Grad school is worse for public health than STDs (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Grad school is worse for public health than STDs (2019)

benkuhn.net

I had a relatively bad experience with graduate school but in retrospect it was better than working. Very little oversight on how I spent my time, got to do interesting work and being a grad student in my field (physics) was relatively high status when it came to dating the people I wanted to date.

I walked to work every day and walked home every night. I slept well.

In comparison, literally the only good thing about "the real world" is more money.

My advisor was an anti-social depressive and I often felt spectacularly dumb. But in retrospect, it was great. If I could afford to go again, I'd do it.

I feel the opposite as a software engineer. The only appointments I have are stand-ups. I can work whenever and wherever I like. I never want to go back to the stress of University now.

Also worth reading: "Don't Become a Scientist!" by Jonathan Katz [1], "Women in Science" by Philip Greenspun [2], and "What Does Any of This Have To Do with Physics?" by Bob Henderson [3].

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20181018063835/http://katz.fastm...

[2]: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

[3]: https://nautil.us/what-does-any-of-this-have-to-do-with-phys...

Professor Katz's piece is highly flawed. From the article: "What can be done? The first thing for any young person (which means anyone who does not have a permanent job in science) to do is to pursue another career. This will spare you the misery of disappointed expectations. Young Americans have generally woken up to the bad prospects and absence of a reasonable middle class career path in science and are deserting it. If you haven't yet, then join them. Leave graduate school to people from India and China, for whom the prospects at home are even worse. I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs."

Two issues: I'm not up-to-date about opportunities in India, but I can certainly say that the remark about prospects in China are outdated for Chinese citizens. Secondly, the remark, "I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs," is more indicative of the professor living in a bubble, instead of a serious assertion that a physics PhD is worse than a drug addiction.

With a PhD in physics, one could work for an investment bank; the government (e.g. NIST in the United States); the space industry; the private sector (e.g. optics, quantum computing); national security; and many other fields.

Katz's article reads as out-of-touch and unimaginative [edit: though thanks for sharing for the discussion]. The false premise is that the only opportunity you can get with a physics PhD is the opportunity to pursue a tenured professorship, which takes many years at low pay, and if you don't get a professorship, the only backup plan is computer programming.

As an Indian working as a biology postdoc, I can't speak to the experiences for people in physics, but at least in biology at this level Americans don't seem very interested. At my midsize institute that's got a reasonable reputation, I would be hard pressed to name a single American postdoc. Almost all the PhD students are American, and almost none of the postdocs. Chinese & Indians alone account for probably 60-70% of the postdocs, and they are the ones who stick around the longest (probably due to the extremely high bar both these nationalities face in terms of getting work visas). Speaking to the American PhDs the most common refrain I hear is an unwillingness to accept a postdoc salary for a couple of years (currently around ~ $55K) - when industry jobs are relatively easy to get for American nationals, and come with double the salary.

> I'm not up-to-date about opportunities in India, but I can certainly say that the remark about prospects in China are outdated for Chinese citizens.

After spending around 5 years in a mid-ranked American university, I have to admit that the quality of physics PhDs from top Indian institutions (IISc, TIFR, etc.) is at least an order of magnitude better -- they publish more papers in better journals, meet with their advisers more often, etc. (Of course, the best American universities still produce some of the best work in the world, but again, they are only responsible for a small fraction of the total PhDs.) Indian academia isn't centered around obtaining research grants, so most theoretical physicists are still free to pursue hard problems that interest them. This also means that Indians who return to their country with a PhD from a mid-ranked American university with a thesis in a low-effort area will find it hard to get a job. And the Indian tech sector isn't particularly keen on hiring PhDs (who would anyway be overqualified for most jobs in the Indian tech industry). So yeah, Prof. Katz's analysis is still spot on for Indians doing a PhD in theoretical physics.

> With a PhD in physics, one could work for an investment bank; the government (e.g. NIST in the United States); the space industry; the private sector (e.g. optics, quantum computing); national security; and many other fields.

Sure, but most students enter graduate school with the hopes of becoming a professor at a university, not work as as investment banker. Jobs at NIST and in the space industry (and most federal labs) are often limited to US citizens because of security clearance issues. Also, these jobs are extremely limited in number (compared to say, data science jobs).

> The false premise is that the only opportunity you can get with a physics PhD is the opportunity to pursue a tenured professorship, which takes many years at low pay, and if you don't get a professorship, the only backup plan is computer programming.

Most physics PhDs I know who left academia are now working as data scientists. "Data science" wasn't a thing in 1999 when Prof. Katz wrote this essay, but at the same time it is not so different from a physicist becoming a computer programmer in the 1990s.

>> Typical postdoctoral salaries begin at $27,000 annually in the biological sciences and about $35,000 in the physical sciences (graduate student stipends are less than half these figures).

Yes, but if they go to Wall St with the same credential, they make 20x that.

The essay is from 1999, so the salaries are a little off -- it's something like $50,000 +/- $15,000 for most postdoctoral positions now. Yes, you can go to Wall St with a physics PhD and have a great career. But the thing is that many students (especially in elite institutions) enter graduate school with the hopes of becoming an actual scientist, not a Wall St analyst.

This is absolutely not a "typical postdoctoral salary", and hasn't been for more than two decades. Most major research institutions follow NIH guidelines for postdoc salaries:

https://www.training.nih.gov/postdoctoral_irta_stipend_range...

When I was finishing up a bioinformatics doctoral program in 2009 I looked far and wide for postdoc positions in the field. My recollection is that the typical salary range was $27k-$30k. What surprised me was that I dug far back in a systematics-specific newsgroup and found the same salary range being advertised for the previous 10+ years. I can't speak to what has happened over the past 12 years, since the low postdoc salaries pushed me to industry, but I can say that you're off with the "more than two decades" claim, at least as a universal claim.

I just pulled three actual postdoc offer letters out of my email archives from the 2008-2009 period. Salary offers ranged from $38K-$48K with the higher end representing a starting bioinformatics postdoc position.

NIH minimum in 2009 was >$37K. If you were getting offers in the $27K-$30K range coming out of a comp bio/bioinformatics PhD program, you were unfortunately getting seriously low-balled.

With a biology PhD?

Well, I know some really biologists who code really well, but you're right only pharma/medicine are likely to pay off your college debts, the first requires a lot of luck, and the other a lot more school. Biology is well known to be a terrible investment (by people in gradschool).

yes. with massive capital investments in bio/pharma sector some in-house expertise required to improve ROI.

ps: basic python and prob theory won't hurt.

"What Does Any Of This Have To Do With Physics" is an absolute blessing. Thank you for the link.

Similar discussion to the "The dangers of high status, low wage jobs" post from today. I do think the stress is directly correlated with their financial situation.

My spouse is in a PhD program. Advantages for her are a) her mother was also a PhD with a tenured job and b) she's married to me, who makes $350k a year (and to be clear, she works a lot harder than I do). I can't imagine people putting up with the same bullshit she does as outlined in the article, _and_ dealing with financial issues. Even if she doesn't get that tenure-track job, her opportunity cost for trying is much lower than someone who doesn't have those privileges.

My wife got her PhD and some of the things she would talk about that her advisors told her just struck me as nuts.

They would lament that it was “sad” people would leave academia to have families ignoring the fact that the jobs paid like crap and there was massive competition for any position. They acted like it was some conspiracy to keep people out of the field when it seemed to me to be mostly explained by people making straightforward economic decisions for themselves.

The article opens with an anecdote about the experience of a philosophy PhD candidate, then moves on to explore statistics.

I believe these types of analyses on the value of a graduate degree should be separated based on field. There are vastly different day-to-day schedules and expected career outcomes for a graduate student pursuing a PhD in, say, philosophy; versus economics; a life sciences field; mathematics; an engineering field; and so on.

Yeah, the issue isn't graduate degrees, it's graduate degrees with no plan (other than a tenure lottery ticket) for where it'll take you.

The research into anxiety rates covered all fields though.

That is true, though I would assert that future career outcomes should factor in to the author's calculations of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs).

In specific, from the article: "It’s a bit hard to get an apples to apples comparison with the “moderate to severe” description from the survey above, but let’s be conservative and use the weights for moderate depression (0.396) and moderate anxiety (0.133). That means the average graduate student loses 0.99 disability-adjusted life years to depression, 0.34 years to anxiety, and 6.17 years to studying irrelevant coursework, writing a dissertation no one will read, wandering around looking for free food, etc."

Consider an undergraduate student who then struggles in graduate school, but is likely to achieve a respected career with good pay and autonomy in the industry thanks to a PhD in a technical field, which could not have been attained without that degree. That student is set to have secured additional years with a high quality of life by achieving their dreams, after some years of struggle.

Contrast this with an undergraduate student who struggles in graduate school in a non-technical field, where opportunities outside of academia open thanks to the degree are more limited. The DALYs in graduate school for this student have a lower chance of securing additional high-quality of life years after graduate school, compared to the student in the previous scenario.

Hot take - graduate school is frequently treated as a "backup" option when getting a job directly out of undergraduate appears difficult or unrealistic. This is a very damaging mindset, as the post-graduate options are not always much rosier than post-undergraduate, but comes with a likely mountain of debt and years of envy watching peers have multi-year head starts in their careers.

This may be the case in computer science but is definitely not the case in science/philosophy. Not doing graduate school means effectively not doing science/philosophy. We sort of scoffed at everyone who dropped out at undergrad and thought they were obviously never serious about the field. I'm not saying the scoffing was correct, just that it was mystifying to us when someone actually good didn't go on to grad school.

Even in philosophy, it depends heavily on program and concentration. Universities are not consistent about which programs fall under the Philosophy Dept, and even if we look at "proper" philosophy at a highly-ranked university, there are some areas that are considerably less rigorous than others. I think you'll find more "Plan B" students there.

I could say a lot more on this and about the decline of academic philosophy, but you get my point.

I wanted to chime in that the same is often true of mental health fields. Most upper level jobs in the mental health field necessitate earning a graduate degree.

This may be true for lower-tier and middle-of-the-pack graduate programs but at the higher end, if anything, the opposite is true. There's an arms race among the candidates to get the best grades in the hardest classes, to get the best research experience, best letters of recommendations, perfect or near-perfect GRE scores and often GRE subject scores.

Getting a good job sounds almost blissfully easy in comparison.

A little nitpicking about GRE, it really doesn't seem to matter anymore. There is a wave of schools making it optional, and often outright banning it from submission.

Anecdotally, I have a near perfect-perfect GRE score (334/340, perfect score in quantitative), with at least avg position on other criteria (I think). I failed to get even interviews in many mid-tier US universities last year.

A member of my family got a "you know the only thing you can do with this is teach, right?" undergrad degree from a prestigious liberal arts school. And then she followed it up with a master's at a prestigious school. And now she's a teacher. Thankfully she didn't go into debt over it.

Yes, I know it's just an anecdote.

I had the opposite view -- graduate studies in math rarely result in tenure; industry is a nice fallback for mathematicians with programming chops.

It's a fallback in both directions.

If you were studying creative writing and planning to go into advertising, but you graduated during a big recession and no-one was hiring? A few years of grad school might be more fun than a few years working retail, especially if mom and dad will help pay for it.

If you've finished your PhD in STEM and it didn't inspire you to follow the long path to tenure? You might fall back to industry; with luck you'll make so much money it hardly counts as falling back.

If your goal is money, industry is a nice fallback. If your goal is purity of intellectual pursuit... offerings in industry can be rather dismal.

True - but if your experience of academia makes you want to stay, you don't need a fallback!

But your PhD won't just expose you to pure intellectual pursuits. You'll also see the downsides to academia. Pressure to publish or perish; anti-intellectual pressures to salami-slice your results, trade citations with friends and overstate the complexity of your work; the stilted language and awful writing of many papers; the need to go around cap in hand pursuing funding; the expectation to provide free labour to multinational publishing companies; the constant threat your competitors are fabricating or p-hacking results; and the risk you'll spend a decade 'paying your dues' in postdocs without ever earning tenure.

> True - but if your experience of academia makes you want to stay, you don't need a fallback!

Sadly, this is not really the case. The job supply doesn't come anywhere close to the demand of (incredibly smart and well qualified) graduates. The vast majority who choose to stay end up as sessional instructors, with little to no hope of attaining tenure. And with each passing year as a sessional instructor, your chance of becoming a "real" professor drops substantially.

Mathematicians don't get up to p-hacking, thankfully, and while some of your issues are present, you're missing a lot of the actual issues if you manage to get on a tenure track: time on committees, shitty department politics, whiny undergrads who don't want to be in the classes they've signed up for... yeah, there's a lot of problems. But, even with all that, I'd take it over a lot of the jobs I was qualified for before uni.

I pivoted a Physics undergrad into an accelerated CS masters and my employability spiked accordingly.

Really I only did the masters because I realized I should have done a CS undergrad but didn’t want to spend 4 more years and even more 10s of K.

It's quite likely some people will come out of reading this thinking we should stop sending people to grad school. Shouldn't we instead take this as a signal that it needs improvement?

Grad students are one of the very few subpopulations of humanity allowed to take on extraordinary epistemological risks; a kind of immune system of our civilization. I'm not even talking about some elusive notion of "progress", just [intellectual] societal health. It would feel to me like a tremendous loss if we let go of such a component of society.

You are assuming that the institutions are making worthwhile "epistemological risks"; when, clearly, there is a lack of the facilitation of the knowledge of Fourier Mathematics (e.g. the Fourier Transform) in virtually every scientific discipline. Yet this is what most of these researchers involve themselves with everyday with their digital computations. Isn't it ironic, don't you think?

But what about STDs acquired at grad school? Umm.. asking for a friend...

The article seems flawed from its premise, which is that because there's X% (41 I guess) rate of moderate to severe anxiety in students attending grad school, grad school must be the cause.

Classic case of correlation =/= causation.

Besides, the cited research also says this: "Although this is a convenience sample in which respondents who have had a history of anxiety or depression may have been more apt to respond to the survey..."

At the top of the article, in italics:

> Caveats: ... “if the correlation is causal”

I'd ask for a control to account for grad students with STDs, but what grad students have time for those?

Eh. My PHD sucks but it's better than a real job.

> Once, for a conference, we visited a different philosophy department, at a less prestigious university, housed in a structure which had set the record for the largest poured-concrete building in the US.

I’m guessing Wean Hall at Carnegie Mellon University?

Perhaps Crosley Tower at the University of Cincinnati?

https://actioncookbook.substack.com/p/the-story-of-a-terribl...

Wean is large and horrible, but 1. I can't find any evidence that it was ever the largest and that never came up when I was a student (I did hear it won awards). 2. Philosophy is in the Humanities department which is in different buildings.

I am extremely skeptical of the authors claim that only 6% of the general population suffers “moderate to severe” anxiety or depression.

How do you even quantify the intensity of a normal human emotion? It’s all relative to an individuals experience.

Human beings are fucked in the head. I believe it’s always been that way and always will be.

Its all about choices really. My wife got her Master's in Nursing and works as a Nurse Practitioner. She had a 6 figure salary right out of school. She helps many people with their healthcare. She is still paying off the cost of school but has the means to do so.

I'm trying to paste the link to the "100 reasons not to go to grad school" blog but HN won't let me paste? I'm on Chrome 98 on Android 9. Pushing the paste button does nothing. No URL works. Regular text works though.

http://100rsns.blogspot.com/

The linked study that he consulted is behind a paywall. From context, it sounds like this is specifically referring to negative mental health outcomes due to PhD studies, which is not all grad school. The title seemingly can't possibly be correct as written, given schools of public health and medicine exist and have to produce some net positive benefit. It's not like public health globally hasn't improved since we discovered the germ theory of disease and medical licensing became a thing. Making some small number of people depressed isn't nearly enough to offset all of modern medicine.

I'd like to know more about your ideas of suffering offsets and why the idea total societal misery is something that can be measured or even considered. Wouldn't it be great if we could have a semi-structured, free intellectual environment that is ALSO a healthy working environment? I'm curious if you would still feel this way if you had been designated as the unhealthy minority that lies beneath our consideration as long as health outcomes continue to improve, on average?

// why the idea of total

Reply on news.ycombinator.com