Reform the PhD system or close it down
nature.com
nature.com
I do think that the current PhD system is broken. As pointed out very correctly in a comment above: "I believe the problem lies in funding. Currently, we base funding largely off of publication success."
However, all is not lost. I have made a conscious effort in my PhD to not end up super specializing. I have tried to take up a problem that requires me to learn about multiple different computer science areas (compilers, architecture, machine learning and graphics currently). This has made my PhD a lot harder as I have to spend considerable amounts of time reading while others are publishing papers and getting better scholarships, I do think this is better for me in the long term.
Overall, while I no longer recommend anyone else to do a PhD, on the flip side if you work hard enough you might still gain value out of a PhD. Whether that value is enough is debatable, and requires considerable effort, but it is also possible to not super-specialize by picking your research topic wisely.
I do agree with the article in general and do think that more cross disciplinary stuff needs to happen. The academic system is currently largely unsympathetic towards trying to cover multiple sub-areas even within computer science with people in other sub-areas often being unwelcoming. Funding agencies are also unhappy with the much larger "startup time" spent in cross-disciplinary projects during which you spend time reading and not publishing.
In sciences, the real problem is things like the biology PhD whose training ends up being "working in this lab on this piece of equipment with this species for these tasks", or so I have heard from the other articles on this topic. And then there's the humanities, where a PhD is all but useless for anything that isn't teaching. There's varying levels of truth for this with other disciplines as well.
I'm not sure how much this is a widespread problem, to be honest. In preparing for my qualifying exam next month, and going to other peoples qualifying exam practice talks, there is a huge focus on making sure that people are asking relevant, interesting questions, and thinking through the analysis and interpretation of (as yet) hypothetical data. Those are skills that are broadly applicable, not just in biology specifically or science as a whole. People from my own lab have gone on, not just to academic jobs, but also science publishing and various startups (more and less biology related).
I don't think this is that big a problem. Publications are what science is made of. If you do research and don't publish it so that other people know about it, you're just engaging in a colossal waste of time.
You open-sourced your source code? Sorry, source code is not a publication. You improved your source code so that it is less buggy and acutally usable by industry? Sorry not a publication. You want to travel to PyCon to actually talk about your work to a wider audience? Sorry no travel funding available for such "non-academic" conferences. You want to cite an open-source work that did innovative work but not in academic setting? Sorry that is not a good enough citation ("who is this _why anyway?"), please include more citations of "academic" papers.
Funding incentive is only there for publishing your results but less incentive is there for building of useful working systems.
Results based funding (and tenure granting) promotes these more conservative and obvious projects. Proposals for more risky, and therefore potentially more rewarding projects aren’t submitted as no one wants to gamble with their own career.
1) A PhD prepares you for academia. However, due to the market being flooded with PhD's, industry won't accept you for a research position without one, even if you don't need it. In a perfect world, a Master's should suffice if it gave you any lab experience at all (at least in science). If industry does accept you despite not having a PhD, your salary will be lower, your career will be capped, and you won't move as quickly through the ranks.
2) The incentives are in all the wrong places. Schools want funding. They get funding by writing grants, which requires research. They want to do the research as cheaply as possible so as to maximize how far each dollar goes. So, they have a very strong incentive to keep grad students in limbo as long as possible, delaying graduation. Since grad students often have major loans left over from undergrad, and the additional degree keeps them from having to make payments, they'd rather be stuck in grad limbo for years than be stuck without a job. This is especially true since student loans (both public and private) in the U.S. are inescapable (you cannot bankrupt your way out of a student loan).
3) Even afterwards, really badly paid postdoc positions keep you in academia for 3-4 more years before you can do anything with your education. It's almost indentured servitude with the "promise" of a better future (by the time you're 35). Unlike MD's who actually have a good salary in sight after they graduate, PhD's (after several postdocs) can only hope to make up to $120-130k after all is said and done (unless they climb corporate ranks in industry).
4) Research is fraught with politics. Instead of trying to actually contribute to the human knowledge pool, you compete with other labs for funding, for research (to be the first one that discovers something), and for spots in the best journals. When you discover a neat paper, it's a game of "what can I do bouncing off of this research that will get me published in an awesome journal" instead of "let's collaborate with this lab, leveraging our strengths to contribute to human progress". Quite often, several labs are running the same experiments just because they want to be the first to make a critical breakthrough. Competition can be great, but it can also result in wasted effort and bitterness at life.
For a research position in industry, your job is to create new knowledge, and that's really hard to do. It's partly a matter of knowing what's already known, partly a matter of understanding how to do research, and partly a natural skill of just being "a good scientist" -- i.e. someone who can pick the right hypotheses, make the right approximations, and turn experiments into understanding. These are all hard skills, and I wouldn't be especially confident in someone having developed 'em in only a Master's.
The incentives are in all the wrong places. Schools want funding. They get funding by writing grants, which requires research. They want to do the research as cheaply as possible so as to maximize how far each dollar goes. So, they have a very strong incentive to keep grad students in limbo as long as possible, delaying graduation.
This much is true, especially in the US. In Australia, where I did my PhD, the funding agencies solved this problem by declaring that all PhD students should finish within four years, and that every semester after that results in certain funding penalties for the hosting university and department. (In case you think that this provides an incentive to grant undeserved PhDs don't worry, theses are marked by three examiners of whom only one can be at the student's university, and one of whom has to be in a different country).
Some parts of Europe are even stricter -- finish your PhD in three years or you're out the door. In fact my last department (in the US) lost a promising prospective PhD student to France after she realised she'd probably have her PhD three or four years earlier if she did it in Paris instead of California.
So actually, to anyone considering doing a PhD in the US I do heartily recommend checking out your options in other countries. Nobody wants to be a 30-year-old grad student.
I'm really glad to hear that. Hopefully it will keep happening, and US universities will realize that they have to fix things if they want to keep the best candidates.
Unfortunately, there is little push for change from anyone but the students: in the existing system, grad students and postdocs provide research and teaching at lower cost than alternatives which are more humane to students and less wasteful of human capital.
Prospective students need realistic information when they are choosing to enroll, but people choose to follow their passions at long odds in many fields (entrepreneurship, Hollywood, pro sports...). The mental model many have of PhD programs is apprenticeship; a more appropriate model might be an extended audition.
In some ways its a "low risk" incubator. You get paid to attend, and a stipend, in most cases. A lot of research ends up being the basis for a startup company. And if it doesn't you get a PhD, which is still very marketable.
The downside of doing a PhD in CS, especially at a top 20 program, is really just the possibility that you may have hit it big in the 4-6 years you were getting your PhD. But of course you have to factor in the fact that being in grad schools opens new doors to hitting it big.
Plus, at least for me, the college life is just fun, and something somewhat hard to replicate a few years out of college.
Even so, Matt Might (who is a CS prof) writes, 'There are few good reasons to get a Ph.D. "Because you want to become a professor" might be the only good one.' [1]
1) The system only prepares PhD graduates for continuing work in academia.
2) PhD does not guarantee a job.
The system is broken and I'm glad more people are realising it. This is major news coming from Nature.
1) The system only trains PhDs for academic research.
2) A PhD does not guarantee an academic job.
PhD skills, particularly in technical fields, can be quite valuable in non-academic careers. To make that transition, though, students need to do the legwork themselves to gain relevant experience and contacts. (e.g., want to move into a programming gig? Do some open-source work and put it on github to build credibility.) Peter Fiske's "Put Your Science to Work" book is a good resource for navigating the culture shift.
1) The system only trains PhDs for academic research.
There's lots of research jobs in industry and government, and a PhD is excellent preparation for them. Who else but a PhD-trained researcher would know enough to be able to run the research programs at Intel or Genentech? Come to think of it, who but a PhD-trained researcher would know enough to be able to start a company like Intel or Genentech?
[1] http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/26607/?p1=Blo...
I'm not sure what it means to be "trained as a professor" rather than "trained as an industrial/government researcher", because I don't think I've ever been trained as either.
Certainly (and this is actually a problem) there isn't enough training of PhD students in key professorial skills such as "how to teach a class" or even "how to write a research grant" -- this is something which freshly-minted professors have to figure out on their own.
I'm surprised there isn't more research along these lines, since it would seem to solve an awful lot of practical problems here on Earth if we could get that particular question sorted out once and for all.
Your petition reveals the extent of your knowledge of Religious Studies.
That said, funding is decreasing and the number of people fighting for it is increasing, which makes it less valuable.
All this aside, a PhD is worth next to nothing in my eyes. I know brilliant, capable people without them, and dull incompetent people that have earned them.
How does that make sense? If the supply is decreasing and competition for it simultaneously increasing, how does that make it less valuable (even in the cynical view of the PhD as a commodity)?
> All this aside, a PhD is worth next to nothing in my eyes. I know brilliant, capable people without them, and dull incompetent people that have earned them.
As I mentioned in my earlier comment, unless the PhD in question scammed the system (it happens), it at least proves that they have the focus to go deep. It's not a double implication though, which is what people seem to forget and then go on hyperbolic rants.
A degree is a commodity. The education behind it might be less so. I don't see it as cynical. The funding system requires a PhD, which confers a type of value on the degree. As you describe, yes, funding is currently very valuable, the degree has become less so.
>As I mentioned in my earlier comment, unless the PhD in question scammed the system (it happens), it at least proves that they have the focus to go deep. It's not a double implication though, which is what people seem to forget and then go on hyperbolic rants.
It doesn't necessarily require a scam. For example, sometimes the candidate of an advisor that is not very involved, but brings a lot of money and/or reputation, can slip through without proper scrutiny. Sometimes the committee is dysfunctional. There are many reasons why it happens.
Less funding per PhD="making it [having a PhD] less valuable"
Generally speaking, the qualities in someone that lead to success in business are the same qualities that leads one to succeed in their educational pursuits. It stands to reason that historically those who have higher education will do better in business. However, those qualities do not come from the education itself and any connection is merely correlation, not causation.
I say this as a Phd student who is "on leave" and instead doing a startup. I spent about a year as a Phd student and I thought the whole system is mind bogglingly inefficient, I felt like I'm wasting my time. This was in E.Europe, so not at a top US school --- I'm sure doing a Phd there is great.
Coupled with low pay and the lack of a payoff at the end just made it a very easy decision to do a startup instead: ultra efficient mode of operation, equally low pay, but at least there is the slim chance of a payoff.
Research (as a whole) is a lot like mining. The human race can put in so many hours of work researching new areas, and the majority of it does not produce immediately fruitful work. Only a very small percentage of the work done results in "breakthrough" technologies that are the main reason money is invested into research anyway. But I don't understand why people think that if we put less time into it, we will cut out all of the garbage and only bring out the really good stuff. You have to wade through a lot of dirt to find a diamond, and cutting your crew down won't help that. It helps to look in the right places, but at the end of the day, you really don't know what will end up producing magnificent results.
In other words, not everybody is doing great research work, and they know it.
I believe the problem lies in funding. Currently, we base funding largely off of publication success. The entire publication system is also broken but that is beside the point. We need to have more industrial and governmental collaboration between local, national, and international actors and academics. Doctoral students, should then have the option to hyper-specialize (as is necessary in some fields) or be allowed to focus more on broad interdisciplinary studies focusing on problems faced by policy makers and other organizations.
I believe you have some misgivings about what a PhD is.
The mandate of the PhD is to create new knowledge (independent research) in a particular, self-chosen area. That's difficult to do when you're focusing on breadth rather than depth. Once you've proven that you can go deep, by all means, get a faculty position and start your own (broad) research program, or get a job in industry and go broad. The PhD is about proving that you can go deep, which usually also involves some breadth.
Still, I’d say the best researchers/professors that I’ve met combined a deep understanding of the techniques in their own line of research with a broad understanding of their field and adjacent fields. Personally, I’d fear that removing technical proficiency as a requirement for a PhD would eliminate an essential bullshit detector that filters out certain people; people who do a great job speaking in broad generality but are incapable of formulating a path to accomplish these grand aims.
(As a quick anecdote, I once saw a research presentation from a grad student who made broad claims about his project’s direct role in curing many forms of cancer. As he progressed, we learned he was only exploring strategies to synthesize a potential ligand that some other researchers would consider using in imaging a specific cancer within rat models. To this end he showed very little progress, but continued to speak at great lengths about the imminent eradication of cancer as he concluded his talked.)
or academic international books they have published,
if no patents - then no funding from the state budget
Also - why would a PhD quarantee a job anyway , since productivity and knowledge are not directly related things ?