Get a job like anyone else would? Why must academia or industrial research be the only plausible options?
After doing a PhD you can be a high school teacher, a soldier, an actor, start a company, go into politics, do whatever you want. Nothing’s stopping you!
Most jobs just want capable educated people, and many vary diverse educational backgrounds.
Is there nothing that you do inherently for the challenge or joy of it?
I did my PhD because it was a challenge and I had a lot of fun doing it and found it extremely rewarding.
Most qualified people at reputable institutions get paid to do a PhD. I bought a house and had a baby while doing a PhD. It needn't hold you back.
I'm glad you had the luxury of pursuing a passion PhD without sacrificing your personal life or worrying about future career prospects. Most students I've known did not have that privilege.
NB Traditional PhD studentships did get a pittance, but relatively few people seemed to do these (at least where I worked).
Edit: Also I had no student debt, which definitely makes things easier.
And, yes, my final year I did not work the summer in order to finish my thesis. Yes, I understand that not everyone has the luxury of additional employment. However, it is not a truism that those of us who pursue a PhD must sacrifice their personal life or career prospects. It improved both of mine.
Like the parent comment said
>After doing a PhD you can be a high school teacher, a soldier, an actor, start a company, go into politics, do whatever you want. Nothing’s stopping you!
Most people don't go into debt for a PhD afaik. Failure to monetize a PhD directly just means falling back into the more traditional workforce.
Stable job in a small city isn't enough of a practical application?
It obviously is attractive, since people chose to do it.
Maybe they're thinking about more than money?
Why do you care anyway? Are these people who take a reduced income to better themselves and others through learning a particular thorn in your side for some reason?
My point is many people don't have the privilege to do so. The article specifically references individuals who sought higher education as a path to a better life -- so if I have a thorn in my side it's the tone-deafness of saying it's not about money.
But I don't think this matches up with what I know from reality. People get a stipend for a PhD. Yes it's not massive, but it's enough. I think all student loan systems that I know of have repayments means tested, so you don't have to repay if your income is low.
Maybe you lose some income opportunity, but I don't see how makes it less accessible as long as the stipend is enough to live on?
A PhD seems particularly accessible to me, actually! More accessible than an undergraduate degree since it's all paid for!
It's just not opportunity cost. As the article references, many PhD degrees don't increase earning potential at all in part thanks to the adjunct system.
So to be clear in the US it's a four year undergraduate degree (which usually comes with debt), then five or six years of working for near-poverty wages to obtain a PhD, and when you finally get it you find that you haven't increased your earnings potential from when you had no degree at all. It's fine to wax philosophical about getting a PhD to become a well-rounded gentleman but the issue at hand is higher education failing those relying on it for professional success.
3 years I think is standard in the UK, for example (https://www.prospects.ac.uk/postgraduate-study/phd-study/wha...).
Strikes me you should say your locality and field of study as doctorate length seems like it would be a function of both of those.
Even the article geographically contextualises its examples; which suggests to me they at least realise they address a global audience on the web.
6 years is probably pretty typical in the US for the sciences. For the humanities it's generally even longer (often due to the need to work to support oneself due to lack of funding). I recall seeing somewhere that the _median_ history PhD takes 11 years.
Edit: seems I misunderstood the UK structure, perhaps I was confusing with continental Europe? Not sure about the time difference in that case.
That's not my experience - you can generally go straight from an undergraduate degree to doing a PhD - I did and most of the people I knew did the same (and the people who had Masters either had done MEng as a first degree or had MSc conversion courses).
NB There is also the weird thing where some UK institutions give you a MA for still existing after a few years....
No that's the opposite - in the UK you normally either do a masters or a PhD but not both. You can leave your PhD partway through and you get a masters though, maybe that's what you mean.
A canonical PhD in the UK is three years of undergraduate and three years of PhD, so six years from leaving high-school equivalent. Some people take one or two extra years in practice.
I had a colleague in Austria who did a full high-quality PhD with top-tier publications in just two years!
I knew fewer folks in the humanities, but you might be right there: some were certainly doing this on a lark.
A PhD is financially viable for anyone who could make ends meet while working at Best Buy. Most people working on a PhD have no family or mortgage.
1940 - 4.6% had a bachelor university degree
today - 33% percent have a bachelor, but only 2% have a doctorate
> For the first time in history, 90 percent of Americans over 25 years of age have finished high school. In addition, more than one-third of Americans over the age of 25 have a college degree or higher.
> That is a big change from 1940. At that time, a Census Bureau study found that less than 25 percent of the U.S. population had completed at least four years of high school. It also found that just 4.6 percent had earned a four-year bachelor’s degree or taken additional classes after completing a study program at a college or university.
https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/us-census-bureau-ameri...
Look people aren't going into phds with the goal of signaling they are educated to the general job market the way people used to go for bachelor's degrees. They go into phd programs because on the whole they are very interested in a specific subject and desire to work in research or academia.
Your argument might hold for master's but not phds.
"Degree inflation" didn't happen last year, it was a slow process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
> people aren't going into phds with the goal of signaling
I've seen plenty of programming jobs with "PhD required". For example pretty much any "data-science" job at any company.
> Some jobs that used to require a master's degree, such as junior scientific researcher positions and sessional lecturer jobs, now require a Ph.D. Also, some jobs that formerly required only a Ph.D, such as university professor positions, are increasingly requiring one or more postdoctoral fellowship appointments. Often increased requirements are simply a way to reduce the number of applicants to a position.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credentialism_and_educational_...
So you think we're going to get to a point in 10 years where 10% of the population has a phd?
>I've seen plenty of programming jobs with "PhD required".
So have I. For research jobs. Please show me the general programming jobs that have phds required.
I know lots -- LOTS -- of people in various industries with a whole smattering of Master's degrees. A lot of them are MBAs, but plenty aren't.
Conventional wisdom says that PhD's are for academia & research. I'd posit that an MA or MS is the new "university degree".
Most PhDs dont want to do that stuff which is why they got a PhD in the first place.
People have to settle for not fulfilling their dreams every day.
The "winners" usually come from old money and then just play with VC billions, never risking a dime, or at least not much.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/c...
However, STEM salaries are on the order of 40% lower -- lower overall numbers on top of 20-30% currency difference (CAD to USD, with CAD being weaker to drive exports). If you're a motivated engineer you're headed south, getting into oil & gas (where salaries are still decent), or learning to accept things as-is.
OTOH the number of well adjusted people, broke people, and all-around happy people is higher north of the border.
And so they hide out in academia to see when they are ready to take that risk. After a certain point, they just stay there.
One sibling working her ass off to prove that she can be as successful as her parents, under tremendous stress, and the other one never leaving school to not even deal with that.
It's kind of like student spending huge numbers of hours playing basketball or football in college, when they have no prospect of making it as a pro. If that's what they want to do, fine, I'm sure the lessons about hard work and teamwork and practice and executing to a plan are all useful.
But, if far more of them think they are going to go pro, than actually will, then it's not ok. The current Ph.D. system is not ok.
If we wanted high school teachers or soldiers, there’s got to be a better way. And realistically, it’s hard to pivot into some of these fields while relatively poor and in your 30s. Can’t join the marines after 28, for example...
Are there schools where tax money is actually paying tuition though, as opposed to the school just waiving tuition?
> Can’t join the marines after 28, for example
That's enlisted. If you have a phd you'd almost definitely join as an officer, which you can do until 30. And you have until 39 if you want to go into the Air Force.
In biomedical fields, the NIH provides institutional training grants that often cover all students' first 1-2 years. There are usually slot for more advanced students too. In parallel, there are also individual training grants (like the NSF's GRP and the NIH's NRSA) that also cover tuition. Alternately, an advisor's research grant (again, often tax-funded) can cover a stipend--and sometimes tuition too.
Waivers do exist, but they're often used for international students or in exchange for "service" (i.e., teaching) and fairly few people get through grad school entirely on waivers.
They're covering a stipend at $24,816, tuition at up to 16k, "training-related expenses" at $4200 and an institutional allowance of another $4200. There are undoubtedly other sources of money too (center grants, etc).
I'm emphatically not saying this is a bad thing in general. However, I do think it might be worth considering diverting /some/ of this money to fund jobs for the people we're training.
I get the stipend and expenses. It's the 30-40k in tuition that I'm questioning. At my school CS grad students just got a tuition waiver, and as far as I know it wasn't directly paid for by grants.
As for the stipend. They are doing research, so you have to evaluate the money in that context. If they are doing useful work for that $25k it's not a waste even if they don't end up working in research after finishing.
There are other costs too: here's an interesting study that tries to estimate non-tuition, non-stipend costs https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4353078/#B6 These, since they're mostly faculty time, are also partially paid for by funders.
In any case, my point is that grad student labor is both important surprisingly expensive and it's not at all clear to me that we have the "right" amount of it. Specifically, I think it might be better, from a research productivity and a "system health" persepective, to have somewhat fewer grad student slots and a few more staff scientist positions: Maybe 70/10 instead of 100/~0.