Comment by krastanov | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

http://thegradstudentway.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/02...

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.

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.

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?

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.

I think you meant to imply that it was difficult to so, but you said "can't".

You absolutely can get a paid for ba and ma in the US. It isn't easy, but thousands do so.

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.

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.

Unless you live in a high COL area where even NSF grant money isn’t enough.

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.

By the time of the induction lecture, won't most students be too invested already to be able to go back?

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").

That is great and all but I would still classify this kind of behavior as predatory and taking advantage of the young.

Payday loan places are also pretty transparent about the situation.

Can you give some examples of what a neuroscience PhD end up doing that is not science? I hope those 66% don't cover Starbucks!

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.

Depending on field, private sector R&D positions can require PhDs

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'd say it varies more than somewhat, but rather a lot, by field (and maybe by school).

And even advisor - some have clear paths directly into industry jobs.

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.

Sources for any of this?

Plenty has changed since the word was created. Similarly, philosophy used to mean all of science which is certainly not the case today.

In other words, PhD does not mean "a license to teach" and it has not for at least a century.

I am not saying all these changes are for the good, but the premise in your comment is not true.

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