The PhD Problem: "Talk of a ‘higher education bubble’ may not be idle chatter”

http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

I'm ABD, Management, for what its worth.

It is very common for people to enter e.g. CS or EE programs with no intention of pursuing an academic career, and instead planning to find an industry job afterwards. Indeed, there were some people I met in grad school that left well-paying jobs at (say) Microsoft with the intention of getting a Ph.D. and going back to industry to work on more interesting stuff. As far as I know, they usually succeeded.

Does a Ph.D. increase your expected salary, if you get an industry job afterwards? Probably not enough to be worth it. Does it raise the level of problems you will be solving, and the quality of people you will be surrounded with? Absolutely.

While there are attorneys who get jobs at big law and make $150k+ starting, a significant percentage of students entering law school this year will not get a positive return on investment over the course of their career.

{The cost of the law degree} + {The opportunity cost of not working for three years} > {the increased salary that they'll make over the remainder of their career}

EDIT: There were a bunch of articles floating around about this over the past year, here's one: http://www.abanet.org/lsd/legaled/value.pdf, or more recently http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html?src=bu...

Consider, most higher wage jobs require a college degree, sometimes any degree. Many people attending college are doing so merely to better their career prospects. Non-trade school colleges actually do not teach much, on average, more so for non-technical degrees. It's getting easier and easier to obtain financing for higher education.

Overall we have the classic elements of a bubble. People "investing" (attending college) because of market rather than personal valuations. People investing more casually than they otherwise would because of easy financing. When people stop making investing decisions based on personal judgment and begin making investing decisions blindly based on what they think the market is doing the result is a bubble. It seems pretty clear the same thing is happening in higher education.

Engineers and computer science PhD students don't typically have to rely on landing a professorship, as there are companies that hire the same individuals.

But, this definitely gives me something to think about as I start my MSc next week.

I once had a philosophy professor admit this in class. He basically told everyone not to even bother with a degree in philosophy because they would only end up competing for the same teaching jobs.

"Classes are exclusively small seminars in which students discuss original source material rather than read textbooks." Shimers is also rated among the top liberal arts schools in the country.

IE, education involving more attention from teachers can be cheaper than what now the standard in college education. The large university today is essentially a racket which takes undergraduate tuition to pay for the capital expenses (building-booms) and then tells the undergraduates how lucky they are to be there.

The European Commission is making an experiment within its FP-s (i.e. FP6) to introduce an "alternative" training after a BSc or MSc (doesn't matter which really), called Early Stage Training (EST). It is supposed to alleviate the overproduction of devaluated PhD-s, by proposing a "new and improved" alternative.

EST-s get all the upsides of a PhD programme: they are scheduled to conferences in advance (i.e. ACEOLE in IEEE, CHEP etc.) and don't really get their papers rejected (their supervisors - and coauthors - tend to be on Editorial Boards). They also get full pension during the training, 500€/month for training expenses (conferences). At the end, they are not required to write a thesis, and would be formally expected to go to work in the industry.

But. Already having the credentials in research (i.e. conf. attendances etc. on CV) EST-s can more easily stay in public research institutions, and if they bother to apply a dissertator (i.e. paperclip) to their 2-3 proceedings paper (which they don't need to write anyway), they can "get downgrade too", by handing it in for a PhD certificate (which committee would refuse an application containing 2-3 peer reviewed papers in a field?) It is also good for the supervisors, because FP WP-s are good money, can be turned to career benefits without the downside of inflating their own scientific grade peer pool.

And the doctoral students can only watch this through (on conferences too) and are expected to suck it up. Invest several years (no pension, min. salary, min. publication budget etc.) to be advised to go to Vegas in the end.

It's all talked about as if there was some absolute value of a PhD that works the same for everyone. That there was a thing that would unilaterally be a good choice for just anyone who only can take it and carry it out.

But, in reality, the world has a different world for everyone.

In the real world, the valuations of events and choices and lessons aren't apparent, until perhaps later. The valuations don't necessarily come in terms of mere financial survival, like getting a job or getting more money. It's all dependent on the time, the place, the person, and the circumstances leading to the choices made and the lessons learned from them.

For example, for one man it might be absolutely golden to first start a PhD, then end up flunking out, internalize some of the facts of his life, and finally end up doing something different, something that is him even if it's not highly regarded in the careerwise or otherwise, in how we like to define "success". Yet, for another man, starting a PhD, finishing it, getting a top job, building a top-notch career for ten years might, in the scope of his life, be the worst possible choice that merely helped him to spend 15 years avoiding ever being challenged in his life's weak spots.

The former man has gone somewhere, the latter man has gone nowhere. A PhD is can be perfect if you can channel your life, your self and your creativity through it. A PhD can be worthless if you just do it for the sake of the degree.

I am wondering where the "wall of rationality" is for education costs, and will we stop at that wall (efficient markets prevail) or go past that wall (into a bubble)?

http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos066.htm#outlook

I would like to see a breakdown of careers to compare which occupations actually benefit from a PhD and which would benefit from a mixture of postsecondary education and some other complimentary training.

It seems to me that this article goes around the two main, most obvious aspects of a PhD;

1) Improve yourself (smarter, better critical thinking, etc) 2) Appearing more valuable to others (Getting grants, getting hired)

So the question is, does it fulfill these goals, and if it doesn't, do prospective applicants realize it?

Certainly there are better uses for your time if you want to appear more valuable to others (work experience), and there might be better ways to improve yourself for the same time and money.

If the average applicant realizes this, but proceeds anyway, then it's not a bubble, as there must be other factors at play when they think about the value of their degree. If they don't, then there is a bubble that will burst when the information becomes more plain.