Fix the PhD | Hacker News Reader

Fix the PhD

nature.com

38 pointspsawaya19 comments

From the article: "Imagine bright young things entering a new kind of science PhD, in which both they and their supervisors embrace from the start the idea that graduates will go on to an array of demanding careers — government, business, non-profit and education — and work towards that goal (see page 381). The students meet supervisors from a range of disciplines; they acquire management, communication, leadership and other transferable skills alongside traditional academic development of critical thinking and analysis; and they spend six months to a year abroad."

This sounds a lot like my undergrad degree, and not at all what I expect from a PhD.

In my opinion, people get bachelors degrees in order to get a job. It used to be that was what trade school was for, but now it seems that you need a degree just to qualify for an interview in a lot of fields. In my opinion, though, you get a PhD because you are interested in the subject - not because you need it for a job.

I think PhDs are an end in themselves, not a means to an end. Please don't water down my PhD by forcing me to do cross-discipline studies that do not interest me, or by teaching me management skills - I'm not in business school.

Now, a smart PhD student would realize that they might be getting a job in the industry, and they might not be able to get the job that they are hoping for, and plan accordingly. For example, while I hope to get a job at a research institution when I graduate, I realize that it is possible that I may not, so I take extra-curricular courses and seminars to prepare me for other jobs. But I do this because I choose to, not because some people somewhere else think that I might not get the job they think that I want.

Frankly, it may be rude, but if there are more PhDs than job openings, that's a good thing. It creates a lot of competition. It keeps mediocre people (or at least it helps to) out of these critical positions. It prevents people (or at least helps to) from trying to get a PhD solely for the purpose of getting a job, which cheapens the degree all around.

So long as PhD students are aware of their future prospects (and I don't know any who aren't - this stuff is crammed down our throats), I think that this is fine. Entrepreneurs do this all the time. They know that starting a business is not guaranteed - indeed, they might go bankrupt. But they might hit it big. This isn't a problem, and we don't start government initiatives to help entrepreneurs who fail get a good job anyway. We don't make entrepreneurs take back-up courses in plumbing and construction, so that when some of them fail they have a fall-back job. They don't want that job anyway. If they did, they would prepare for it on their own, because they are smart people.

In science it is the same thing. The people who love science for science's sake - these are the people we want to be scientists. These are the people we can trust with tenure, because they would do research even if we didn't pay them at all. They are smart, and they know that they might not make it into their dream job, so they can prepare themselves for alternatives if they want. Or they can shoot for broke, spend years of their lives doing fantastic research and focusing on doing only the things they love (which, by coincidence, help the rest of the world). But forcing them to prepare for alternatives because some of them might benefit from it is just a turn-off.

"Please don't water down my PhD ... by teaching me management skills - I'm not in business school.""

Most faculty manage groups of 5 - 20 people (their lab), a budget (their startup and other research funds) and have to deal with all the problems of running a team of people with varied skills, interest and motivation. Some faculty go on to be department heads or directors of institutes. In all these cases, management skills would be useful. Sure, you're still doing research, but you'll spend a good chunk of your time managing the lab.

"These are the people we can trust with tenure, because they would do research even if we didn't pay them at all"

It's this attitude that keeps the postdoc (and in some cases the junior faculty) salaries so low. Just because you love what you do, you shouldn't have to raise a family on $40,000/year

The higher you climb, the less hands-on research (including everything from planning to write-up to manual procedures) you do -- absolutely. It's staggering how much money is wasted in the process due to lack of management skills.

One solution would indeed be adding managerial skills to the PhD curriculum. However, most PhD will never reach such a "position of power." Hence, the more efficient way around this issue appears to be hiring of full-time lab managers.

The whole science-pyramid requires restructuring.

Thanks for pointing this out. I agree with you that having managerial skills would be important to someone who manages people, and that many faculty in academia do need to manage people.

My point is not so much that nobody needs management skills, it's that not everybody needs management skills. Let me decide whether or not I will need those skills for myself. Perhaps I already have some management skills from an undergraduate education, or perhaps I simply have a natural talent for it. If I think that I need management skills, I will learn them - I have plenty of opportunities to take such courses or seminars, if I want. I'm an adult, you don't have to force me to do something because I might need it later, just tell me the facts and I will decide for myself.

But if I think that it would be a better use of my time to do something else, like collaborate with a researcher at another university on a new problem, let me decide that. I hope that whatever job I apply for decides whether or not to hire me based on my specific skill set.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this: a PhD is not (or should not be) a certificate declaring you qualified for a job. Not for an academic job, nor an industry job, nor any other job. It is a certificate declaring that I am very knowledgeable in a specific subject, and that people better and wiser than me believe that I can do meaningful research in the future.

If I want to show people that I have other job skills, I must show them some other way. A PhD only verifies the above, it doesn't verify that I am a good teacher, a good manager, a good communicator, a friendly guy, or that I am in any other way competent. If a job wants skills that I don't have, they shouldn't hire me.

For your other point, I totally agree that this attitude keeps the salaries low. Unfortunately I don't know what should be done about it. Either we can lie, and pretend that we only enjoy our research to the extent that it pays the bills, and otherwise do not enjoy it, or we can actually try to stop enjoying our work. Either seems silly. You can't hide what you love, and if other people try to take advantage of the fact, well, so be it. In fact, I can understand the counter-argument: just because work is important, doesn't mean we should pay people more than the bare minimum they will accept. It's not fair, and it isn't right, but it is rather true.

I think PhDs are an end in themselves, not a means to an end

I agree completely. I advise people to only do a PhD if they'll be doing what they love. It's the one chance you get to do exactly what you want, so make it good.

EDIT: one chance (apart from doing a startup).

I'm reminded of this illustration: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

As credentials for employment we have already bachelor and master degrees.

Entering a PhD program purely to improve job prospects is asking for trouble.

It seems that the goal of a PhD should be, as it has been, to become a academic subject expert--one who can either push the boundaries of a field, or comprehensively educate less knowledgable students. PhD students should be those with a general passion for a field, not those who hope to use the experience as a stepping stone to something completely different.

You could argue that certain industrial roles require a degree of specialization that only a PhD holder would possess. Fine. Working near the boundary of knowledge like that you're bound to bump into it now and then. Those are really academic jobs in disguise.

Something a PhD does indicate, I suppose, is that a degree holder possesses the tenacity and grit to persevere through years of arduous work.

I am someone doing post-doctoral research, looking for an academic position and working in a university environment. I've seen students come in to the university at undergraduate level, students come into the post-graduate program and leave with PhDs. I've also worked in high schools, helping educate kids about physics, and taken students from high schools into the university for 'work-experience' placements.

It strikes me that Nature's second idea is what is actually happening right now; people are getting PhDs and leaving to do anything else (mostly banking and medical physics in my field). It's part of an overall trend: our undergraduate syllabus needs to cover a lot of the stuff I was taught in high school 15 years ago. Our post-graduates come into our research group with an expectation of spoon-feeding. Our PhD students have the kind of 'awakening' experiences that were maybe associated with a good undergraduate program back in the 60s and 70s. As more people come into education, the experience (but not necessarily the knowledge) is watered down and so a post-graduate degree is necessary to turn out the kind of well-rounded, hard-working, self-starting individual that might have been found exiting an undergraduate program 40 years ago.

Thus a post-doctoral research position becomes essential if one wants to find an academic position - very, very few people get a permanent position without doing at least one post-doc.

This may be a good trade-off for the greater numbers with a better education, but it seems that society's expectations are still to catch up.

Imagine bright young things entering a new kind of science PhD, in which both they and their supervisors embrace from the start the idea that graduates will go on to an array of demanding careers.

This already seems to be the case in fields like computer science. An academic career path is only one 'successful' route, among many. It's not uncommon to see CS PhD students take positions in software development, industry research, finance/banking, consulting, startups, and so on.

While academics may be biased towards academia, CS students seem well aware of their options.

Further, at least at my school, the majority of the incoming CS PhD students have no interest in a tenure-track teaching position and are targeting those other jobs from the start.

My impression from academia is that generally speaking (and in the US), PhD programs are designed around turning out professors.

That's just my impression though.

From the article: "That is because increased government research funding from the US National Institutes of Health and Japan's science and education ministry has driven expansion of doctoral and postdoctoral education without giving enough thought to how the labour market will accommodate those who emerge."

I think this is SPOT ON. I'm surprised this doesn't come up more often. You can add Canada to the list. Universities are given $$$ (and this is in CDN funds so you know it is worth something) for the number of PhD students that graduate their program. While this policy certainly increases the number of PhDs, it doesn't do anything to help them get jobs afterwards.

I felt this led to a odd situation in recent years. Smart kids in their Masters program realized that it wasn't the best use of their time to get a PhD. They got out. The people who are left either really wanted the PhD (for its own sake or to teach or were simply exceptional scientists), people who were using it to further immigration goals, and the not-so-smart kids.

Wow, so much elitest attitude in here. I've seen everything from "don't water us down" to "back in the old days, degrees used to mean something". My view is more in line with Nature. We need to fix the system, we need to realize that management is important if we want to be leaders, and finally that PhD will gain so much useful skill and insight in their own field and that we should encourage people to take those skills out into the market. Hyper-specializing in a specific biological testing technique is all fine and dandy but maybe a few more broad general skills so that we can do more interdisciplinary work and solve the hard problems in the world is important as well.

Also, I see grad students and postdoc students as highly skilled labourers. A lot of what we do is grunt work that can't be automated or easily done because we're pushing the boundaries and haven't quite smoothed the process out yet.

I think that I'm one of those elitist attitude people. I apologize for this, I don't mean to sound elitist (I certainly don't think of myself as elite). I agree with you that we are just skilled laborers.

What I mean to say is that graduate students are adults. Let us decide for ourselves what is important. I agree that hyper-specialization is probably not best for humanity, and that interdisciplinary work can really crack open some unsolved problems. And there are jobs that want people to have these skills. I think that a grad student is much more hire-able (for many positions) if he/she has some broad skills. But why should getting a PhD require this? Shouldn't it be up to the person doing the work to decide whether or not the work they are doing will help themselves/the world?

I simply don't think that we should alter our degrees to match requirements for job openings. We certainly should alter our skill sets, but a PhD should be a certification that you are knowledgeable and capable of research. It's not (and I don't think that it should be) a certification that you are ready for a job (regardless of what that job is).

In my opinion, "Getting a PhD" and "Getting a Job" should be as disjoint as possible. Otherwise people who want one will do the other simply because they have to, and this is good for nobody.

I think that a Master's degree is more the type of degree that this is suited for. Most people that I know who are getting Master's degrees are getting them for the express purpose of getting a specific job. This is fine. Most people I know who are getting PhD's are getting them for the purpose of learning their subject, not to get a job. Sure, they need a job after they graduate, but this is tangential in their motivations, and should therefore be tangential in degree program as well. At least, that's my opinion.

This is part of Nature's The Future of the Phd series, which has been linked to a few times here on HN, but never had a proper discussion.

Series: http://www.nature.com/news/specials/phdfuture/index.html

The US labor depts numbers for unemployment show something like 10% for folks without a college degree and 2ish % for people with a phd. This tells me there are lots of jobs just maybe not in academia. That seems like a good thing to me. Less publicly funded research and more private industry taking over. (e.g. SpaceX)

Frankly, lots of people arent cut out for acadeia. I realized I wasn't and left my phd program with a masters and couldn't be happier.

  > 10% for folks without a college degree and 2ish % for
  > people with a phd.

Doesn't say much about job quality, though. Nobody could sensibly argue that it's impossible to get a job with a PhD; it evidently isn't. But this includes career paths that make acquisition of a PhD either pointless or even detrimental.

Ask, for instance, burger-flipping or even Excel-wielding zoologists if (a) their PhD was worth the time, effort and money it cost and if (b) they're happy with their current employment situation. Because, statistically, they're employed.

The burger-flipping zoologist seems to be a bit of a myth. Of all the folks I know who have (science) PhDs, they're all either employed in their field or making craploads of money outside it. Of course the latter group of people are smart enough that they'd also be making craploads if they'd skipped the PhD.

If you do a PhD for the right reasons I don't think you're likely to regret it. I, for instance, have a PhD in physics because I couldn't imagine not having a PhD in physics. When they offered to pay me a pittance to do physics research for three and a half years in order to get the word "Doctor" before my name my reaction was not "hmm, let me calculate the effect of this on my total lifetime earnings" but "Wow? You mean you'll actually pay me to do this? A whole pittance? I'm in!"

I liked a suggestion from the RAND institute. This article took the interesting approach of concluding that the lack fo interest (among Americans) in Science & Engineering PhD programs is a rational response to long, uncertain training times and poor pay and career prospects relative to the "professions" (law, dentistry, mba, medicine, etc..) One suggestion was moving these PhDs to something more resembling the "professional" model...

http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html

"Adopt the “professional school model” for S&E PhD programs. This strategy aims to reduce the early costs and uncertainties of training for an S&E career rather than increasing later career rewards. The adoption of this strategy by academe, even any resolve toward attempting it, seems remote. Still, more young people might select these S&E doctoral programs over professional schools if the years to S&E PhD completion were rolled back to, say, 1970 levels, if this term were predictable and uniform, and if the subjective and arbitrary aspects of the PhD path were curtailed."

Truth is, almost all (98%+) of of the people who get into Stanford's law school or MBA program finish their degrees on time. You can't say this about the PhD programs - not a knock on Stanford here, it's one of the friendlier campuses from what I've heard. This is typical of any university.

Make the PhD programs shorter and more predictable, and they'll be more appropriate for the kind of non-academic careers this article discusses. As for academics? Well, law professors don't typically have PhDs. No reason people can't continue to learn to do research as a junior professor.

I do agree that the odds of this happening are very low, largely because the university system is addicted to cheap graduate student labor, and because they'll be able to fill the gap left by Americans who overwhelmingly prefer the professions with international students whose visa terms make it difficult to walk away from the grad program without also losing US residency.

Honestly, my PhD and ensuing postdoc probably cost me money, and they were worth every penny, and a whole lot more. Spending that number of years doing pure research, thinking 24 hours a day, with access to huge libraries of research materials, was fucking awesome.

I know the startup buzz is also 24 hours a day and fucking awesome too, but it's much more about the kaching than the enlightenment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com