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Comment by ebiester | Hacker News Reader

I am not a PhD student, but my partner is one (non-science) and I watch this academia issue. You have a lot of people who are really smart but are not math and science oriented. These are people very good at one thing: reading a lot and thinking a lot and writing. Other than law (and we have too many of those, too) what's the best economic use for these people?

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I think if you're smart and you've earned a PhD from a good program, you've proven you have the ability to dig deep into a subject and figure it out and move the ball forward a bit. This is an economically valuable skill that should be broadly transferable into many fields, even those far afield from your PhD studies. I think the problem arises for PhDs when they refuse to leave their narrow field of specialty. A lucky few can continue to specialize in academia, but for the rest the real world requires them to get a lot more general and interdisciplinary in order to succeed, something I fear a lot of them are unwilling to do. Hence our glut of unhappy PhDs. This is not a new problem.

"I think the problem arises for PhDs when they refuse to leave their narrow field of specialty"

Amen, we have a friend who spent 12 years getting a PhD in Russian History only to get out and face no job prospects. Depressingly, every year he gets ready for the one History Job fair that happens in January, flies down there and presents himself at interviews. 3 years later he still actually believes that he has a chance at getting a job after being out of the game a while. He has no sense to pivot, no sense that maybe he needs to find a new calling in life and utilize his skills in another fashion.

Contrastingly, we knew another PhD in Chemistry from Cornell. He got out and hated academia, but still loved teaching. He decided to teach chem and physics at some fancy prep high school and is doing well for himself.

To me these people need to understand that if they can't find their place quickly to scale that pyramid need to find a more general use for their skills.

There's perseverance and then theres a false sense of hope.

Except the history of academia and science is rife with people who slaved away for their entire life in their narrow field of specialty, before discovering something that changed the world, and their life. There's no objective test to determine the difference between "failure to pivot" and "changing the world with a little more effort."

The guy who developed a proof to Fermat's Last Theorem worked on it for seven years. I suspect people laughed at him, told him he would never succeed, told him he should do other things.

After he came up with the solution, he was knighted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiles%27_proof_of_Fermat%27s_La...

Here's a documentary about him, it's worth watching: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8269328330690408516#

There is a big difference between working on something for a long time and, basically, just keeping hoping for a long time. I wonder how many people who have their PhDs and hope for an academic job are really working at improving their abilities in their fields, or even at keeping up.

> I suspect people laughed at him, told him he would never succeed, told him he should do other things.

I don't think that's true. IIRC, Wiles was pretty successful before he started the work (tenure at Princeton?), worked on it secretly, and still published (though at a lower rate) to cover his secret.

That's pretty rare situation nowadays, and relatively specific to maths and few other fields where you can work by yourself. Even Nobel-prize level research is rarely done this way anymore.

Somewhat off-topic, but I've had fleeting contact with a former doctoral student of Wiles', Brian Conrad (math professor at Stanford now), and holy fuck is that guy intelligent.

"If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school."

--Paul Graham from http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

The problem is not finding work for people with a PhD it's wasting the money handing out PhD's to people who don't end up 95% of what they learned in there subjects. The USSR, before it's collapse, had an extremely educated populace. However, while pumping up the numbers of "highly educated people" looks good on paper it did not fit their economy.

To put it simply much of the time higher education is consumption not investment. Overspending on anything be it Roads, Medicine, the military, or Education is simply wasteful. And not just for the teaching staff your taking a large number of talented young people and keeping them fully engaging in the workforce for an extended period of time.

Exactly: it is very wrong to think PhD are useless because you won't use what you did during your PhD. This is stupid on two accounts: even if you do an academic career, what you did during your PhD is rarely what you will do later, and PhD teaches you many other things.

I only realized it afterwards, but many people are simply incapable of working by themselves without being given precise instruction: PhD teaches you that in some way (of course, there is a selection bias). It also trains you to communicate to other, which is a very valuable skill. You are also used to being criticized on somehow objective criterion: few people are able to take critics in any other way than personal. Finally, you almost always learn tenacity.

For me, saying that PhD is a bubble because there are few academics positions is like saying being an entrepreneur is a bubble because so few people become very rich. Even failure teach you a lot (where failure would be defined as not becoming an academic in the PhD case).

+1 for "you almost always learn tenacity". I've seen many good and bad Ph.D. students, but in the end, the ones who got their Ph.D. were the tenacious ones, not necessarily the best or brightest ones.

This is a really good point. The importance of good written and oral communication skills is often downplayed but likely one of the most important in the workplace.

Best economic use you ask? Well the whole point of the Economist article is that in most academic fields there's an incredible oversupply of PhDs. What's the use of a 1,000 houses in a town of 100 people?

Here's the source of the problem as I see it. The PhDs I know are largely risk intolerant and stay in academia because it's a comfortable way to pursue their passion. They're used to asking for permission and people evaluating them along very specific guidelines. When they enter the real or corporate world, they're used to this attitude of asking for permission to do things. They expect universities or corporations to find a use for their talent instead of architecting one themselves.

So what is their economic use? They need to figure that out. One solution would be to design a system that prepares them better for a world that's a lot more dynamic than their specific area of expertise might be.

What's the use of a 1,000 houses in a town of 100 people?

I don't think we gain much by assuming that a person with a PhD is only good for one thing when trying to find another use for them.

Let me rephrase: What are the best economic uses for highly intelligent, non-technical people, who are very good at sitting down, reading, and synthesizing information from a variety of sources? Most of the jobs that would be suggested are ones like law and journalism, both of whom are highly competitive as well. It's estimated that fewer than 400 people make a living off of fiction, and non-fiction in most cases is a field owned by academics.

Further, most auxiliary careers, such as political analysts, draw from academia.

So, if this is your top talent, you only have a few options, and other than law, academia actually is one of your best chances to use your top talent.

It's a bit like athletics in this society. If you are very strong and very fast, you have a very limited amount of economically viable options for you. The NBA is a long, long shot, but if you are 6'9 and fast, and that is your primary talent, what do you do?

It's estimated that fewer than 400 people make a living off of fiction

Wow, can you point me to a reference for this statement? I find it remarkable.

It's bandied about in some writing communities, I'm looking for it. I know that it was referenced as a Columbia study in http://www.dansimmons.com/writing_welll/archive/2009_12.html via http://www.asimovs.com/aspnet_forum/messages.aspx?TopicID=36... though.

Maybe your observation holds true for the majority, but in my case my PhD taught me how to be self-reliant, work autonomously, plan ahead and cope with a high workload. Now that I've switched to industry, I've found these qualities are serving me extremely well.

However, I've tried motivating some former colleagues to make the switch and they just won't so maybe you have a point. But I would refrain from stereotyping.

I left a PhD program in history and ended up working at a series of startups. Eventually, I founded one.

My cohort at school, on average, was smarter and harder-working than I was - I'm sure they could do exactly the same thing, if they wanted to. Or, for that matter, they could do anything else they wanted.

The issue isn't that there's no economic use for these people. The issue is that there's (close to) no economic use for what they really, really, really want to do.

Quick response with a couple ideas that popped to mind: Journalist? Political analysts?

Given more thought, I'm sure I could come up with more. There's definitely value in critical thinking. Whether PhD programs are the most economically efficient way to use their skills is something I don't know.

Political analysts are often trained by political science.

Journalism and freelance writing are both places many end up, but both are also fields where there is more supply than demand.

When I was at Caltech, a number of students were interested in Astronomy and majored in it. They were well aware, though, that the chances of getting a job in Astronomy were exceedingly small. So they did the sensible thing - double majored. One was AY and was for fun, the other they expected to be able to get a job in.

Think tanks, if the degree is at all applicable.

I think that "one thing" you identify is one of the most important abilities in determining business success. Those who refined their ability to properly communicate, think critically, and analyze problems have built a transferable skill set that cannot afford to be learned at the workplace. So in my opinion, they've got plenty of options. You could easily go the business consulting route where they specifically look for people with those traits and eventually have them specialize in some field. From there you could easily transfer to any industry job you specialize in for a comfortable living. The more ambitious could use those skills to build a startup and surround themselves with the right mix of a math or science backgrounds to create a business.

>Other than law (and we have too many of those, too)

What's wrong with the lawyer profession? Last I checked good corporate lawyers make $300-$500/hour. My inexpensive corporate attorney is somewhere around $250/hour I think. Good divorce laywers are impossible to find, and the ones that are there are spoiled they can afford not to return their clients calls for days and days.

There appears to be a serious shortage of those types of lawyers, and it's exactly good fit for the kind of people you described.

Well, maybe I was wrong after all:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/01/you-know...

Write novels or do something related to history?

Consultancies.

Serving hot dogs and fries?

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